Screening: "i feel it all" @chess club, Kunstverein Hamburg and Satellite Galleries

There is a trend in northern Europe for Kunstverein's to pick up the hot young gallery/curator/film screener of their city and put them in the spare room of their Museum. Kunstwerein Hamburg (and curator Milan Ther) is making a SMART decision by placing Chess Club — because the freedom it gives them to speak to an audience outside of regular programming. They can cross connect older monagraphic exhibits with younger artists in order to plug them into a younger (hotter) continuum.

Hollywoods favourite part of these "projects" is that they usually are announced through instagram posters, thus attracting a select community who organise thwier social events through the algorithim.

Otto Bonnen doing the "Backroooms" of KunsthalleZurich during Danielle Baumans, now at the Kunstmuseum Lichenstein; Kunstverein Braunschweig having a bar program by Anna Erler and Lennart Koch, "Poem Untitled" and Amanda Weimer of Chess Club in the spare room of Kunstwerein Hamburg.

Our Hamburg correspondant, Mercy, writes to us reporting upon a screening which occured in summer. I guess what Hollywood is thinking, is, WHY DO THESE KUNSTVEREIN'S WANT HOT YOUNG CURATORS ANYWAY? WHY DONT THEY JUST HIRE THEM OUTRIGHT? WHY ARE THEY SATELLITE PROJECTS?

Hollywood thinks that... the concept of the "satellite" is actually sexier than we suppose. Stay small for as long as possible, as they say, and mine the currency of the avant-garde for as long as possible.

— Syndey Sweeney

---

It’s Hamburg, July 30. It’s hot and it is raining, and people are gathering in and around the Kunstverein Hamburg. This year, the institution has opened up its usual programme to house chess club, a project space initiated in 2022 as a residency that expands its institutional framework in a young and witty fashion. Hamburg, somewhere between Berlin and Paris. Behind its first layer of preppiness, the city shows a close-knit community with a dedicated attention to and attendance at what is contributed in the name of frivolity and art. That night, we lie scattered across beanbags between Nina Porter’s solo exhibition, the group show curated by Anthony Huberman and Milan Ther, and, most importantly for us in this context i feel it all curated by Amanda Weimer. The exhibition, bringing together eleven artistic positions through and around the medium of photography and collage, is accompanied by that evening’s screening of four films by artists also participating in the show.

In Tim Hardy’s Scenes(2025), we are taken to suburban Australia. Feeling like an introduction from the still image to the moving one, the film is an assembly of scenes: canaries in a cage, an improv class in a pub, or a group of girls doing test shoots at a modelling school. I feel like the silent participant in local community events and public life, where movement and narrative remain subtle.

Costume Party: Fame, Love, Beauty (2026) is a two-act drama and short film by Collezione Nancy Delroi from Milan, created together with artist Witt Fetter and writer Isabel Consolani in Stromboli, recontextualising the myth of the Judgement of Paris through its three aloof allegorical figures: Fame, Love, and Beauty. “War. Sperm. Cock. Shit. Whore.” We are Paris, watching the three goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite discuss and perform their virtues through a war on meaning. The myth continues with Paris choosing Aphrodite after she promises him the most beautiful woman in the world. We still hope to move beyond the mystification of female sexuality and female intelligence in culture; a mystification inherited from antiquity and still reproduced in both high and popular culture today. Rather than offering an escape from this system, the work seems to negotiate with it from within.

After Costume’s Party’s Sylvano Bussotti-esque damned pounding and strumming of the piano, the program is followed by Matt Gess’ Untitled (2024), paired with a discordant musical composition by Oliver Coates. If every photograph is a memento mori, the short film shows the ritualistic bringing to life of a figure enacted by artist Nova Needham. Put motionless on a pedestal under a London bridge, in a form resembling the crucified Christ, the blond is slowly revived to gaze back at us. It is unsurprising that Matt Gess's work has qualities of a fashion film - in super 8 beauty the protagonist feels like a sexy war cyborg, who’s sentience remains only suggested.

The screening concludes with The Other Queen of Memphis (2024) by Belgian artist Luna Mahoux – a hybrid documentary on Memphis rapper La Chat (Chastity Daniels). As its heroine drives through the city, we see atmospheric shots of clubs and other locations important to her, interwoven with archive footage and the story of a life fully lived. The Other Queen of Memphis is a break from the previous films in the programme, as the focus shifts towards a celebration of community in the context of Memphis’ social reality. Alongside La Chat’s music, the film is scored by experimental musician and artist Embaci, underlining the bittersweet legacy of memory, loss, and cultural inheritance.
The central presence of women and beauty forms a coherent thread through the films, no less represented by chess club’s taste for uncanny glamour. If beauty can be understood as both material and practice, Paris’ sacrifice of the city of Troy for his love of it becomes clearer through its power. But seduction is not about desire; it is about play.

—Mercy