Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff: German Theater 2010-2022

Chronicling 10 years of the duo’s collaborative practice and their influential artist-run performance and theater spaces in Berlin

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.
Calla Henkel (born 1988) is from Minneapolis and based in Berlin and Los Angeles. She is the author of Other People’s Clothes (Doubleday, 2022) and Scrap (The Overlook Press, 2024). She has staged plays at Volksbühne Berlin and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and her artistic work with Max Pitegoff has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Together with Pitegoff, she operates New Theater Hollywood in Los Angeles.
Max Pitegoff (born 1987) is from Buffalo, New York, and based in Berlin and Los Angeles. His work with Calla Henkel has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Together with Henkel, he operates New Theater Hollywood in Los Angeles.