Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts. The Villa Romana Fellows 2022 and intertwined echoes of the Fellows 2023 (Chapter I)

Villa Romana e.V. is pleased to present Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts, a series of interventions and a multi-chapter exhibition featuring the Villa Romana Fellows 2022 Haure Madjid, Jasmina Metwaly, Neda Saeedi, Alexander Skorobogatov, with subtle echoes from the 2023 Fellows: Samuel Baah Kortey, Jessica Ekomane, Diana Ejaita, and Pınar Öğrenci and from the German artists’ house in Florence.

In times of devastation, deep polarisation, sense of fear, and unsettling feelings, the artists’ house Villa Romana, founded in 1905 by Max Klinger with the aim of creating room for an independent forum and for free artistic experimentation, finds a suitable temporary home in an artists’ project space rather than in a museum: a space that historically in the city of Berlin has been continuously engaging with pressing social concerns and with the very possibilities of troubling, questioning, and criticality tackling our times and contexts – a practice that Villa Romana embraces on an everyday basis, as A House of Mending, Troubling, and Repairing. In this very moment of unrest and of general crisis, the urgency of criticality, of being close to one another, the need for talking, and making sense of things together, seems crucial. There is an urgency for holding each other, for grieving together, but also for celebrating each other’s commitment to the understanding of artistic work as a labour of repair.

This exhibition is a celebration in two chapters of the Villa Romana Fellows 2022 intertwined with echoes of the Fellows 2023; artists that lived through times of transition for Villa Romana, artists whose work bloomed and inspired the generation of artists who came after, but also others before. For more than one hundred years, Villa Romana has been a space for artists to reside, retreat, and experiment. As an artists’ house, Villa Romana is in fact built year by year through the agency of all the artists that inhabited and lived – or embodied – that space: brick by brick the house stands as the materialisation of the sum of so many spirits, visions and perspectives. As complexity theory explains, the behaviour of complex systems cannot be explained from the analysis of its individual components. Rather, it is the interactions or relationships between the components that gives rise to the emergence of properties not found in any of the components individually.

It is only through the work of each of the Villa Romana Fellows and their relationship to each other and to the greater complexity of an institution like Villa Romana that we understand us as a whole. And as an ensemble of singularities.

The first chapter of the exhibition (30 May – 30 June) unfolds with the work of 2022 Villa Romana Fellows Neda Saaedi and Haure Majid with echoes by Samuel Baah Kortey and Jessica Ekomane (Fellows 2023) and cross-border radio interferences from Villa Romana at present.

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