Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Since 2017 the Giant Panda Bears Meng Meng and Jiao Qing have been hired out to the Berlin Zoo from China to attract more visitors and to therefore increase profit. Unfortunately for the Berlin Zoo this advertising campaign did not work out as planned - in fact it worked backwards. Meng Meng, the female Panda will only walk backwards - probably protesting the fact that she is kept in captivity and in a totally different continent from her origins. But instead of rethinking the problematic concepts of zoos in general, international media is taking on a different debate: blaming Meng Meng’s behavior on the fact that she has not bred yet and is just looking for attention. Kerstin Honeit’s video aligns Meng Meng’s protest with other performances of protesting bodies using movement in public space to address grievances.

Kerstin Honeit studied fine arts and stage design at the Berlin Weissensee School of Art. She has been teaching at Kunsthochschule Kassel since 2014. Using video works, performance an d installations in her artistic research, Honeit examines worlds of hegemonic image production in the media of information technology and pop culture. Intervening at the boundaries of representation and reception, she questions the construction of social norms. Most recently, her works were shown at Off Biennale Cairo (2018); Videoart at Midnight, Berlin (2018); Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2018); La Centrale, Montreal (2018); Bärenzwinger, Berlin (2018); Schwules Museum, Berlin (2018); Rencontres Internationales Paris / Berlin (2018); International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2017); Berlinische Galerie (2017); SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen (2017).