4×4
!Mediengruppe Bitnik with Sakrowski & Baruch Gottlieb

4×4 
(South Korea 2024)
16 Artists · 4 Bands · 3 Days · 1 Night · 1 Exhibition


1. Invite 16 artists to dinner. Make sure they come from different disciplines: visual arts, sound, performance, music.
2. Use the random band generator to randomly select the artists into 4 new band projects 

Let the random band generator assign a band name for each band.
3. Seat each new band together at a table of 4 and serve the meal.
4. Let each band pose for a band photograph.
5. Provide space, time and resources for the bands to rehearse for three days.
6. On the fourth day, let them all perform at the opening of “Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone” at ARKO Art Center (or other locations).

What happens when you invite artists and musicians to form new randomly assembled bands and give them just a few days to conceptualise and rehearse a collaboration to be performed on stage?

4 x4 uses calculated chance as a formative force and artistic method to bring together artists and musicians into new collaborations. Creating new accomplices and collaborations facilitates new social and artistic practices. Thus, the project sees itself as a social experiment in which a non-competitive space for collaborative work is created leading to more “intimate” connections between the individual artists. As curators, we consider the relationships within an artistic community to be extremely important, especially today, as they lay the foundation for solidarity, political action and often make community possible in the first place.

The genre-transcending nature of the 4×4 offers artists with a variety of different practices – spanning music culture, visual, performative and media arts – opportunities to leave their conventional genres and redefine themselves without pressure in an unfamiliar, yet casual context.
4×4 took place for the first time in 2023 at panke.gallery and Panke Club in Berlin, Germany. It brought together ~40 artists from the Berlin art scene and randomly assembled them into 10 new bands for an experimental night of music, performance and club culture. The pandemic years in Berlin were characterized by long lock-downs, creating artistic isolation and precarious situations, anxiety and overload for many. The aim of 4×4 is to revive the collaborative spirit of the Berlin art scene and create a space for light-hearted experimentation and a framework for a career-free artistic work in a safe social space. During a one day of the festival, the 10+ band projects presented works created in these new constellations, which included diverse media forms such as net art, sound art, media, video and performance art.

Curators of 4×4 ARKO Seoul: !Mediengruppe Bitnik with Sakrowski & Baruch Gottlieb
Curators of 4×4 Berlin: !Mediengruppe Bitnik, DJ SchluchT, Lucie Freynhagen and Sakrowski
https://www.panke.gallery/event/4×4/
https://bitnik.org/4×4