HomeBase Project Exhibits at VOLTA NY Booth #P-02
March 8 – 11, 2012
Download the prespack
HomeBase Project (homebaseproject.org), an artist run nonprofit is invited back to VOLTA – booth #P-02 – for the second consecutive year. The organization will showcase the ways in which it fulfills it’s mission to apply contemporary art as an agent for social change within an urban setting.
For the past seven years, HomeBase Project (HB) has been transforming vacant buildings in neighborhoods undergoing transition – in New York City’s Lower East Side, Harlem, and Greenpoint, and currently in Berlin – into site-specific spaces where an international roster of artists explore the notion of ‘home.’ These temporary projects are designed to connect art to everyday urban living, cultivating community, and cross-cultural dialogue.
In 2010 HB established a home in an abandoned, historic brewery in the Pankow district of Berlin. This temporary sojourn expanded into HomeBase LAB – an ongoing, year-round residency and research program. The next HB project is planned for Jerusalem, and satellite projects will take place simultaneously in New York and Berlin.
“Berlin has been a turning point for HB,” says Anat Litwin, artistic director and founder of the project. “The extended residency has given HB artists and the team the opportunity to deepen the creative exploration of the meaning of ‘home.’ We are now vested the history and future of the brewery building, and developing ways to serve the neighborhood. We are coming to VOLTA NY to share our vision for fostering interconnectedness.”
This year’s booth contains:
- Introducing HB Service which include consultations, commissioning, and implementing artist-residencies and public programs that cultivate social consciousness built on the HomeBase model;
- Sale of HB products including Ignatz Bier, an artisanal pilsner brewed at HomeBase LAB Berlin that contains a “message in a bottle” (more information follows below),, as well as limited edition, signed bottles of beer from the third batch of Ignatz Bier, a unique collector’s item;
- An offering of original art work on the topic of ‘home’ commissioned in ‘ready to go’ boxes, created by HomeBase Project alumni artists.
“We all felt very strongly connected to the concept behind HomeBase Project,” says Amanda Coulson, artistic director of VOLTA. “It is a very current topic and one that deserves the benefit of a major international platform and we are extremely pleased to have them with us.”
HomeBase Project is one of a few nonprofit organizations that have been given a booth at VOLTA NY. HomeBase Project is a participant in the Fiscal Sponsorship Program of FJC, a registered 501(c) 3 organization in the USA and also is registered as a non for profit in Europe. Purchases and donations made at the VOLTA NY booth are tax-deductible to the amount permitted by law, and benefit HomeBase Project and artists.
For more information visit www.homebaseproject.org
About the HomeBase Project
HomeBase Project was founded in 2006 as site-specific public art project exploring the notion of home. Multi-disciplinary artists take up residence in a building in an urban area undergoing transition. The artists take part in research programs and workshops, group dinners and discussions, and are signed their own room in which they create site-specific art installations on the topic of home. The space is then open free to the public to view artists’ rooms, and experience a range of programming including lectures, performances, open mic sessions, workshops and parties. All aspects of the production are documented from start to finish and include notations of logistics, group dynamics of the HB team and HB artists, the creative processes and interactions with the neighborhood, the community, and the public at large.
About Anat Litwin
Anat Litwin, a Brooklyn-based Israeli-American artist and curator, working in the medium of paper cut-outs, installations and public art, is the founder and artistic director of the HomeBase Project. While working on the first HomeBase projects, she also served as the director the Makor/ 92nd Street Y Artists-in-Residence program and gallery, and later became the associate director of LABA at the 14 Street Y. Litwin received her BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem in 2001, and her MFA in 2005 from New York’s Hunter College department of Combined Media. She received the Keren Sharet award for outstanding artists in 2001, and has exhibited her work in Europe, Israel, and New York. She is currently working on her first book titled “Anatomy.” For more information please visit www.anatlitwin.com.
About Ignatz Bier and the Historic Engelhardt Brewery
Pankow neighbors told HB the story of the building they were inhabiting. Built in 1895. the building was the home of the Engelhardt Brewery from 1905-1949. Under the direction of Mr. Ignatz Nacher, a German-Jewish entrepreneur, the brewery became one of Germany’s most successful and was expropriated by the Nazi’s in the 1930’s. following WWII it became a communist brewery, a youth hostel of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth / Communist youth movement) and remained deserted for nearly 20 year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 2010 HB arrived with an international group of artists, who brought to the building a new life.
On March 5th 2011, 104 years since the first pilsner was introduced on site, HB created along with neighbors, artists, brewers, and beer lovers, an artisinal tribute beer in honor of Ignatz Nacher. During the process, it also came to symbolize how artists can reapproptiate and infuse life into an empty building.a March 5th has become the date for an annual communal art event at the HomeBaseLAB.
Art can change one’s fate
deepen a sense of identity
explore what it means to exist, what it means to be human
Art can bring us home…
(Message in a Bottle / Excerpt from the Ignatz Bier Label) 1
