Please Hilda! Please!
Cabaret with Giorgio Handman & Friends
Friday, May 22nd
Doors at 7pm
Cabaret starts at 7:30pm
Image by Aram Jibilian
mõist ~ room to swing a cat in Neukölln will host Please Hilda Please! by New York-based artist and social worker Giorgio Handman. The exhibition will open with an arthouse cabaret that centers matrilineal inheritance and the post-war women of Europe and its diasporas — the displaced and the glamorous, the unremembered and the iconic — whose survival and creativity continue to echo through the generations that follow them.
Image by Aram Jibilian
Hilda is a practice of devotion: a way of embodying and honoring the matrilineal lineage of artists, icons, friends, and family who have shaped her. The heart of Hilda is Handman’s mother who was born in Lithuania and raised in a displaced persons camp in post-war Munich. She emigrated to the United States at 16 and built an expansive, elegant life for herself in the New York of the 1970s and 80s. She died at 49. Bringing Hilda to Germany — to this city, this Hinterhof — is an act of return, a way of tracing the ghost of a childhood Handman’s mother never fully spoke about.
Moving through this same geography, the show draws on a broader constellation of post-war women who crossed borders, reinvented themselves, and made art and beauty in the wake of devastation. For the cabaret, Hilda will perform songs by two of them: Nico, born in Cologne, raised in Berlin, a defining presence in the post-war avant-garde, who also died at 49 — and Dalida, born in Cairo, and later moved to Paris becoming a multilingual singer and beloved icon.
Image by Aram Jibilian
The cabaret also honors another layer of matrilineal inheritance: many of the performing artists studied together in the New Genres department at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1990s, under the guidance of the legendary Professor Sharon Grace. That community — forged by Grace in a spirit of radical experimentation, mutual devotion, and the particular freedoms of San Francisco in that decade — will reunite and activate the space with the energy of Grace’s mentorship.
With Please Hilda Please, Handman asks, “At this moment in time, when chaos seems to be the new order — what do each of us need to be able to release, to celebrate, to mourn? What do we need to be mothered and mentored?”
Image by Benito Aguilar
CABARET PERFORMANCES by Hilda, Hrant, Dirty Churches, Kendel Bennett, Cobrasfaltica, Joli Bébé, Katie McKay, Becca Cohen, Laurel Katz-Bohen, and Mayte Lopez, with music by Conrad Kaneshiro, Matt Katz-Bohen, Jesse Gelaznik and Alex Lug, clothes by Jonathan Osofsky at Kasuri.
ARTWORKS by Giorgio Handman, Aram Jibilian, Katie McKay, Rachel Blackwell, Becca Cohen, Felix Tunador, Benito Aguilar, Aleen Jendian, Micah Jendian, Alexis Agathocleous, Nadja Frank, and Jomar Statkun.
Curated by Nadja Frank and Jomar Statkun.
Image by Benito Aguilar
| Exhibition dates: May 22nd – 30th Opening hours: Saturdays from 3 to 6 pm and by appointment: info@supermoist.de |