Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff: German Theater 2010–2022

This book, German Theater 2010–2022, is the first monograph on the work of the artist duo Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff. Their manifold practices play out, live test and fictionalize the mechanisms that shape creative communities. Chronicling over a decade of production in Berlin, the book is organized around the influential bar and theater spaces they ran there: Times Bar (2011–12), New Theater (2013–15), Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne (2017–18) and TV Bar (2019–22). Rooted in a renewed conceptual approach to photography, Henkel and Pitegoff’s oeuvre spins an allegory of this historical moment in which precarity and gentrification are two sides of the same coin. Their photographs, plays, writings and films address the complexity of collective action, painting a deadpan picture of the social and economic systems that sustain communal exchanges and their eminently fragile autonomy.