« ABA's Air SALON » air salon: Three Categories

"Three Categories" is a collaborative radio performance featuring Dutch/Hungarian artist Dóra Benyó and the Belgo-German artist duo Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (O.J.A.I.), composed of Chris Dreier and Gary Farrelly. Central to the piece are the declassified secret service files compiled after the surveillance of Benyo's grandfather, a research engineer and political activist during Hungary's communist era. The title of the work is drawn from a report that outlined three categories used at the time to classify citizens based on their loyalty to the state.

Benyó's collaboration with O.J.A.I. reimagines the architecture of the state archive, transforming it into a conceptual space representing totalitarian overreach through the excessive production of knowledge. O.J.A.I. contributes to this transformation by creating paranoid organizational atmospheres, conveyed through a series of fictional texts and modular sound compositions. This project was developed during Dóra Benyó's residency at Air Berlin Alexanderplatz in 2024, which was generously supported by the Mondrian Funds. Farrelly's practice is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

ABA Air SALON is a radio format produced by Air Berlin Alexanderplatz, a Berlin based artist initiative dealing with the distribution and documentation of forms of collective and experimental knowledge production. The broadcasts come from different locations in Berlin where we organize salons. At these salons we meet with local actors, artists, scientists and other cultural producers to exchange around research based artistic projects and practices. You can find more information about our program at www.airberlinalexanderplatz.de

ABA (Air Berlin Alexanderplatz) e.V., is a research-oriented artists' initiative founded in Berlin in 2009 by the artists Susanne Kriemann & Aleksander Komarov. The programme focuses on ephemeral artistic research and collective and experimental knowledge production. ABA’s operations consist of the conception, curation and implementation of various presentational formats: The organization of salons in different locations across the city, the release of publications, the stewardship of a residency-program and the maintenance of a website as a central place for documentation and archiving of these forms of ephemeral knowledge production.