Viel Feind, viel Ehr
Peninsula Gallery– 352 Van Brunt Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231
Sunday, February 17th through May 4th, 2019
Opening Sunday, February 17th, 6-9 PM
Jerry Blackman
Lutz Braun
Andreas Bunte
Andrew Guenther
Stef Heidhues
John Hodany
Jeroen Jacobs
Valentin Just
Michael Kirkham
Johnny Mullen
Hester Oerlemans
Mike Olin
Thomas Schroeren
Marike Schuurman
Gibb Slife
Raaf van der Sman
Heidi Specker
Barbara Westermann
Jess Willa Wheaton
Anton Zolotov
Curated by Johnny Mullen and Raaf van der Sman
Viel Feind, viel Ehr is the first iteration of a collaborative project between Peninsula Gallery and the Berlin project space nationalmuseum. It presents a number of artists allied to nationalmuseum paired with New York artists selected by the curatorial team of Peninsula.
Peter Braatz and Thomas Schwebel met in Düsseldorf in the late 1970s and invented, in addition to new names for themselves, the name of a non-existent band called S.Y.P.H. They could neither play nor did they own any instruments. At the time, they frequented the ‘Ratinger Hof’ which was the regular haunt of bands like Charley’s Girls and Mittagspauze. “Yeah, we’re musicians too.” When pressed further, they blurted out titles: “Zurück zum Beton” (Back to Concrete,) “Industriemädchen” (Industrial Girls,) and “Lachleute und Nettmenschen” (Laugh-people and Nice-people.)
Now there was an interest and a building pressure to write the songs. This resulted in S.Y.P.H.’s first album, Viel Feind, viel Ehr, which Carmen Knoebel brought out in 1979 as the first album on Pure Freude, her legendary Düsseldorf punk label. The artists and artwork featured in this joint exhibition captures the same type of audacious, spontaneous energy found in its titular namesake.
This project is co-funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe