Chinese Museum’s Influential Berlin Outpost Will Shutter Due to ‘Sociopolitical Turbulences’

Dear friends, colleagues,
Dear audiences,

In this historic moment of global crises, when socio-political and economic turbulences have already, or will soon, affect every aspect of our lives—Times Art Center Berlin (TACB) has decided to leave its physical space in Berlin Mitte. As an experimental platform for changes and transformations, creative exchanges, and communal encounters, TACB will continue to explore more flexible and versatile modes of art production. 

We want to thank from the bottom of our hearts: our artists, collaborators, and audiences who have provided us with invaluable information, knowledge and experience, greatly enriching our challenging, transcultural projects over the last years.

From the landmark show The D-Tale – Video Art from the Pearl Delta Region that inaugurated our first exhibition space at Potsdamer Straße in November 2018, which focused on TACB’s institutional roots, that is to say, the artistic diversity of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, to the recent solo exhibition Earwax by Wong Ping, TACB has produced and commissioned a series of international solo and group exhibitions, as well as online and offline programs including lectures, talks, publications and screenings. These exhibitions and programs have embraced and furthered ideas and discourses on diversity, transcultural exchanges, and connectivity in and beyond Berlin and Europe.

As a platform dedicated to global contemporary art practices and research-based academic conversations, TACB has aimed to promote and develop the comprehension of and a re-envisaging of contemporary Asian art in a global context, and has undertaken active and innovative explorations through a series of group exhibitions. Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Woman (2019), the first exhibition at our current premises at Brunnenstraße 9, as well as the interdisciplinary symposium Floating Constellations, brought manifold perspectives and diasporic experiences of prominent Asian women artists to our Berlin audiences. The year 2020 marked the beginning of the pandemic, and with it a period of uncertainty and instability, in which boundaries are being re-defined, with different possibilities of exchanges, and new ways of making encounters. The exhibition Readings from Below (2020) looked into artists’ use of archives, exploring how artists engage new readings of the complex present by making use of the virtual potentials of archives. Angst, Keine Angst (2021), our most challenging exhibition to date, focused on artists’ new perspectives on the present uncertainties and fear; unfolding in three chapters, the show opened new angles on the potentialities of intercultural artistic exchange and humankind’s resilience. Más Allá, el Mar Canta (Beyond, the Sea Sings) (2021) brought together artists from Central America and the Caribbean here in Berlin to explore narratives of migration as spaces of diasporic kinship and resistance.

Through the solo exhibitions Racing Gravel (2019), Winter North Summer South (2020) and Earwax (2022), respectively by artists Kan Xuan, Zhou Tao, and Wong Ping, TACB has provided a platform for featuring prominent emerging and mid-career artists. We are dedicated to encouraging the diversity of contemporary art practices as well as commissioning, producing and presenting new works in the context of Berlin’s vibrant cultural landscape.

Looking back on this invigorating time of engaged conversations, creative challenges and collaborations that TACB has undertaken with a great number of artists, curators and scholars, bringing together a wide range of global contemporary art practices both on local and international art scenes, we are truly grateful for the constant support by the global art and cultural communities, and are proud to have found like-minded communities and independent projects to collaborate with over the years.

We want to express our most heartfelt thanks to our parallel institution: the Guangdong Times Museum, which initiated and has continuously supported the TACB project. Our thanks also go to our colleagues and peers in Guangzhou; they have been dear cross-continental members of TACB’s big family. In the uncertain times we are facing today, we will work even more closely with the Guangdong Times Museum to continue to explore more organic and sustainable possibilities, different modes of collaboration and artistic experimentation in the diverse spaces between the digital and the physical. We look forward to opening up a new chapter of TACB one day.

We sincerely thank all the global art and cultural communities that have greatly supported Times Art Center Berlin from its inception. A temporary farewell is also the beginning of another encounter!

Xi Bei, Artistic Director of TACB, and the whole TACB team