"Chapter One. He adored New York City," begins Woody Allen's 1979 'Manhattan'. "To him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity to cause so many people to take the easy way out …". Allen's line may be an allusion to suicide, but one less radical departure for New York creatives has been, traditionally, to move away. With seemingly exponential increase over the past decade, asylum seekers have turned not to Brooklyn but to Berlin, inaugurating in their wake a love-hate fantasy wherein the German capital is cast as an utopian center of artistic production, and New York as a place to sell, not to make––a sexy but commercial hell. […] Okiishi has been living between New York and Berlin since 2001, and '(Goodbye to) Manhattan' combines materials from that experience (filmed between 2006 and 2009) into a seventy-two-minute, semiautobiographical transposition of Allen's classic.

(Victoria Camblin, Artforum)

Arbeiten und Performances von Ken Okiishi (*1978, lebt in New York und Berlin) wurden u.a. präsentiert im Kunsthaus Bregenz (2013), bei Mathew, Berlin (2012), im Mehringdamm 72, Berlin (2012), bei Alex Zachary, New York (2012), bei White Columns, New York (2012), im Golem, Hamburg (2012), im Anthology Film Archive, New York (2011), im Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2010), im Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2010), bei Performa 09, New York (2009), bei Ludlow 38, New York (2008), im Artists Space, New York (2006) und in der Foksal Gallery, Warschau (2004).

Die Filmvorführung findet im Rahmen der aktuellen Ausstellung "Festival der Kleinskulptur" (09. März bis 07. April 2013) statt.

Grosszügig gefördert durch das Land Niedersachsen, den Lüneburgischen Landschaftsverband und die Hansestadt Lüneburg.