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Finissage & Poesie: Ein Abend mit Rim Battal und Odile Kennel
Finissage & Poetry: An evening with Rim Battal and Odile Kennel
Event by: Institut français Berlin
Location: Kurfürstendamm 211, Kurfürstendamm 211, Berlin - Bezirk Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf
About event
At the end of the exhibition Breaking this Silence, we cordially invite you to a literary evening in the Alice Guy Gallery in cooperation with the House of Poetry. The focus is on two outstanding voices in contemporary poetry: the Moroccan-French, Arabophone poet Rim Battal and the German-French poet Odile Kennel.
In a bilingual conversation, the two authors talk about bodies, femininity, language and autonomy - accompanied by their poems, texts and experiences. An evening of closeness, exchange and poetry - embedded in an exhibition that tries to write new narratives.
Afterwards you are cordially invited to end the evening with a drink, look at the exhibition and start a conversation.
Moderated by Anna Julian Mendlik.
Event in French and German, with simultaneous translation into Germans. Admission free.
In the Alice Guy Gallery.
In cooperation with the House for Poetry.
About the exhibition Breaking this Silence:
The exhibition Breaking this Silence sees art as a place of counter-speech, resistance and rewriting. The focus is on not only depicting the invisible, long-repressed disease endometriosis, but also creating new narratives about it - artistically, politically and poetically.
The invited artists - themselves those affected or allies - show works that approach the female body from an autopathographic, activist and critical perspective. They not only address the physical experience of a colonized, silenced illness, but also the social, historical, religious and medical constructions that continue to shape the view of the female body today.
Breaking this Silence follows the “patient as partner” approach - a model that places patients' experiential knowledge on an equal footing with medical knowledge and leads to an ethical and epistemic change in the healthcare system
The exhibition is part of the European Erasmus+ project #ENDOs, supported by L’Agence Créative as part of the Endometriosis Academy. It is accompanied by workshops, performances, lectures and encounters between artists, patients and health professionals - with the aim of creating new knowledge together and overcoming old models of thought.
Odile Kennel lives in Berlin as a poet and translator of predominantly contemporary poetry from French, Portuguese, Spanish and English. She writes in German and French and likes to include other languages in her texts. Her first volume of poetry or what is the name of this interplanetary air (2013) was published by dtv, as were the two novels What Ida Says (2011) and With a View of Sea (2017). For the latter she was nominated for the Alfred Döblin Prize. With the Berlin publishing house she published the essay Lust (2021) as well as the poetry collections Hors Texts (2019) and something in between (2023). In 2022 she received the Paul Scheerbart Prize for her poetry translations. Something in between received the Dörlemann Prize from the Hotlist of Independent Publishers in 2024.
Rim Battal was born in Casablanca in 1987 and now lives in Paris. After studying journalism, she devoted herself entirely to writing and photography. Today she is considered one of the defining voices of a new generation of Arabophone poets.
She published, among others:
Vingt poèmes et des poussières (Lanskine),
L'eau du bain,
Les Quatrains de l'all inclusive,
X et excès (Le Castor Astral).
Her first novel was published in 2025: Je me regarderai dans les yeux.
In a bilingual conversation, the two authors talk about bodies, femininity, language and autonomy - accompanied by their poems, texts and experiences. An evening of closeness, exchange and poetry - embedded in an exhibition that tries to write new narratives.
Afterwards you are cordially invited to end the evening with a drink, look at the exhibition and start a conversation.
Moderated by Anna Julian Mendlik.
Event in French and German, with simultaneous translation into Germans. Admission free.
In the Alice Guy Gallery.
In cooperation with the House for Poetry.
About the exhibition Breaking this Silence:
The exhibition Breaking this Silence sees art as a place of counter-speech, resistance and rewriting. The focus is on not only depicting the invisible, long-repressed disease endometriosis, but also creating new narratives about it - artistically, politically and poetically.
The invited artists - themselves those affected or allies - show works that approach the female body from an autopathographic, activist and critical perspective. They not only address the physical experience of a colonized, silenced illness, but also the social, historical, religious and medical constructions that continue to shape the view of the female body today.
Breaking this Silence follows the “patient as partner” approach - a model that places patients' experiential knowledge on an equal footing with medical knowledge and leads to an ethical and epistemic change in the healthcare system
The exhibition is part of the European Erasmus+ project #ENDOs, supported by L’Agence Créative as part of the Endometriosis Academy. It is accompanied by workshops, performances, lectures and encounters between artists, patients and health professionals - with the aim of creating new knowledge together and overcoming old models of thought.
Odile Kennel lives in Berlin as a poet and translator of predominantly contemporary poetry from French, Portuguese, Spanish and English. She writes in German and French and likes to include other languages in her texts. Her first volume of poetry or what is the name of this interplanetary air (2013) was published by dtv, as were the two novels What Ida Says (2011) and With a View of Sea (2017). For the latter she was nominated for the Alfred Döblin Prize. With the Berlin publishing house she published the essay Lust (2021) as well as the poetry collections Hors Texts (2019) and something in between (2023). In 2022 she received the Paul Scheerbart Prize for her poetry translations. Something in between received the Dörlemann Prize from the Hotlist of Independent Publishers in 2024.
Rim Battal was born in Casablanca in 1987 and now lives in Paris. After studying journalism, she devoted herself entirely to writing and photography. Today she is considered one of the defining voices of a new generation of Arabophone poets.
She published, among others:
Vingt poèmes et des poussières (Lanskine),
L'eau du bain,
Les Quatrains de l'all inclusive,
X et excès (Le Castor Astral).
Her first novel was published in 2025: Je me regarderai dans les yeux.