SAMANTHA BOHATSCH

We are glad to be part of the program “Performance in der Kleine Orangerie” that will unfold from the 2nd to the 4th of September 2022 in Charlottenburg, Berlin, with the reading performance “5D” by Samantha Bohatsch on the 2nd of September 2022 at 7pm.

In an elliptical and composite narrative Samantha Bohatsch tell a version of the city in which they have been and still are active, or that they dream of. But more than the urban environment they convey, it is a state and its sensations they summon. Suspended, troubled, emotional, it marks a time out. It is the state of someone who goes through time, like Janus, a face turned towards the past, another towards the future. It is the sense of a bygone era that eternalizes through its traces adhering to the asphalt. 
 
Samantha Bohatsch release waves of thoughts. Daily concerns align with mythological figures and features of the pop culture in the 1990s-2000s. Autobiographical, fictional and oneiric elements of teenage years in Berlin intertwine with those of a projected youth. It could be another big city. And yet, it becomes the ground of endless love, of a queer love that sneaks through the urban interstices and expand. They look for the way back in, and out again, supported by temporal leaps. Thus, they set up a stratified mapping, in which their trajectory becomes transversal, as a way to seek the incidences of one’s surrounding and its multiple meanings in the shaping of personality and the sense of belonging and loving at certain moments in life. By engaging in a practice of poetic and investigative text-writing and reading performance, Samantha Bohatsch question their own journey and use it as a strategy to reassess times and places they experienced or dreamt of.

Text by Marie DuPasquier

Samantha Bohatsch (*1984 in Berlin) is an artist and poet who is based in Berlin. They studied in Vienna, Berlin and Karlsruhe (D) where they finished their studies as Meisterschülerin of Silvia Bächli. Bohatsch makes reading performances, text-based sound pieces and installations. They deal with interpersonal relationships and transformation processes, inspired by personal experiences, observations from the internet, queer and feminist literature, history and pop culture. Bohatsch has received artist fellowships by the Federal State Baden-Württemberg, the Arts Foundation Baden-Württemberg and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Their works have been recently shown at Kunsthalle Mainz (D), Galerie Bernau (D) and Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (D) among others.

Picture: Samantha Bohatsch, SWM, 2020. Performance und Ausstellung, Eins zu Eins Festival, Alte Münze Berlin, Berlin 2020. Photo by Jonas Fischer. Copyright: Samantha Bohatsch und VG Bild-Kunst, 2022