Magazine #30 of the Federal Cultural Foundation / Kulturstiftung des Bundes

Nยบ 30 Spring/Summer 2018

altered state

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Editorial

The desire to escape the constraints of everyday life and view the world from outside or above is one of the oldest dreams of humankind. But the search for an “altered state” fundamentally differs from strategies of stupefaction or suppression. The state of ecstasy, the sense of being “outside ourselves” is tied to the hope of achieving greater awareness, more clarity, a more refined sensitivity that enables us to perceive what lies hidden in our mundane, socially controlled existence.

Since the age of Socrates, the transcendental, ecstatic experience has been associated with the artistic process. In fact, it is possibly one of the oldest cultural topoi shared by diverse cultures around the world, although it seems to have been most repressed and least sanctioned in Western society. Global interaction with other cultures and unease at the increasing economisation of emotions might be driving renewed interest in and exploration of ecstatic forms of per­ception in the Western hemisphere, as well.

The philosopher Robert Pfaller debunks a central Western misunderstanding about ecstasy, i.e. the belief that it represents irrationality and the loss of control. He points to other cultures which view ecstatic states not as individualistic and private experiences, but as collective, solidarity-building ones, during which we are “outside” ourselves. He compares the “negative cults” of avoiding ecstatic experiences – as is prevalent in Western society – with the “positive cults” of other societies which encourage individuals to “step away” from their egocentric view of the world.

It would do our society good to take a more relaxed attitude toward such ecstatic states (p. 4).

The artists Carsten Höller and Jeremy Shaw, both of whom are participating in exhibitions funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, share their views on the value of ecstatic experiences in their artistic work and what socio-political potential they possess (p. 6).

The choreographer Meg Stuart, who will be receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Biennale this year, also strives to attain a different “state of awareness” as part of her artistic strategy. You can read her interview by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist on page 8. One could argue that Meg Stuart’s interna­ tional reputation and the cult surrounding her works is built upon the literally ecstatic nature of her dance performances. Meg Stuart has been chosen to head the artistic programme of the Dance Congress in Dresden next year.

The photos in this issue highlight the preparations for the exhibition “Hello World” at the Hamburger Bahnhof of the Berlin Nationalgalerie, funded by the Global Museum programme. To a certain extent, these “mood boards” express the ecstatic view of the exhibits of the collection. Arranged alongside what many have previously regarded as marginalised objects and documents, the focus of the collection has assumed a more diverse art-historical and socially complex global perspective. Here, the curators offer a view “from the outside” which questions the long-established Eurocentric position of the collection.

Although most people have seen works by Victor Vasarely, few would associate them (anymore) with “art”. His artwork is now the focus of a major exhibition at the Frankfurt Städel Museum that may redefine its role in the art-historical continuum of modernism. In the late 1960s, people stood in awe before Vasarely’s pictures as if witnessing an aesthetic revelation. His pictures seemed immediately accessible and understandable to everyone.

Perhaps this is why the art world has shown him so little appreciation for so many years. The art critic Hans-Joachim Müller, who knew Vasarely personally, describes the “Vasarely phenomenon” on page 24.

Julius Eastman was one of the eccentrics among th 20 -century composers of minimal music. As Jasmina Al-Qaisi reports (p. 26), Eastman, who passed away at the age of 50 in 1990, was a marginal figure in professional circles and led a socially precarious existence for many years. As a Black American who openly acknowledged his homosexuality and refused to make personal or musical compromises, he has only recently gained appreciation for his extraordinary musical talent. In Europe, Eastman is now being celebrated as one of the great minimalists alongside John Cage.

In 2019, we celebrate the 100 th anniversary of the Bauhaus, the famous school of art and design known for its holistic approach toward renewing the fine arts.

Few people know, however, that the Bauhaus also wanted to revolutionise language, which – analogous to the visual arts – focused on the “acoustic material” of words. Torsten Blume investigates the “word art” strategies used by the Bauhaus students and masters (p. 27).

With its newly established fund for city libraries, the Federal Cultural Foundation aims to change the status of these important public institutions. The Foundation is promoting measures that redefine public libraries as a kind of “fourth place” to accompany the home, the workplace, and the consumer world.

Richard David Lankes, one of the pioneers and most committed advocates of renewing and opening community libraries, writes an open letter to a librarian in which he makes an appeal to transform city libraries from places of quiet retreat to open spaces of encounter, and ultimately “engines of change” (p. 30).

Hortensia Völckers, Alexander Farenholtz Executive Board of the German Federal Cultural Foundation

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Content

(4)

(24)

Frightening Raptures

Senseless – With Good Reason

Community and solidarity as an altered state – Robert Pfaller’s case for more ecstatic moments in our culture of self-control.

(6)

Viktor Vasarely liberated art from the weighty burden of significance and viewers from the necessity to interpret it. As Hans-Joachim Müller explains, it’s high time to revisit his legacy.

(26)

Rules of Rapture An interview with Carsten Höller and Jeremy Shaw on the role of ecstasy in the artistic process.

Minimal Form, Maximum Impact Rediscovering the composer Julius Eastman: Jasmina Al-Qaisi describes the career of an exceptional musician who unerringly followed his own path – even when it led him astray.

(8)

Exhaustion into Transcendence

“This obsession, to over-stretch time, to force people to be hyper-present”: Hans Ulrich Obrist speaks with choreographer Meg Stuart.

(27)

(12)

The Bauhaus as a school of word art and linguistic rejuvenation – Torsten Blume examines a lesser-known artistic field of the avant-gardists.

Hello World A photo essay by Udo Kittelmann on revising the collection at the Neue Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, as part of the Global Museum programme.

Unknown Bauhaus

(30)

The Other Library. A Letter to an Old Acquaintance The library science scholar Richard David Lankes encourages libraries to boldly rethink their role in society.

(32)

New Projects Lorenza Böttner With Feeling Post Studio: CalArts 1970–1978 Remembering Landscape Intelligent Music: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning In the cut No Refuge for Jewish Refugees Rodin / Nauman Focus on Poetry Into the Blue!

KP Brehmer (1938–1997) Slavs and Tatars

Images of Sound and Shades of Music Writing in Migration Hinterland Jutta Koether 8th Festival of Photography f/stop Werkleitz Festival 2018 Computer Grrrls Wrested from Oblivion FIND 2018 Wild Songs To Keep Time from Standing Still Beatriz González For the Common Good

Quillo Shockheaded Peter Revisited HERE AND NOW at the Museum Ludwig Our Stage Cuba Emprende – A Family Affair Pátria Estrangeira / Foreign Homeland Invisible Republic Publication of Hannah Höch's Address Book im/possible bodies Brandenburg Concerts The Walter Kempowski Project

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Frightening Raptures WE ARE PRETTY U SE L E S S AS SH AM AN S, BU T A F E W SM ALLER AN D LARGE R ECSTASIES WOU L D DO OU R SOCIETY GOOD

Robert Pfaller

01 THE ECSTATICS AND US Although we may be fascinated by foreign cultures with their colourful dances, their trances, their rituals of drug use or collective sexuality as exemplary practitioners and bearers of ecstatic states, we – as members of capitalistic industrial societies – are not entirely unfamiliar with ecstasy. We think we know what ecstasy is, based on experiences with sexuality and drugs, Carnival, Oktoberfest or company parties; the “fever of the game” which football teams can succumb to, or the boisterous and oftentimes violent displays of enthusiasm and excess by the viewers; the psychological effects of endogenous substances released after long-distance races or high-risk sports like white-water rafting, rock climbing and bungee jumping, or walking over burning coals during a weekend seminar for managers, or even when fasting; at certain moments of professional activity, the so-called “flow” that stockbrokers experience, or the creative or writing raptures of artists and writers. And even though European observers at the turn of the 20th century, who saw themselves as representing a “hot” culture focused on the written word, may have been appalled, horrified or even disgusted by such collective dance ecstasies in many foreign cultures, our own Western culture – especially after World War II, as the media theorist Marshall McLuhan points out – had “cooled down” and “retribalised”. In many ways, it has since appropriated the practices of tribal cultures – for example, the loud, mass exercises of self-oblivion exhibited in collective dance practices at discos and techno parties in Western metropolitan cities.

Of course, we haven’t been able to appropriate everything that regularly occurs in foreign cultures; or perhaps never sought to appropriate it in the first place, such as “speaking in tongues” (so-called “glossolalia”), manic visions or auditory sensations, physical convul­ sions, epileptic-like seizures, obsessions or compulsions, e.g. in response to having one’s love spurned, dancing oneself to death like the young aborigine in Nicolas Roeg’s wonderful film Walkabout. We encounter such phenomena, if at all, in the psychiatric ward or during psychoanalysis. We regard such symptoms as unpleasant and those who exhibit them as requiring therapy.

For most of us, it is questionable or difficult to imagine that other cultures that deliberately elicit these in collective situations find such states sensual or sensible.

02 OUTSIDE OF WHERE? Cultural theory struggles to explain what exactly comprises ecstasy. Etymologically, the word means “standing outside” or “put out of place”, which begs the question – outside of where? Or where out of place?

If we define ecstasy, as some writers are wont to do, as a “loss of control over oneself”, we might be reading too much into the definition. We would have to regard a typical fit of rage, jealousy, laughter, the excessive need to share information, seducibility, or the consumption of more wine than our thirst requires as “ecstatic” behaviour. On the other hand, the same definition doesn’t seem broad enough either.

5 For some ecstatic states do not necessarily consist of “losing” something. Just think of Spinoza’s wellknown example of sleepwalkers, i.e. the fact that they “can do many things asleep which they would never dare in a waking state,” demonstrates “that the body itself by adhering to the laws of nature is capable of accomplishing many things one’s own mind would be amazed at.” If someone is outside of herself, or bereft of her – conscious – control, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she is mindlessly perambulating. It is more likely that other systems have assumed control, the existence of which we are little aware and whose ability to conduct certain tasks may even exceed the known systems. Sigmund Freud posited that the telling of a good joke requires the subconscious to process the conscious material for a brief moment; this insight offers us a familiar, mild example of this kind of superior ability of a different psychic system for certain tasks.

We run into similar difficulties if we attempt to define ecstasy as “thought and behaviour which deviate from predominant notions of a society or group and are viewed as strange or abnormal”. Again, this definition is too broad because, for example, at an American university, it could apply to the expression of controversial arguments or even wearing highheeled shoes. On the other hand, this definition fails to account for the distinct characteristic of ecstasy by which it differs from other forms of deviant or pathological behaviour. Especially in cultures that we presume are most practised in ecstasy, ecstatic behaviour might be regarded as special, but by no means “abnormal” (in the sense of criminological or clinical definitions); and furthermore, it does not differ from the prevalent attitudes of the respective society or group. In contrast to our culture which views such behaviour as an individual pathology, the cultural notions and social roles (such as that of the shaman) in other cultures view ecstasy as an intentional and socially “acceptable” behaviour.

Along the same line, Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille tried to salvage the “sanctity of everyday life” in the 1930s and reclaim it for the political left. From a leftist perspective, they argued that it was essential to occasionally interrupt one’s mundane, goal-oriented routines that secure one’s existence in order to enjoy moments of celebration, generosity and wasting time, money, sleep, etc. Not only does this make people proud, independent beings who fear living a bad life more than death, but also strengthens their sense of solidarity, enabling them to see other people’s happiness as their own.

The line of demarcation defined by the French theorists of the Sacré quotidien seems astoundingly topical today. It points out a series of cultural microconflicts, e.g. whether or not to wish “Gesundheit” to someone who sneezes, or whether one should compliment a female colleague on her new hairdo or rather pretend not to notice at all. “Positive cults” in which individuals are encouraged to take initiative and be more generous, more elegant and friendlier than they might normally be, stands in contrast to “negative cults” of avoidance. Leiris, Bataille and their colleagues and comrades-in-arms from Contre-attaque and the Collège de sociologie du sacré would have known what was at stake here and taken sides. And not for what is erroneously purported to be reason or “civilisational process”, but rather for the small and greater ecstasies – the positive cults of sociability and self-determination.

Perhaps we should view both as two sides of one coin – that ecstasy enables people to achieve things that would hardly be possible in ordinary circumstances, and that in some cultures and in some situations, ecstasy represents an intended, even desired, behaviour. We could then say: people might be capa­ ble of something extraordinary because the society or group desires it of them or because they recognise it as something valuable. (An example of the shift from an “ecstasy-friendly” to an “ecstasy-hostile” attitude in our culture is the discussion often heard in the 1980s of whether social democracy needs new visions, or whether people who have visions need to see a doctor). The ecstatics in such cultures would be “outside” themselves, yet inside the group. In effect, ecstasy forms an “inner outside” in such cultures.

03 ECSTATIC CULTS AND CULTS OF AVOIDANCE What we have here is a difference between cultures like ours which demand an extensive degree of self-control from individuals, and those that not only demand less self-control, but actually demand the opposite, namely to set aside self-control for something considered more worthwhile. The difference between the condemnation and the appreciation of ecstasy, there­fore, is not one of rationality versus irrationality, but to a greater degree, one between conscious, individual self-control and less conscious, collective self-control. If people become less ecstatic, they don’t become more rational – they only become more stubborn and less inclined to support the common good.

Max Weber’s argument that the “disenchantment of the world” is not a process of the Enlightenment, but rather one of fanatic religious internalisation, points exactly in this direction.

Robert Pfaller, born in 1962, is a philosopher and professor of Cultural Studies and Cultural Theories at the University of Art and Design Linz. His most recent book Erwachsenensprache. Über ihr Verschwinden aus Politik und Kultur [Adult Language and Its Disappearance from Politics and Culture] was published by S. Fischer Verlag in 2017.

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Rules of Rapture E C S TASY AS AN ARTISTIC P ROC E S S

Questions for Jeremy Shaw What led you to more intensively explore the phenomena of ecstasy in your works?

I have been drawn to altered states in general from a very young age. At 6 or 7 years old, my friends and I used to hyperventilate and then choke ourselves until we passed out – coming back seconds later as if waking from a dream. I loved it.

These early experiences segued into a lot of further exploration of my own as I grew up, from dancing and drugs to meditation and sensory deprivation. As I began making art more seriously, my attention shifted from my own experiences to those of others and this seemingly universal quest for some kind of transcendence.

However people choose to go about searching for ecstasy, I am generally interested. I also became very interested in the scientific aspirations of mapping and explaining the phenomena. I find the grey area between the experience of altered states and their scientific quantification endlessly fascinating.

Dance and music are genres which most commonly evoke and depict ecstatic states.

What is the specific challenge for a fine artist in this regard?

For me, the challenge lies in creating something beyond a singular, representa­ tive position. I aim to push into the grey areas of the ecstatic, between the experience, its translation/depiction, the belief systems around it, and the scientific attempts at its quantification. This is why I end up working within a science fiction context a lot of the time. I feel that sci­ ence fiction gives me a neutral platform from which I can collate all these disparate elements of my interest into some kind of autonomous, non-hierarchical whole.

Religious ecstasies are largely a thing of the past in the enlightened Western world. In other cultures, however, they play a larger role. What effects could this have on an increasingly globalised world?

Although organized religion and its rituals may be waning in the West, there is definitely a movement towards other ways of attaining ecstatic states – many incorporating elements of Eastern spirituality in combination with other various esoteric, physical or psychological methods.

People seem to be searching out for their own conclusions these days, without the need of an overarching religious ethos.

Perhaps at some point we will come to a Transcendental experiences are so perso- more universal method – some alcheminal and subjective and internalized that cal combination of thousands of these the visual outcome on one’s appearance different methods that leads us all to an can be completely misleading. I suppose absolute infinite total ecstatic transcenthat some kind of register could be made dence. to chart between the type, or at least the extremity of an ecstatic state, but it would need to be very specific in the cause of the state to begin with and the many parameters that effect it. At this point it Jeremy Shaw, born in 1977, is origitime it would still have to rely heavily on nally from Canada and is now living the subjectivity of one’s recollection of in Berlin. His work focuses on the vithe experience itself – which would be tosual representation of rapture and ecstasy in videos, photos and artistic tally unreliable – but probably a very fun experiments that explore the psycheproject! delic effects of religion, dance and Do ecstatic states enable us to escape our drugs. social reality, or rather to “optimise” ourselves so that we can function better in that reality?

Ecstasy is a state that people either yearn for or fear because it’s associated with a loss of control. Is it possible to differentiate between ecstatic states, in that some people lose all sense of hearing and sight, while others experience heightened perception, that they hear and see more (or better) than in their normal state? Can you recognise this from one’s appearance?

I believe that they have the potential to do both, absolutely.

ALTERED STATES SUBSTANCES IN CONTEMPORARY ART Since the beginning of time, humans have occasionally ingested substances which have no nourishing effect. There are many reasons why people consume such substances: healing, intoxication, psychedelic experience, religious rituals, self-optimisation, protest and boredom. However, the purpose for ingesting them and the names we give them have changed over time. Their classification as pharmaceutical products, drugs, hor­ mones or doping substances often have less to do with their characteristics than with social background and economic interests.

This exhibition invites artists to explore the subject of substances in photography, video, sculpture, drawings, VR, installations and performances. Their artworks examine, among other things, the role of the dar­knet in global commerce, the ties between the military and the pharmaceutical industry, or the use of hormones in our society. The exhibition poses fundamental ethical questions concerning a free and self-determined life and the relationship between personal freedom and collective responsibility against the background of current medical research.

The Dresden artist Marten Schech has created an exhibition design which highlights the thematic and aesthetic relationships between the artistic positions. The associa­ tive starting point of the exhibition is the medieval alchemist’s laboratory where all key substances existed in one place.

The exhibition is accompanied by an inter­ national conference, organised by the Kunstpalais, where chemical, neurological and psychotherapeutic studies will be presented, and scientists and bioethicists will engage in discussion with legal and political scholars. The project includes a multifaceted programme of workshops, performances, a literary evening and guided tours for various ages. www.kunstpalais.de Artistic director: Milena Mercer Artists: Daniel García Andújar (ES), Cassils (CA), Rodney Graham (CA), Sidsel Meineche Hansen (DK), Carsten Höller (BE), Joachim Koester (DK), Joanna Rajkowska (PL), Marten Schech, Jeremy Shaw (CA), Suzanne Treister (GB), Mary Tsang (US) and others Kunstpalais Erlangen: 4 Mar. – 21 May 2018

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Questions for Carsten Höller

Do artists traditionally possess a particular affinity to rapture and ecstasy?

You have to imagine the first artists as being ritualists. This is the conclusion Robert Calasso proposes in his wonderful study Ardor, dedicated to Vedic culture as it existed 3,000 years ago in India. The Vedic sacrificial cult possessed a very pronounced relationship to ecstasy. The soma, a mysterious substance, was considered the mother of all intoxicants. If there is truly a close relationship between art, ecstasy and the ritualistic act, it does not mean that the sense of aesthetics arises from mere self-indulgence. Rather, the rapture builds within the ceremony which is filled with an endless number of instructions and rules which apply to the smallest detail. Art is both rapture and rules.

Are you more interested in enabling people to experience something outside social reality, or rather allowing them to step “outside themselves” in order to perceive themselves differently?

Without divestment, there’s no art. My works are forms of self-distancing which in ideal circumstances provide viewers with a different horizon of perception. This process shouldn’t be confused with some form of escape from reality. Only through distance, through rapture do we have the possibility of gaining new insight to both art and society.

Has the need to experience a “different state” become more urgent nowadays?

Most statistics indicate that the consumption of intoxicating substances among young people is falling everywhere in Eu­ rope. This means that drugs are not being used so often to achieve different states of consciousness. It could well be that technologies have now assumed this role. Re­ searchers have come to a general consensus that our presence in social media influences our neuronal reward system. Liking, sharing, chatting are the highs of the 21st century. It’s no reason to succumb to cultural pessimism, but this finding certainly provides ample material for art. What does it mean when small ecstatic explosions in our brain no longer depend on our immediate physical social environment, but rather shift to the space and time of the digital sphere?

More and more people are looking for a different reality – through drug consumption, extreme sports or pornographically induced desire. To what extent do these “lonely” forms of ecstasy reflect a retreat from social reality?

According to Michel Houellebecq in his 1996 essay “La fête” in the French youth magazine 20 ans, the aim of ecstatic experience is to take a holiday from oneself. In this way, we can forget – at least temporarily – our own mortality and the insur-

mountable feeling of loneliness which goes along with it. The view that contemporary forms of being “outside oneself” are exact­ ly what enables us to become better acquainted with our true selves, is rather difficult to square up with the original purpose of ecstasy. Perhaps from this point of view, we can better understand the remarkable rise of performance art. On one hand, it often highlights the suffering we experience from isolation, but on the other, in the process of jointly observing and understanding this isolation, it becomes community-building.

Do you fear or welcome social, mass-organised ecstasies?

The last great social rapture in Germany – but not only there – was entirely dominated by beats. The triumphant arrival of electronic music initially led to a relatively limited number of raves, morphed into mass festivals like the Love Parade which reached their climax at the end of the 1990s. What was amazing was how deeply this phenomenon divided the intellectual world and the art world. The one side claimed to recog­ nise an ominous echo of a dark past. Didn’t such drug-induced, music-fuelled cadences resemble the lockstep of military parades?

And didn’t the urge to become part of a homogenous mass hint at a nationalistic, if not fascistic, yearning? On top of that came the growing mistrust of the theory against pop culture which had long harboured an emancipatory potential when, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Neo-Nazis were seen wearing Public Enemy t-shirts. In hindsight, I would agree with those who recognised a utopian moment in the Love Parade: an ecstasy which not only tied East and West Germany in peaceful celebration, but also different social classes which have since become rather polarised and increasingly estranged.

This mass event was a place of encounter which no longer exists.

Questions by Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel

Carsten Höller, born in 1961, studied Agricultural Science and earned his habilitation in Phytopathology. During his time as a researcher, he began using experimentation as a process of artistic activity. Today he is one of world’s best-known object and installation artists whose works intentionally engage viewers by intensifying aesthetic perceptions and evoking emotional experiences. Höller lives in Germany, Sweden and Ghana.

ECSTASY IN ART, MUSIC AND DANCE Exhibition Ecstasy is one of the oldest and perhaps most fascinating anthropological ubiquitous phenomena.

Originally rooted in a ritualistic-religious context, the borderline experience of ecstasy was first described in antiquity. It is an integral component of initiation rites and, in more recent times, general social theories. And yet, its definition and significance have steadily changed and expanded over time. While ecstasy is attached to predominantly positive connotations in indigenous cultural spheres and is contextualised as part of ritualistic actions, it has a more threatening connotation in societies marked by industrialisation, globalisation and self-optimisation. In such cases, ecstasy is equated with a loss of control and the risk that individuals or collectives could run afoul of accepted norms. In terms of its cultural significance and complexity, ecstasy has entered the realm of the fine arts and forged extraordinary alliances with the disciplines of music and dance.

In fact, art curators have noticed growing interest in ecstatic experiences in contemporary art.

The exhibition “Ecstasy in Art, Music and Dance” is the first of its kind, devoted extensively to the phenomenon of ecstasy. Based on paradigmatic examples from the present day back to antiquity, the exhibition highlights the spiritual, political, psychological, social, sexual and aesthetic implications of euphoric and rapturous states between ascetism and excess.

Featuring over 50 international pieces of art, the exhibition examines this virulent, transcultural phenomenon. In nine theme-based rooms installed in the special exhibition area of the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, along with two installations within the collection, the project presents a diverse array of thematic facets, such as the Cult of Dionysus, the unio mystica, the Brazilian Candomblé and drug-induced ecstasy. With paintings, graphic art, video works, installations and a kinaesthetic room of experience, the exhibition explores states of ecstasy as rendered

by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francisco de Zurbarán, Lovis Corinth, Wifredo Lam, Marlene Dumas and Aura Rosenberg, among others. www.kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de Curators: Ulrike Groos, Markus Müller, Anne Vieth Artists: Gian Lorenzo Bernini (IT), Louise Bourgeois (FR/US), Lovis Corinth, Ayrson Heráclito (BR), Carsten Höller (BE), Marlene Dumas (ZA), Pablo Picasso (ES), Aura Rosenberg (US), Hanna Wilke (US), Francisco de Zurbarán (ES) and others Kunstmuseum Stuttgart: 29 Sep. 2018 – 24 Feb. 2019

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Exhaustion into Transcendence Hans Ulrich Obrist: Ecstasy, transcendence and endurance are fascinating themes because, as I see it, they evoke an image of art being a portal you have to pass through. It’s an important topic for many younger artists, and you’ve been working on it for a long time. But before we get to that, let me ask you how it all began. How did you arrive at dance and choreography – was it a kind of epiphany?

Meg Stuart: I grew up in a theatre, and I think that certainly played a big role. Both my parents are theatre directors.

Having the chance to see so many plays, watch dancers and actors up close, made an impression on me. But somehow, I didn’t want to act, to play a character, I simply wanted to be myself. I didn’t know what this “self” was, or whether there were multiple “selves”, but there was always that wish. First, I got into sports, like running track; the physical aspect was important.

Then I started getting more involved in dance, and at some point, I let the running go. Then I took a dance class in high school which was not about learning to imitate other people’s movements – though I did that, too – but rather choreography.

I did dancer studies – standing, sitting, lying – looking carefully at each part of the body, breaking it down piece by piece. That’s when I started coming up with dances without really knowing how to dance. I didn’t have a technique that I’d eventually have to discard later on. First, I had to build a structure and technique around me in order to realise the things I imagined. When I was young, I tried out alternative techniques, but I also studied the “modern masters” – Cunningham, Graham, Limón. I don’t know if you can call that an epiphany, but that’s how I started.

HUO You originally come from New Orleans …

MS Yes, I am from New Orleans but my first breakthrough as an artist happened at the Klapstuk festival in Belgium when I was 26 with the work Disfigure Study. Up until then I had been working years on various short studies in New York and these explorations came together in Disfigure Study (1991). It was this first evening piece that launched me into the scene in Europe.

HUO I asked about New Orleans because I recently spoke with the

singer and musician Solange [Knowles] and the director Alan Ferguson, both of whom live in New Orleans. They told me that New Orleans is so spiritual that it radiates something transcendental and the people there relate to one another in a very special way.

MS

I was quite young when I left New Orleans. I can remember the hurricanes and Mardi Gras, but not much more than that.

When my mother started working at CalArts, [California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles], I would wander the halls of the institute, watch Ravi Shankar play [editor’s note: Ravi Shankar, Indian musician and composer, appointed professor of Indian Music at CalArts in 1970], see the art exhibitions held at CalArts in the seventies and the dance performances there. All these different art practices in one space – I’m sure it influenced me. My parents often took me to classical concerts. When­ ever I closed my eyes and listened to the music, I’d imagine people dancing and moving. I created my own little world, a space where I could control things.

HUO It seems you really found your own “language” in Belgium.

One of your first pieces that came to my attention was No Longer Readymade (1993) – a piece that deeply resonated with the art world. Can you tell us something about what went into No Longer Readymade?

MS

It was my second piece, and maybe it was born out of crisis.

Creating a second work while on tour with the first, getting a lot of attention very fast, being pulled out of New York and diving into the European festival scene – that was a lot to handle at one time. The centrepiece of this work is a solo. I’m digging through the trash in my pockets, pulling out receipts, coins and whatnot, spilling the detritus of life onto the floor.

Then I take off my clothes, a men’s suit, a women’s suit and my dress ... and I hang them from my arms on two hangers and then start walking on my face with my Doc Martens. And that’s when I asked myself, is this enough for you? What do you expect from this? My previous piece Disfigure Study was like a long research project on distortion and fragmenting the body and playing with physicality and light. But this was an entirely new approach to the question “Here I am, what now?” It was the

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H A NS ULRICH OBRIST

TA LK S TO T H E CHOR EOGR A PH ER M EG STUA RT

A BOU T R I TUA LS, I M PROV ISAT ION AND ECSTASY

first time I studied physical and emotional states. The piece opens with a dancer, Benoît Lachambre, shaking his head violently for about four and a half minutes and then gesturing feverishly. Then he starts shaking and does the whole thing in reverse. He’s completely out of control, he’s blurring like in a Bruce-Nauman-video. He’s pushing himself to the limit yet continues articulating in this frenzy. When we started rehearsing the piece, he vomited in the studio. Only after several rehearsals was he able to perform it. It was the first time I was interested in fever and sweat – could this be a “language”?

How do we use these kinds of involuntary physical responses as dance material? It was then that I integrated physical and emotional states into the choreography.

HUO This piece seems to go beyond the rational; there are irrational forces that come into play. Andrei Tarkowski once said that we need to re-introduce rituals because they have disappeared from the modern world. It’s interesting that ecstasy is regarded as something positive in indigenous cultures and in ritualistic contexts. But in capitalism and in our globalised world, it’s somehow taken on a negative connotation. In your work it clearly has a positive connotation. I was wondering about when the subject of ecstasy entered your work. When you started, it must have been quite unusual, right?

MS

From a Western perspective, I think rituals are things we do out of habit, if not by choice. But we’re constantly occupied with such rituals. We create them for ourselves, we’re forced to participate in those of others, rituals are all around us. So, it’s about acknowledging them, and also reinventing them. Rituals are a series of intention-driven actions, just like with magic. Your actions have a certain intention, and you expect a certain outcome. Going to the theatre is a ritual as well. I don’t know how I came to introduce that. I think I’m receptive to energies or streams of energy that are not only my own. We know that everything is influencing our nervous system and our electromagnetic field. Every day we’re influenced by what we see, our consciousness is inundated with information. The question is, how do we deal with it, how do we purge ourselves of it, what thoughts are our own and which are not, and how do we work with these forces?

HUO You talked about rituals, but I’m curious about the notion of ecstasy. To a certain degree, improvisation is present in all your works. As you mentioned about your second piece, No Longer Readymade, improvisation was a gateway to all these different states and sometimes ecstatic states …

MS Exactly …

HUO Then let’s talk about improvisation and ecstasy.

MS One inspiration for my last piece Celestial Sorrow (2018) was the very repetitive music of a Jathilan ritual I saw in Indonesia. It was a remarkable performance on the outskirts of Yogyakarta.

The dancers performed very simple, 20-minute ritualised movements with their arms. Suddenly they seemed possessed and fell into a trance ... and it wasn’t clear if it was real or not, or self-induced. Some things happened in front of you, and other things backstage. The dancers would take off their costumes and come back in something more pedestrian. There was such absolute chaos that no one knew what was part of the performance and what wasn’t. Was it all just preparation for that moment of release, the freeing of these dark energies?

I found it all very contemporary and very complex. So we started crafting our own version together with two musicians.

The dancers also go through a kind of trance. I think we all want to escape the reality of our daily lives. We all want to feel that we merge with something else, that we overcome the borders between us and the others. We can take drugs or get high on music and repetition, or lock ourselves in a room and concentrate on our own breathing ... I think we all have that wish to work on higher realms, to have a more singular focus, to be less absent-minded and distracted.

HUO When I was London I saw your piece Until Our Hearts Stop (2015), which I thought was very impressive. It also had to do with this very different state. As in your earlier pieces, you often focus on the notion of exhaustion and how exhaustion can lead to a transcendental state ...

MS

... or to a nervous breakdown (laughs). Actually, I think we sometimes like being exhausted. I think exhaustion gives us the feeling of being in the here and now, it’s our neoliberal mode, this idea that we’re always working. It’s also about working through the exhaustion in order to achieve a higher state of consciousness where more subtle frequencies resonate. Exhaustion is either a wish or a problem, but it can also be a strategy – a strategy of art-making. You tell someone: look at this, now look at it again, and again ... no, this image is not finished yet. This intensity, this obsession, to overstretch time, to force people to be hyper-present – that’s what I see as the responsibility of art right now. Insisting on being accountable for where we are.

HUO Improvisation was a theme we both explored in Laboratorium – our first collaboration in 1999. It’s a work that is seldom discussed anymore. I’d be interested in hearing your recollection of it.

10 MS

Laboratorium was an incredibly imprecise study that examined the relationship of performance and research, science and research, and art and research. It was the basis for an improvisation, the last piece of a longer project titled Crash Landing, which I put on in Moscow in 1999. We were lots of artists, many of whom were Russians, and the space we chose was way too small for all of us – it was rather uncomfortable. The work was about the future, about the body of the future, and how we see ourselves in the future. Each performer could suggest things. There was nobody saying, “but this is my project”. We were not concerned with individual authorship, but rather a collective working method where everything was mixed, alliances were formed and questions were jointly investigated ...

Looking back, I can see it as quite radical in its haphazard methodology of insisting on collaborative encounter through improvisational performance, considering the invitation and the context.

HUO It was also about demarcation – between the stage and the world, if you will ... It wasn’t very clear where the stage began and where it stopped, of even if there was a stage ... The young Tino Sehgal was also there as a student – that was when he was still dancing and working with Xavier [editor’s note: French choreographer Xavier Le Roy]. I told him that I’d be doing an interview with you and he sent me a question to ask you this morning: Where do you see a demarcation between dance which is meant to be performed, and ritualistic practices like those of the shamans or Shakers which occur off stage?

MS

Dance that is meant to be performed is about a set of principles or proposals that is shared with an audience. Shamanistic practice and rituals are grounded on service and intention.

Shamans with spirit guides dive into other worlds to heal members of society. This is a service for the community. People go clubbing every weekend, an improvised dance ritual, in search of connection and release and ecstatic shared moments.

It is clear that the codes of behaviour are very narrow even in places like Berghain and I can imagine there will be more and more hybrid undefined open spaces in the future for sharing, voicing, releasing and dancing as strategies of survival and healing. I am hoping that the Tanzkongress in Dresden can be such a lively, unconventional space for collective action and shared intention. We are going to create a five-day gathering, somehow intricately and magically composed, that functions as a social choreography for meeting, exchange, conflict and transformation. A rave deconstructed and other variations of social dancing and encounter are essential to this meeting concept. The rave format in the Tanzkongress would commence early in the morning in that massive hall of Hellerau. A charged political space in the daytime with the removal of the trope of nightlife. It would be a space where people could express themselves freely thanks to a different kind of receptivity. So, in this huge cavern of space, I want to create some­ thing fluid that shifts the pace so that eventually the music slows down, breaks down and another space of listening and presence emerges.

HUO Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, who came up with the Fun Palace in the 1960s, also described this idea of having moments of noise and silence. Suddenly the rave would fall silent – a rupture from fast to slow. So I love your idea. In 2002, Hortensia Völckers got me involved while they were mapping the future of the Federal Cultural Foundation. It was a utopian undertaking which she worked to make come true. And to this day, the Foundation still possesses this utopian vein. The Tanzkongress is also a kind of utopian undertaking. There weren’t many congresses of this scope and magnitude – in the Weimar Republic in 1927, 1928 and 1930. What kind of rituals are you planning for the Tanzkongress?

MS

I’m quite interested in the Monte Verità gathering in Switzerland in 1917 where spiritualists, anarchists and artists came together on the mountain to discuss and share alternative ways of living. In the first Tanzkongress (1927) the dance artists were passionately arguing and looking for definitions that would be unthinkable nowadays like what is dance, what a dancer should be, what is the purpose of dance now? They also describe a le-

gendary party where the whole congress came together at the end. I would have loved to witness that. I’m very interested in the social dimension of dance, dance history, sacred dances, contemplative scores and visualizations, martial arts. What’s important to me is that dance isn’t merely the warm-up for the discourse part, but that both are integrated into the same format. As a curator, what advice would you give me?

HUO In 2005 when I was working on the “Theater der Welt” festival in Stuttgart, I had initially planned to do an interview project for the stage, a kind of marathon. In the beginning, it was just me interviewing people for 24 hours, but that got lonely after a while, so I invited Rem Koolhaas to join me. Little by little, it became more of a hybrid format with performances, talks, etc. The interesting thing about your idea, of course, is that people would come to listen to a neuroscientist talk and then see a contemporary artist. Or they come to see the artist but would also hear what an architect had to say. This can help break down professional ghettos and avoid having only dance professionals attend. Right now I’m exploring the phenomenon of dance manias, also known as choreomania or St. Vitus’s Dance which occurred in Europe in the 14th and 15th century.

It was a social phenomenon when ordinary people in cities – not professional dancers – would dance and dance until they collapsed from exhaustion. There was an outbreak in 1374 in Aachen. Wouldn’t it be amazing if a dancing mania broke out in Dresden?

MS

… Or debate mania! When I shift into different states of con­ sciousness very quickly or turn my attention from the moment, I feel I’m bending the laws of time and space, I’m moving through dimensions. I feel there’s a solid truth you can arrive at through physical practice. Dancers know this, but it needs to be acknowledged in other areas – how certain movements can impact our consciousness. In Hellerau, there’s this big garden in the back, and I hope we can use it to create some common rituals, cook together, engage in other forms of exchange.

HUO Well, it appeals to all the senses. Margaret Mead once said that we need rituals that appeal to all the senses. I recently read a text by Dorothea von Hantelmann where she asked: What form of ritual corresponds to the life, the social structure of the early 21st century? How collective, how individualised, how rigid, how open, how liberal should such a structure be?

That seems to have some relevance for Dresden.

MS

There will definitely be various forms of coming together and celebrating, but also coming together and mourning. Dresden won’t be a five-day party. The congress has a dramaturgy that covers a wide range of aspects and provides space for meditation and movement, but also discussions about non-violent communication, or social justice or the power of intention.

HUO There’s so much violence and xenophobia in Dresden right now.

It has made me think of your work Alibi (2001) which explores themes of fanaticism and violence. In an interview you described how shocked you were, moving from New York to Brussels and suddenly being in a place where people don’t speak English as their native language. What’s especially interesting is that the Dance Congress has the potential to connect with the population. Brecht talked about creating an “epic” theatre for the mas­ ses. Perhaps one could extend Brecht’s theories to dance and see whether it could change the city. Maybe you could change Dresden.

MS

Maybe. I just heard about this German-Syrian artist Manaf Halbouni who erected three buses in front of the Dresden Frauenkirche. I would very much like to have a dialogue with the Dresden scene. I’ll also be teaching a workshop at the Palucca University of Dance and the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden (Hf BK).

11 HUO Would you say your works are political?

MS

When you’re working with policymakers to put on the Tanzkongress, it’s a very different type of collaboration, and a different type of visibility. I often talk about ethics and responsibility. Violet (2011) is a completely abstract piece that explores energetic patterns in nature. It features five dancers with five platonic bodies. It was made at the time of the Arab Spring and the tsunami in Japan, and I asked myself: What causes change?

At what moment is there a radical shift in thinking and how do we handle it? Frankly it was a response to exhaustion: I don’t have enough energy for this ... Normally you have all the time in the world for abstraction, it is something cold and detached.

You work with lines, forces, geometries, but here we were working with abstract movements under stress in a charged heated atmosphere. There was an urgency and a call. That is why it felt extremely political. For many years and in different contexts I have created and held space for artists, musicians and dancers to exchange and meet. In Sketches/Notebook (2013) the dancers were on equal ground with the visual artists and musician. Questions and ideas were exchanged through shared actions and simply by sharing a working space together. I aim to create a dynamic working space of encounter for the extended dance community at the Tanzkongress.

HUO Sketches/Notebook leads me to my last question. I started a project on Instagram which has to do with sketches and notebooks. Personally, I find it appalling that handwriting and doodling is disappearing. So I decided to ask every artist at the end of an interview to write or sketch something that I can post on Instagram – a sentence, motto, a quote. So now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to ask you for a doodle …

Meg Stuart, born in 1965 in New Orleans (USA), is a dancer and internationally acclaimed choreographer. This year she received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for her life’s work in recognition of her outstanding role in the development of contemporary dance. The Federal Cultural Foundation was fortunate to have Meg Stuart accept the post of artistic director of the triennial Tanzkongress, scheduled to take place in Dresden in 2019. Meg Stuart lives and works in Berlin and Brussels.

Hans U ­ lrich Obrist, born in 1968 in Weinfelden (Switzerland), is a curator for contemporary art. He is known around the world as one of the most influential fig­ ures in the art scene. Since 2016, he has served as artistic director of the renowned Serpentine Gallery in London.

For over 15 years, Obrist has been working on his “Interview Project” for which he has conducted numerous interviews with artists, musicians, architects and filmmakers. The (abridged) interview above with choreographer Meg Stuart had been one of his long-held wishes.

Hello World ON REV I SI NG T HE C O L L E C T IO N AT TH E N E U E N EU E NAT IO NA LGA L E R IE , BERL I N

A photo essay by Udo Kittelmann

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Š Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Photographs: David von Becker

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Senseless – With Good Reason A RT O R F O L K L O R E ? W H Y V I C T O R VA S A R E LY ’ S P I C T U R E S H AV E B E E N U N J U S T LY R E L E G AT E D T O T H E T R A S H Y C O R N E R S O F A RT M U S E U M S. A R E H A B I L I TAT I O N.

Hans-Joachim Müller

Leafing through his old catalogues, listening to the quiet crackle of the glossy pages peeling apart, it feels like an old movie. The tired colours. The distant sound.

The hiss of history. Does anyone still remember the story of Victor Vasarely? He had once been a star of the art salons in the post-war decades. Celebrated like Bernard Buffet. But without the sad clowns. How he enchanted us with optical tricks! With colours so persuasive like the traffic lights at an intersection. Those mysteriously moving patterns of right angles and straight lines and curves sketched with such precision would make you want to hide your old school notebooks with all those failed parabolas and hyperbolas in shame.

Vasarely’s pictures have long been hidden away.

Some­how it would be embarrassing to have them displayed in the collections of contemporary art. Disquieting memories of a bottomless stock market crash. Our fathers’ and mothers’ blue chips which every documenta in Kassel had put its money on until the mid-1960s. Those times are long gone. And it sounds like ancestral mythmaking when people recall standing in front of these pictures as if they were revelations of the most dazzling clarity.

The fact that illusionism is not the result of the old game of visual make-believe, but rather precise geometric calculation, transparent construction, was a libera­ tion from the magic of mimesis. And this seemed to fully square with our contemporary expectations of the image when we discovered the spherical impression at the centre of a field of squares, knowing that it was solely caused by how we perceive the world, and that we had no choice but to visualise a spherical apparition when presented with the corresponding pattern of lines and arrangement of colours.

Everybody knows that the image is absolutely flat, and there is no hidden ball bulging below the canvas. And yet, there is no way to perceive it otherwise. You see how the picture inflates. And when you come back to it later, it still inflates just like before. And what else do we want from painting? It was like completely sensualised rationality – as if reason had finally arrived at the arts and the

amazement had become intelligible. Apparently, the aes­ thetic pleasure could also be achieved just as well with the enlightened means of mathematically precise pictorial strategies.

They came up with the term “Op Art”. It never really made complete sense, especially if we try to imagine the opposite, a non-optical art, but it established itself none­ theless and served as an index of contemporary artistic understanding for an entire era. And one of the factions of the “Op Art” movement was the “kineticists” – a group who set out to put some legs on the age-old static image. And that’s just how it is – things are in motion though nothing is moving. If we sweep our eyes across a Vasarely picture from the kinetic group, the colours and forms begin to flutter like the lamella of a curtain. A fascinatingly contemporary experience in a time which was thoroughly delighted by its advancing acceleration. Finally, pictures that fit the times, free of scientific scepticism, with which painting had forever acknowledged its lack of technical competence. And when the moon landing was broadcast on the first television at home in 1969, Victor Vasarely could have cut as good a figure as any expert in the control room at Cape Canaveral.

In fact, Vasarely was the first to win over a large audience, applying a universalist concept of art that delivers all sensual surprises through calculus and rules. In his ingenious works, abstract art – which the public had come to view as one long chain of visual labours, had finally achieved its long-desired plausibility. It was no longer necessary to ask what it was “supposed” to mean.

No one had to fear that the trembling of the colours and forms could taper off. The picture on the wall remained free of wear and tear like a new couch corner.

And in contrast to many contemporaries of constructive art whose crisply outlined squares were akin to images of infinity, Vasarely’s Op Art was free of all metaphysical suspicion. Although the master certainly penned his share of profundities: “The definition of the unity of ‘form-colour’ led me to a combined-objective method in sculpting which has universal validity. I call it ‘planetary

25 folklore.’” Which, of course, when viewed from a combined-objective perspective, is not so easy to understand.

But he was right in calling it “planetary folklore”. During the decade of Vasarely’s triumph, there was no other work which so manifestly affirmed the old phantasms of modernism using the global language of art. Because there is nothing really in these pictures to understand, they have been understood universally.

Art has never gone long without interpretation. There had to be something concealed behind those mysterious symbols and gestures. And even when everything seems clear and unambiguous like the 32 Campbell’s soup cans that Andy Warhol painted on canvas, people are reluctant to forego the pedagogical handout. Very unlikely that the painter was merely interested in the circumstances of painting. With Vasarely, the liberation from the diktat of interpretation finally succeeded. And at the same time, the fulfilment of a cultural democratic utopia. Even without academic credentials and without having taken a course on artistic observation, the contorted squares bulge toward us like a graphic beer belly.

And there is no contradiction in the fact that the work possesses its meticulously conceived structure. I personally met the artist in 1976 at the opening of his “Fondation” in Aix-en-Provence where we spent a late summer day relaxing on the lawn at the edge of an artificial pond. I found him to be an educated man who could lead you through his world of ideas so eloquently that you’d swear by the end that here was one who had finally hit upon the world formula. And if one takes the time to read Werner Spies’s major Vasarely monography of 1971 – arguably the most thorough study of his works to this day – it occasionally feels like entering a research institute where one lab door after another is opened to you.

There is the “Permutation” and the “Hommage à l’hexagone”, the “Denfert Period” and the “Gordes-Cristal Period”. Astounding order and discipline predominated throughout the decades. And in contrast to the communal artist narrative which tends to portray the creative mind as an incoherent madcap, Victor Vasarely brought light and logic into the business and would not tolerate impassioned paint smearing in his pictures.

It is worth noting that these images, sculptures and reliefs garnered their greatest success at a time when the presumably popular Pop Art from America was shocking audiences with its obvious lack of depth, and the informal gestural painting, which had long dominated in Europe, was sleeping off its most recent buzz, and the only ones who actually enjoyed the trendy happenings and Fluxus spectacles considered themselves belonging to the avant-garde elite. Vasarely’s was People’s Art in the best sense of the word. And his widely disseminated graphic creations – at times, marked by sublime simplicity, and others, intricate as Sudoku for experts – have probably done as much to influence the taste of socialised, reform-minded citizens as the do-it-yourself furniture from the IKEA stores.

Perhaps the Vasarely hype that existed at one time also has something to do with the fate of the Bauhaus.

The former teachers with their functionalistic and new-objective programme had all been forced to emigrate. Their austere views on design especially flourished in Latin America. And what came back to Germany possessed little of the didactics of perception which the Bauhaus masters had explored in the arts and crafts in the 1920s.

The “good form”, as scholars designated avant-garde design in the 1950s, remained confined to progressive circles. And constructivist painting, whose principal representatives comprised the Zurich concretists, was nothing more than a special case of abstract art. An expression of a purist snobbishness which never truly conquered the hearts of the viewers. While we may eventually succumb to boredom by Max Bill’s endless gold-bronze ribbon no matter which way we tilt our heads, Vasarely’s images with their vibrating colours and serial dynamics always provide cultivated entertainment – and have exported L‘Esprit de la France more popularly than a master of all classes like Picasso.

Vasarely, who was born in Hungary and only moved to Paris in 1930 where he worked as a commercial artist, has always been considered a French artist who seemed

completely untouched by his country’s surreal legacy, untouched by the priestly gestures of informal painting, yet also wonderfully detached from the imperial grandiosity of American abstract Expressionism. His art possessed something recognisably practical to life and had no need for echo chambers in which images became sacrosanct.

Which doesn’t contradict the fact that there was a Vasarely before Vasarely. Academic attempts with obliging trompe-l’œil effects, figurative works, a Martian, a self-portrait as stiff as a rough-hewn chess pawn. The loosening of those non-representational colours only started appearing in the late 1940s.

Today it wouldn’t be too late to loosen up the Vasarely ban. As it is, one doesn’t visit it so often. But if you ever feel daring and disembark at the “Juridicum” subway station in Bonn, and you march up the stairs to the vaunted specialist library of the Faculty of Law, you’ll find yourself standing before a wall relief which spans the entire space over the entranceway. As you get closer, it begins to look like a gigantically enlarged web pattern. But you shouldn’t settle for this first impression. Werner Spies discovered the point in the “permutability of the basic form”, i.e. “Each component (each letter) could be removed and inserted in a different place.” Conceptually, of course. Preconceptually, gazing upon the shimmering black and white hatchings, it’s enough to say you had a veritable Vasarely experience. The time has come to remove the many other hidden images from storage.

Hans-Joachim Müller, born in 1947, worked as an art critic for many years for the features section of Die Zeit, and most recently, was the features editor of the Basler Zeitung. He regularly writes for the Welt am Sonntag and is the chief editor of the art magazine Blau. His publications include monographs on Harald Szeemann (Hatje Cantz, 2006) and the art collector Ernst Beyeler (Opinio Verlag, 2011).

VICTOR VASARELY IN THE LABYRINTH OF MODERNISM In 2018/19, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, known for its collection of masterpieces created over 700 years of European art history, is now highlighting the modernist era with a large retrospec­tive on Victor Vasarely (*1906 in Pécs, Hungary, †1997 in Annetsur-Marne, France). Vasarely’s oeuvre forms a link between works of modernism and contemporary trends, spanning a period of more than six decades starting between the world wars and ending at the avant-garde of postmodernism. Vasarely was an advertising designer, an artist, inventor, chief proponent of European Op Art, and a central figure of French post-war art with Hungarian roots. Today, he is arguably the “most famous unknown” European artist of the post-war era. Vasarely and his convoluted, oscillating, hypnotical images, objects and sculptures are emblematic for the multifaceted, vibrant modernist trends of the 1960s and 1970s, positioned between the avant-garde and popular culture.

Art experts and the public will have the opportunity to view 120 works by Vasarely in Frankfurt spanning more than sixty years, which illustrate how he successively dissolved the boundary between high and low art, and popular and modernist forms. Not only does the exhibition reveal a completely different and profoundly complex artist, but more significantly, it presents a new history of the “modernist project” which extended throughout the entire 20 th century.

Organised in cooperation with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the exhibition “Victor Vasarely − In the Labyrinth of Modernism” presents a broad overview of Vasarely’s oeuvre thanks to numerous loans from European and American collections.

These are supplemented by pieces owned by the Centre Pompidou and loans provided by Michele Vasarely, whose extensive collection has not been publicly displayed in Europe for two decades. www.staedelmuseum.de Curators: Martin Engler, Jana Baumann Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main: 26 Sep. 2018 – 13 Jan. 2019

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Minimal Form, Maximum Impact T H E WO R LD I S R E D I SCOV ER I N G J U L I U S EA STM A N, T H E M U SI CI A N A N D CO M PO S ER .

A S A N A RTI ST, H E N E V ER D EV I ATED F ROM H I S PATH – E VE N W H EN I T LED H I M A STR AY

Jasmina Al-Qaisi Repetitions, sobbing violins, elegance, indispensable confusion, joy, sacred words, bells, a tremble, authenticity, the grace of the piano, energy, urgency, sweat, delirium, enchanting surprises and sometimes the horror of a life spent too quickly.

The repetitions of the avant-garde composer Julius Eastman (27 October 1940 – 28 May 1990), of which no commercial recordings were made during his lifetime, are like inci­ sions of a scalpel through contemporary music history.

Repetitions which offer us a profound understanding of music as a biographical form of experience and which are so complex that they serve as an endless source of inspiration for musicians today.

In order to talk about Eastman’s life, we must rely on speculations, presumptions and a composite of incomplete information. Despite the brilliance of his music and his undisputed contribution to recent music history, very few are familiar with Julius Eastman. Everything that we know about him today was learned by those who recognised his significance early on.

Eastman grew up in Ithaca, New York, he first showed interest in singing and then piano, later started composing and conducting works by other composers, and even performed as a dancer. He studied piano and then composition at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, one of the most renowned conservatories in the world. In his late twenties, he joined the Creative Associates, a leading experimental music group at the University of Buffalo in New York. At that time, he was one of the very few people of colour who had gained access to the circles of New Music.

In the mid-1970s, Eastman turned his attention to jazz and moved to New York City where he spent his most productive years; he performed with such outstanding musicians as Arthur Russell, Meredith Monk and Peter Zummo in wellknown concert halls, but also in discos. After leaving the University of Buffalo and having fewer musicians around with whom he could collaborate, he had no choice but to write pieces for himself that he could perform on his own. And he adapted. In an interview with David Garland in 1984, he said, “The piano is like a small calculator. If I don’t have a calculator, I tend to make the music a bit simpler.”

Eastman’s death came tragically early. He spent his final years living in homeless shelters and parks. Little else is known about this time. His friends and colleagues report seeing him in poor physical and mental condition, he had lost all interest in his musical career. In another interview in 1984, he confessed he was more interested in love than in music.

When he was evicted from his house in the East Village and all his possessions were tossed onto the street, he apparently didn’t even bother to salvage anything. Instead he wrote and shared his compositions as a self-proclaimed “city monk”.

This nomadic existence has made it practically impossi­ble to gain access to his works. When the American composer Mary Jane Leach started researching his compositions, she quickly discovered that there were hardly any traces to be found. She began a search expedition. In 2005, a three-part CD compilation entitled Unjust Malaise, featuring his most important works, was published and made publicly available via YouTube.

Those who listen to Unjust Malaise should take the time to read the commentaries under the YouTube videos where other listeners share their reactions to the power of Eastman’s overall sound. Many of them note his lack of prominence and describe him as a discovery. Others complain of never having heard about him at university and pity him as a god who died in misery.

There are several compelling reasons to listen to Eastman’s work one more time. He created music which had a “minimal form, but maximum impact”. His expressive force went far beyond pure minimalism – beyond the non-dramatic, or more precisely, the lack of a narrative, of a hierarchy which creates the impression that all of the notes have the chance to share the climax.

Eastman once said, “I usually write imaginary music but the things I sing are spontaneous.” If we place this statement in the context of “black performance” which “has always been the ongoing improvisation of a kind of lyricism (...) Blurred, dying life; liberatory, improvisatory; damaged love; freedom drive”, as Fred Moten poetically described it, we are very close to uncovering the secret of Eastman’s music. It is not merely improvisation, but an ad libitum without a past and future.

Some are now discovering Julius Eastman as an activist.

The titles of his diverse piano pieces shed light on his efforts to change the existing living and working conditions of black people. Dirty Nigger, Nigger Faggot (or NF), Crazy Nigger (1978) and Evil Nigger (1979) are not only music titles, but chapters of black and gay empowerment. Identity politics and spirituality are interwoven in his music and become narrative tools; they exist and reverberate in a language all their own. A work like Gay Guerrilla demonstrates how undefined the boundary can be between art and life, the mundane and the sacred, inspiration and the composition. As Julius Eastman once quipped about his titles: “either I glorify them or they glorify me”.

This sentence – so it seems – applies to the entire oeuvre of this extraordinary musician.

WE HAVE DELIVERED OURSELVES FROM THE TONAL – OF, WITH ­TOWARDS, ON JULIUS EASTMAN Exhibition, symposium, live performances The African-American composer, musician and performer Julius Eastman (1940–1990) was a leading figure of American minimal music of the 1970s and 1980s. Following his premature death, he was quickly forgotten, but as of late people have been rediscovering his works. The joint project “We Have Deliv­ ered Ourselves from the Tonal” comprises various formats which pay tribute to Eastman’s musical genius and personality.

It investigates Eastman’s visionary musical concept that combines repetition with improvisation, and examines the social context in which the artist worked. Eastman had always regarded his work as a medium for addressing socio-political, economic and religious themes, gender issues, sexuality and racism.

Musicians, fine artists, performers and scholars will meet to discuss Eastman’s legacy and reassess its significance for the development of contemporary music. Selected participants have been commissioned to develop their own artistic and theoretical perspectives on works such as “Gay Guerrilla”, “Our Father” and “The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc”.

The exhibition by SAVVY Contemporary will present the results of the project along with handwritten scores, concert recordings, listening stations and private photos which offer a very personal view of the life and works of Julius Eastman. The MaerzMusik Festival 2018 will open with one of Eastman’s compositions for four pianos. The project also plans to stage an international symposium in Vienna on the themes of atonality and New Music.

A project by SAVVY Contemporary in cooperation with the MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin and the Wiener Festwochen. www.savvy-contemporary.com

Jasmina Al-Qaisi, born in 1991, is an ethnologist, correspondent and author. She lives in Bucharest and Berlin. She is currently producing a series of radio plays from the archive of the SAVVY Contemporary project venue.

Artists: Hassan Khan (EG), Annika Kahrs, Barthélémy Toguo (CM/FR), The Otolith Group (UK/DE), Okwui Okpokwasili (NG, US) Savvy Contemporary e.V., Berlin / Vienna: 1 Mar. – 31 Oct. 2018

27

Unknown Bauhaus THE BAUHAUS AS A SCHOOL OF WORD ART AND LINGUISTIC REJUVENATION

Torsten Blume

BAUHAUS is a one-word poem comprised of two one-syllable words in which the vowel combination of A and U creates the dominant diphthong AU. Pronounced quickly and forcefully, it sounds a bit like the gruff bark of a dog. Articulated slowly and gently, a deep sound resonates, rising slightly before plunging and then fading into a voiceless fricative. But when each syllable is emphasised by itself, the word loses the impression of meaninglessness. Each syllable becomes its own word: Bau (building, construction) and Haus (house): “Bau” as the abbreviated nominalisation of the verb “bauen” (to build), as likewise is “Haus” with respect to the verb “hausen” (to house). Whereby BAUHAUS could possibly refer to an earlier version of a poem with an obviously imperative character, like: “baue Haus” (build house). In this sense, BAUHAUS could be interpreted as the radically condensed form of an original statement that might have read: “Bauen wir ein Haus!” (Let’s build a house!) or “Hausen wir im Bau!” (Let’s house in the building!). That would lead to the creation of “Bauhausen” with its archaic or animalistic associations of inhabiting a den of the kind that animals live in. We could also imagine sentences like “Bauen für das Hausen” (building for housing). With regard to word-art theory of the kind propagated by the writer and gallery owner Herwarth Walden, publisher of the magazine Der Sturm, since 1919, such sentences like “Hauen wir einen Baus!” (Let’s dig a den!) or Bausen im Hausen saust (Bausen in Hausen buzzes) could certainly have existed at one time. For word artists do not narrate and describe, they form words rhyth­ mically as single and mutually resonating energies whose medium is the poet.

Few have endeavoured to examine the Bauhaus as a school of linguistic rejuvenation and view the “Bauhäusler” as poets (with the exception of poetry by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky). However, it’s obvious that this holistically oriented school attracted a diverse range of artistic talent, including numerous poets and writers. A plethora of material lies hidden away or forgotten – much unjustifiably so – in the estates and archives of the former Bauhäusler.

In the 1920s, there was hardly an avant-garde journal in Germany and Europe that didn’t feature poems. For in poetry and language art, one could often better express the multifaceted and ambivalent nature of nascency, the vague presentiments of what was coming, than with pictures and programmes. This was why Walden regarded ‘word art’ (Wortkunst) as a key discipline for the free development of the mind.

He held that words possessed a basic, aesthetic, intrinsic signifi­cance beyond their assigned terminology. Walden strived to achieve nothing less than a global turn (Weltwende) toward a holistic version of the ‘New Man’, which Expressionism would prepare for in the form of an artistic turn (Kunstwende). This vision also influenced the early Bauhaus. When Walter Gropius founded this school of avant-gardists in 1919, the State Bauhaus in Weimar, and entered the word “BAUHAUS” in the registry, he signified the poetic manifestation of the

advent of the modernist age. Not only was it a reference to Der Sturm and its programme, it practically embodied it.

Before Gropius enthusiastically settled on the name BAUHAUS in 1919, he had been playing with variations of the word since 1918, like Baurunde (building circle) and Bauloge (building guild). His experience of World War I had shaken his convictions to the core. He searched for an impressive and poignant word for what he envisioned as a radical new beginning of collaboration between all arts and artists in the future – the same way the Gothic cathedrals were constructed by the medieval masons’ lodges where artists at all levels worked in close personal contact. This community would include painters, sculptors, musicians, poets. Instead of Bauhütte (masons’ lodge), he initially preferred the name Baurunde or Bauloge. He liked Bauloge because he felt it emphasised the intellectual groundwork conducted in a small circle – much like the Free Masons.

This notion had been inspired by Bruno Taut, who declared in Walden’s journal Der Sturm in 1914: Let us build together a magnificent building ... A building ... in which architecture will once again merge with the other arts.

Inspired by his writer friend and building-imaginist Paul Scheerbarth, Taut also invented new words to express his vision of the future of architecture. He exuberantly described entire mountains ensconced in glass as “alpine architecture”, crystal houses as “crowns of the city”, and he even wrote a symphony in tribute to architects as the “world’s building masters”.

In a piece he wrote for Der Sturm in 1912, the future Bauhaus master Wassily Kandinsky touted his theoretical treatise entitled “On the Spiritual in Art”, in which he demanded that words and the sound of letters be used free of their superficial meaning. As he abstractly composed pictures like music with dots, lines and swaths of colour, he insisted that poems, too, could consist solely of the acoustic material of language. Kandinsky demonstrated his word art in his volume of poems entitled Klänge (Sounds). In the following, an excerpt: Gesicht.

Ferne.

Wolke. … …

Es steht ein Mann mit einem langen Schwert. Lang ist das Schwert und auch breit. Sehr breit. … …

Er suchte mich oft zu täuschen und ich gestehe es: Das geLang ihm auch – das Täuschen. Und vielleicht zu oft. … …

Augen, Augen, Augen … Augen …

28 Face.

Far. Cloud. … …

There stands a man with a long sword. The sword is long And also broad. Very broad. … …

He tried to trick me many times and I admit it: He sucCeeded too – at tricking. And maybe too many times. … …

Eyes, eyes, eyes … eyes …

[Translated by Elizabeth R. Napier]

For Herwarth Walden, such radical alienation of language served as the fundamental model of his word-art theory, which he intensively propagated in Der Sturm starting in 1919. The poem BAUHAUS more or less fits this mould perfectly. It is an extremely condensed, all-encompassing rhythmic word with a unique sound. With respect to the conceptual in poetry, he wrote the following in 1918: When a single word stands so that one can immediately grasp it, there is simply no need for many words ... And each word is noble, if it is word ... the outer expression is the inner unity. BAUHAUS also possesses such inner unity, just as Walden extols: The sound leads ... and the individual word lives.

By inviting artists affiliated with Der Sturm (Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kan-dinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer and Lothar Schreyer) to teach in Weimar, Gropius consciously infused his newly founded school with the in­ tellectual trappings of the Sturm circle. In Paul Klee, he gained a Sturm painter who, like Kandinsky, regularly wrote poems and entitled his pictures with two- or one-word poems, undoubtedly inspired by word theory, such as: Black ships Flagged city Grey dawn Sealed mouth Soul journey Mad seventeen or Moth, Unlucky star Water plant writing Round head Spiral screw blossoms Abandoned

Female poets on the fringe

When Else Lasker-Schüler presented her poems on 14 April 1920 as Prince Yussuf of Thebes at the first Bauhaus evening, it was an un­ usual and, for some students, disturbing experience. Lasker-Schüler had helped Herwarth Walden achieve his name in two ways. His actual name was Georg Lewin and his journal Der Sturm was also co-founded by Lasker-Schüler. The fact that a woman took the stage as a poet, who embellished her recital with sounds and a drawling, made-up pseudo Arabic, was apparently all too much for some male, nationalistically and conservatively minded students who left the reading and, soon thereafter, left the Bauhaus as well. Artistic eccentricity, intellectual radicality and experimental living were things reserved for men. If women dared to encroach on this territory, they could barely hope for any support by the male-dominated societies of the avant-garde. For this reason, Lucia Schulz, who became Lucia Moholy in 1921, published her poems under the rather ridiculous pseudonym Ulrich Steffen. Her poetic creed, titled Symbole, appeared in the journal Freideutsche Jugend in 1919. There she wrote:

In the cosmos of unity, the body is no longer a temple of a deity, but its own body. Body and soul are, for the same reason, the root, they are one. We know no embodiment of an incarnate world ... We are God ... To those swaying in being, language is the appearance of being ... With the world, which I am, no symbol can bind me any longer.

Another female poet at the Bauhaus was Marianne Brandt. She never published any of her poems. In 1923, she wrote in Weimar: Ich tanze auf allen Wegen In alle dunklen Straßen Will ich mich stürzen.

Ich grüße alle Menschen In allen Häusern Hinter den Fenstern In allen Stuben.

Vor mir ein grünsilberner Himmelsstreif Hinter mir der aufgehende Mond.

I dance on all paths In all dark streets I want to plunge.

I greet all people In all houses Behind the windows In all parlours.

Before me, a green-silvery Wisp of cloud Behind me, the rising Moon.

Lothar Schreyer was explicitly a “word artist” in the Sturm circle and Sound was also an editor of Der Sturm from 1916 to 1928. When Gropius ap- speaking pointed Schreyer in 1921 to be the director of the newly founded Bauhaus theatre workshop, poetry became an important part of the curriculum for the first time. Schreyer had already developed his own type of sound speaking for the Sturm stage, founded in 1918, which he then also practiced with the students of the Bauhaus theatre workshop from 1921 to 1923. By articulating slowly with emphasis on sound and breathing, Schreyer claimed one could experience profound intellectual connections between the sounds and word formation, and correctly recognise their impulse. For example, by applying what Schreyer called a Spielgang (play walk) in which one articulated words in a mix of onomatopaiea and a kind of chanting: Ewig sternt Erde den Himmel Kalt steint die Nacht Haar hängt der Mond ins Grab.

Forever earth stars the sky The night stones cold The moon hangs hair in the grave.

Ultimately Schreyer couldn’t get all too many students enthused about sound speaking. They generally found his texts too cryptic and certain ones excessively spiritual. The Bauhäusler missed the freedom of the uncertain experiment in which something new presented itself. They could warm more readily to the playfully arranged sound poems which Kurt Schwitters, for example, presented as a guest lecturer at the Bauhaus. Also in the sound poems of Christian Morgenstern, Raoul Hausmann and others, especially those word artists of the Dadaist persuasion, listeners discovered a liberated and liberating sensuality in language, with which playful abstraction and decomposition was worth the effort.

A significant impulse for new playful conquests of language can be attributed to the disruptive activities of the Dutchman Theo van Doesburg starting in 1921. Van Doesburg tried to shift the Bauhaus away from its Expressionistic, Sturm-based ideas and get people to embrace the art doctrine of the Dutch De Stijl which emphasised technique and construction.

A small Weimar De Stijl group even started meeting at the studio of the Bauhaus student Karl Peter Roehl. His fellow Bauhaus student Werner Graeff, who with Roehl was one of the De Stijl propagandists in Weimar, penned a manifesto entitled Für das Neue (For the New): …

It pains you to see a gasometer in a beautiful landscape? We laugh!

However, we do have more than you.

For we love the contrast.

You only have the swaying stems, the colourful Snails, hedgehogs, nightingales, strawberries, sea and Penguins.

We have these too. But the wheels bother you, and the velocities and the dead-straight lines.

Not us! … (excerpt)

Free play

29 The Bauhaus reacted to this change in mood, and Gropius declared later that Art and Technology – A New Unity would be the new slogan and mission of the Bauhaus. In reference to this, Josef Albers summarised the new idea of language design as follows: We live fast and move so. We require stenograms and telegrams and code ... we speak tersely. In such a terse style, the architect and Bauhaus student Günter Hirschel-Protsch also crafted his poems, which he published in the journal MA (Young Silesia special edition) under the pseudonym Hispro: ich sitze verquer durch den raum I sit crossways through space baumloses astet und gilbt branching treeless and yellow ich lasse den raum I leave the space und schüttle den raum and shake the space und bebe den raum and quake the space und höhe den raum and raise the space leere stöhnt emptiness bellows leere weitet emptiness widens leere fruchtet emptiness yields Angst Fear

Oskar Schlemmer, who replaced Lothar Schreyer as the director of the Bauhaus stage in 1923, pointed out in Dessau in 1927 that he still regarded word, sound, language ... as possibly the most important elements of his experiments. Although he initially focused on the optical design of the set and began with the silent play of gestures and movement, he was convinced that from this the necessity of the word would one day evolve. But the verbal tone would have to enter the process in an elementary, entirely unliterary and unbiased form. Sometimes it was enough for Schlemmer to stage a choral chanting of the alphabet, e.g. to give a scene something of a verbal-rhythmic sound. This would then open the possibility for wordplay with more seemingly meaningful words. This is demonstrated, for example, in an excerpt of a fragment taken from the first act of the project House of Py or the Starry Home (Haus Py oder das Sternenheim), which was developed in rehearsal in summer 1927 as the first play performed on the Bauhaus stage. The following line is spoken by the Astrologer:

Because the Bauhaus – as Oskar Schlemmer claimed in 1927 – was all about working with the fundamental, the elementary, the word and its design was predestined, along with language and poetry, to be an important issue, i.e. the object of intractable investigation. As a result, writing poems and exploratively playing with language and speech were obviously an integral focus of study at this school. The word art of Der Sturm played a significant role in this as both a catalyst and formative model for the paradoxical coexistence of irrational spirituality and the penchant for stringent analysis which was rather typical of the Bauhaus. With expressive pathos, Dadaist inanity or sheer cockiness, it repeatedly tossed out its rulebook, and thereby repeatedly reopened all possibilities of interpretation. The Bauhaus student Xanti Schawinsky shared this insight in 1924 in disbelief: In fact, I am dough. Time is kneading me. When I came to the Bauhaus a half year ago, I was a facade deformed by mini motifs. Today I am a red cube (red is “stewing in one’s juices”, as I then learned). Every person, I believe, who comes to the Bauhaus, goes through such a transformation. The inner temperature depends, of course, on the boiling point of the individual. And that is the whole joke ... Oh, so you have never drowned in Bauhaus dance? You’re still an ordinary earthworm, you haven’t been able to solve Shakespeare’s riddle of being or not being. Nothingness and eternity – have you ever been able to grasp the fact of your existence in one enlightened moment? ... Do you hear the sounds of the accordion, do you see the tumbling lantern? – there life moves through the silver-filled canyons, passes over the dark trees which become more beautiful than the most beautiful theatre decoration.

I wish to thank Linda Pense for the idea and inspiration for this article, as well as Janek Müller for his help editing it. An earlier version of the text was pub­ lished in Edit. Papier für neue Texte 73 (Leipzig, autumn 2017) under the title Wir sind! Wir wollen! Und wir schaffen! BAUHAUS und andere Wortkunst für das Neue.­

3 479 A Z 2-5-9- 3. House – falling house – that is very interesting, unfavourable for weddings, livestock breeding, kid-neys ... unfavourable for everything that is short on top, long below, communion with those of higher standing – love affairs – Beware! – shinbone, anus, bladder ... Corner house – wide curve – hmm!

Overlaps Gemini. – What time? Now it’s exactly ten minutes after 8 o’clock, 3-7 = 37 seconds and a half. Let us see – the constellation from yesterday should be visible again today – so, where is it? – there – no! – Saturn – here – Aha! Curious, this! – no matter – it shines!

Schlemmer’s poem “The Square” (1927) also played with language in a similar fashion: Das Quadrat Es geschah Es war da Über Nacht wars gemacht War nicht mollig war nicht rund War nicht ockig war nicht bunt Es war voller Pracht Das Quadracht.

Scheinbar wenig war es viel Es war Stil und Weltgefühl Scheinbar war gar nichts dabei Dennoch: ein Columbusei Blinde wurden plötzlich sehend Lahme wurden plötzlich gehend Fast an jedem zeigen Spuren sich von richt‘gen Quadraturen Wo Quadrat ist auch ein Wille Man tanzt nur noch die Quadrille Nicht genug mit diesem Reiz Bringt es auch das Fadenkreuz.

Fort mit allem Eigendünkel!

Glück ist nur im rechten Winkel In diesem Zeichen wirst du siegen Sterben oder Kinder kriegen.

The Square It took place It was there Twas done overnight Wasn’t chubby, wasn’t round Wasn’t dreary, wasn’t bright It was full of splendour The Squaredour Seemed small, but was great It was stylish and worldly Seemed like nothing at all Yet, the Egg of Columbus The blind could suddenly see The lame could suddenly walk Almost everyone bears the mark Of the true quadrature Where there‘s a square, there’s a will Now they only dance the quadrille If this charm is not enough The crosshairs will do as well.

Away with all arrogance!

Happiness lies alone at a right angle In this symbol will you triumph, Perish or have children.

Torsten Blume is a research associate and artistic staff member of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. His work and research is primarily focused on the historical Bauhaus stage. He also heads the “Bauhaus Open Stage”, a programme that aims to apply its methodical approaches in workshops and seminars, the “physical exercises for designers” today.

BAUHAUS 2019 The fourteen years in which the Bauhaus operated in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin were equivalent to a spark that would revo­lutionise 20th-century architecture, art and design. The same controversial questions present themselves today as they did back then: What role do art and culture play in releasing the creative energies of individuals? How do we want to live together in the future? In what kind of houses? In what kind of cities?

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, the Federal Cultural Foundation is funding an extensive, nationwide programme which highlights the historic legacy, the international impact and the contemporary relevance of the Bauhaus. “Bauhaus 2019” is divided into three parts: the commemorative programme in the Bauhaus Alliance with numerous exhibitions throughout Germany, the funding programme “Bauhaus Fund Today”, and the “Bauhaus Agents”, an education programme for Bauhaus museums. The Federal Cultural Foundation has allocated 17.2 million euros to fund the “Bauhaus 2019” programme from 2016 to 2021. www.kulturstiftung-bund.de/bauhaus2019

30

The Other Library A LETTER TO AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

Richard David Lankes

Dear Bibi, You are not the only librarian who has expressed concerns about the future of libraries. Either you hear them saying that they’re old-fashioned or obsolete, or they envision them as community centres more focused on experiences than reading and literacy. You are asking yourself why we need a new librarianship that reimagines a library’s role, and yours, in a modern and diverse urban community.

Can’t libraries just be quiet refuges for reading? Why can’t they be left alone? Why are people urging you to get out of the building and to step into complex – and scary – discussions about integration and nationalism and social safety nets?

My answer will hopefully give you courage and strengthen your self-confidence: It’s because our communities need us – there are few others who can help them. And because librarianship has been on a mission for over 4,000 years.

Libraries, and those who build and maintain them, have been committed to helping communities get smarter for ages. In ancient Alexandria, the head of the great library was the counsellor to kings. In the Middle Ages libraries fed the souls and minds of the people.

The digression into history is important for recognising the great tradition whence we have come. The Renaissance was as an explosion of knowledge into society – not books or manuscripts, the tools of knowledge – but views on art and justice and society. Libraries were the research labs of philosophers. If you study the Enlightenment, the Reformation, or even the advances of the Internet, you will find libraries and librarians everywhere. And our need for a new librarian­ ship derives from the same reason we measure history in millennia: our society is changing and facing new opportuni-

ties and challenges – and it needs its libraries and librarians to do the same.

No one is asking you to throw out your work and experience and start over. However, you do need to put them to new uses. For over a century, librarians have sought to collect materials and make them available. This notion has been driven by ideas forged in the age of the Industrial Revolution.

We sought to build libraries around standards and efficiency so that a library in Berlin would function just like a library in Hamburg or New York or Cairo. We were not alone. We built our schools and even our governments on the concept of the assembly line. The time has finally come to rebuild these on something far more consequential than efficiency – now is the time to build upon that which outweighs efficiency – how people find meaning in their life.

You must understand, Bibi, what libraries represent – not a place of books, databases, or computers, but society, the community itself. Those books, that building, they are fine tools, but they are only kindling to the genius of society. Our goal is not to collect everything our society needs, but to unleash a smarter, more confident and inclusive society upon the world. Libraries will continue to be houses of cultural heritage – a culture that is alive and dynamic, and a heritage that is growing and constantly being re-examined.

Those people that come into your library – they are not consumers seeking to be entertained or informed. They are people seeking to make their lives matter. They seek to learn, to share, to participate, the engineers, plumbers, musicians, lawyers and more. These people comprise the holdings of a library, they are grander than anything found in the biggest collections in the world. Because they can do something that no Library of Congress or Vatican Library can do: create new

31 knowledge. What’s more, they can do for themselves and their neighbours something no text, no matter how lofty, can do: change the world for the better. Your collection are the citizens of today and the leaders of tomorrow.

Imagine your library not as an oasis or a retreat – but an engine of change. Imagine combatting terrorism through neighbour knowing neighbour. Imagine protecting democracy by preparing voters who can differentiate propaganda from trustworthy sources. Imagine fighting poverty by providing services that teach skills and knowledge and strengthen one’s self-esteem. No matter how poor you are, no one can deny you the dignity of learning. Learning from books, from YouTube or friends.

I realise this doesn’t make you less worried. In fact, such grand ambitions probably make you more nervous. But you are not alone. Libraries in the Netherlands are equipping buses with 3D printers, WiFi, and “FabLabs” to stay connected to students who live in remote parts of the country. In the United States, librarians are serving as social safety nets for homeless families. In Switzerland, librarians help new immigrants integrate into society by providing language training and helping them find suitable housing. In Italy, cities are using public libraries to preserve ancient manuscripts and provide study spaces for university students – building a new piazza along the way. In city after city, country after country, and continent after continent public libraries have thrown open their doors, letting the people in to create a new community living room, while the librarians are reaching out to the people.

And these librarians are not unique. They have the same resources and skills as you. Is it scary? Perhaps. But it’s worth it. By refocusing their existing skills on learning and people, librarians are not only doing more good, they are reintroducing the profession to the people. We will no longer be seen as passive “book folk”, but valuable advocates.

So Bibi, I know these calls for change in librarianship may seem scary, or annoying, or invigorating, or frustrating, or all of this at once. But here is what you need to know: what libraries will become is ultimately up to you and the people you serve. Our communities desperately need engaged advocates that help them make smarter decisions. The tools you use to help them may change, but your mission, to improve society through learning, that remains. It was true on your first day in the library and it will be true as you take the library to the people. Take courage, Bibi, I know you can do it!

Yours truly, David

Richard David Lankes Lankes is a professor of Library Sciences and director of the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina, USA. In 2017 his book Expect More: Demanding Better Libraries for Today's Complex World was published by the Simon Verlag für Bibliothekswissen in German with a preface by editor Christoph Hobohm. The book delivers a rallying call to transform libraries for the people into libraries of the people, the community.

HOCHDREI – CHANGING CITY LIBRARIES In contrast to theatres or concert halls, city libraries are informal and easily accessible cultural venues. They are open to adults and children alike, are usually situated downtown, are housed in stately buildings, work for the common good and charge negligible fees, if any at all. In today’s urban society, public libraries which offer an extended range of services can play a prominent role when it comes to teaching media skills and offering more equitable chances at cultural participation. As urban, non-commercial venues, they offer a space for intercultural encounter. With this new programme, the Federal Cultural Foundation recognises the new cultural-political role that city libraries can play in Germany. This application-based funding programme will support innovative projects at city libraries and work to establish these as open places of encounter. The programme is accompanied by workshops, information services and events which aim to strengthen networking efforts and the international exchange of expertise between the libraries.

The Federal Cultural Foundation has set aside 5.6 million euros to finance the “hochdrei” programme from 2018 to 2022. www.kulturstiftung-bund.de/ stadtbibliotheken

32

Neue Projekte At its joint session in autumn 2017, the interdisciplinary jury of the Federal Cultural Foundation recommended funding for 39 new projects with a total volume of 6 million euros.

For more information about the individual pro­jects, please visit our website www.kulturstiftungbund.de or the respective project websites.

The members of the jury are: Dr. Manuel Gogos, author and exhibition curator / Björn Gottstein, artistic director of the Donaueschingen Festival / Bart van der Heide, chief curator of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam / Wolfgang Hörner, managing director of the Galiani Berlin publi­shing company / Prof. Dr. Gerald Siegmund, director of the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Giessen / Susanne Titz, director of the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach / Almut Wagner, chief dramaturge of the Schauspiel am Theater Basel Lorenza Böttner, Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 1980 (private collection)

Lorenza Böttner Life and works 1959–1994 This retrospective in Stuttgart and Barcelona offers a comprehensive study of Lorenza Böttner’s artistic estate. Böttner was an extraordinary artist in many ways. She was born in Chile to parents of German descent and christened Ernst Lorenz Böttner. At the age of eight, she lost both arms in an accident, and at age twelve, she moved to a town near Kassel with her family so that she could undergo a series of reconstructive surgeries. Her experiences of social exclusion due to her handicap, her struggle with HIV and her life as a transgender woman play a prominent role in her artworks. Despite her disability, Böttner was able to study painting at the University of Art in Kassel. Her art often blurs the boundaries between real life and performance, the street and the stage, painting and dance, and femininity and masculinity. Her works openly explore homoand transsexual fantasies and celebrate the eroticism of the “disabled” body. In addition to carrying out conservatorial and restorative measures, the project presents some 200 works, along with personal and political documents which highlight Böttner’s life and oeuvre. It is the first major exhibition to feature her extensive estate of photography, drawings, paintings, videos and performances. The project aims to position Böttner’s works in relation to those of other contemporary artists. The exhibition is organised in cooperation with the La Virreina art centre and the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, and curated by Paul B. Preciado.

Mr. Preciado exhibited works by Böttner for the first time at the documenta 14, and is meanwhile a recognised expert of Böttner’s oeuvre. The exhibition will be supplemented by an extensive catalogue and accompanying lecture programme.

With Feeling International Puppet Theatre Festival Puppet theatre productions from 25 countries are invited to explore the theme of feelings and sensations at the Munich festival. Most theatre pieces rely wholly on sight and hearing, but in these plays, other senses, such as smelling and feeling, play central roles as well. Unique theatrical effects are created when certain sensory impressions suddenly vanish or are isolated. And this festival presents productions which do exactly that. For example, a puppet theatre performance depicting a puppet’s “execution” aims to evoke sympathy and possibly incite the viewers to intervene in the action. The British Hijinx Theatre works with actors with lear­ ning disabilities, while the Sandglass Theater from Vermont will present a play based on their work with patients suffering from dementia. And Ari Teperberg and his “Golden Delicious Ensemble” from Jerusalem will stage a performance about the blind and deaf activist Helen Keller.

The Munich Stadtmuseum houses the largest puppet theatre collection in the world. The puppeteer and puppet designer Frank Soehnle has been invited to explore the festival’s theme in an entirely different form. Soehnle will stage an exhibition using objects from the Stadtmuseum collection combined with his own creations. As a puppeteer, he is known for pushing the boundaries of puppet theatre with forays into the fields of music, performance and the fine arts. The festival programme also includes audience discussions, workshops and presentations about the festival theme with sepa­rate events oriented to adults and to children. www.figurentheater-gfp.de

Artistic directors: Mascha Erbelding, Evelyn James Artists: Frank Soehnle, Pojūčiųteatras / Theatre of Senses (LT), Hijinx Theater (GB), Sandglass Theater (US), Ari Teperberg (IL), Theater Junge Generation Dresden / Ariel Doron (IL), Ulrike Quade Company (NL), Trickster-p (CH) Plays, performances, installations, workshops, presentations, Munich Stadtmuseum, Pasinger Fabrik, Schauburg, HochX, Munich: 17 – 28 Oct. 2018; exhibition by Frank Soehnle, Munich Stadtmuseum, Munich: 18 Oct. 2018 – 6 Jan. 2019

www.wkv-stuttgart.de

Artistic director: Paul B. Preciado (ES) La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona: 8 Sep. – 23 Dec. 2018; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart: 23 Feb. – 5 May 2019

Lorenza Böttner, untitled photograph (private collection)

33

Post Studio: CalArts 1970–1978 Exhibition by the Kestner Gesellschaft Post Studio is the name of the now legendary university department, initiated by the artist John Baldessari in 1970 at the then newly established California Institute of the Arts, or CalArts, for short.

Post Studio advocated a concept that shifted artistic production from the studio into everyday life.

In its early years, CalArts became known for its progressive pedagogical concepts and feminist artistic practices which influenced an entire generation of artists. To this day, many of the tested ideas and approaches, e.g. institutional critique, image criticism and feminism, remain relevant artistic topoi. In this respect, CalArts and especially Post Studio marked a watershed moment when an artistic change of paradigm became institutionalised.

In an exhibition, symposium and extensive research project, the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover together with the Freie Universität Berlin and other international partners will conduct a historical assessment of Post Studio for the first time. The exhibition will present individual artistic principles which influenced the teaching activities, as well as some of the school’s innovative teaching methods.

It will be the first exhibition to combine the teaching content and the resulting works produced during those formative CalArts years. The exhibition will feature interviews with contemporary witnesses as documents of oral history.

The exhibition aims to emphasise the relevance of the methods developed by Post Studio, especially with regard to digitalisation. It asks to what extent the approaches of artistic detachment from location and material are relevant and helpful to us today when digitalisation has made placelessness and virtuality far more prevalent– and not only in the area of the fine arts?

www.kestnergesellschaft.de

Project concept und curators: Philipp Kaiser (US), Christina Végh Cooperation partners: Freie Universität Berlin: Annette Lehmann; Migros Museum Zürich: Heike Munder; California Institute of the Arts Los Angeles: Ravi Rajan; metaLAB Harvard University: Jeffrey Schnapp Artists: John Baldessari (US), Judy Chicago (US), James Welling (US) Kestnergesellschaft e.V., Hanover: 9 Mar. – 26 May 2019

Marianna Christofides, Days in Between, 2015, 1-Channel Full-HD-Video

Remembering Landscape Exhibition, seminar, accompanying programme When we think of landscape, most of us imagine an aesthetic ideal – if not unspoiled nature, then at least a diversified, organically developed agricultural and rural living environment. But in reality, landscape has long been altered by war, commercial exploitation, border demarcations and migration. Deformations, ruins and peculiarities of vegetation are testimony to major events of political and economic history. This project by the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Siegen presents a series of artistic positions, highlighting such “traumatic landscapes”. It interweaves two antipodes – on one hand, the “techno landscape” as the remnants of nature left in the wake of globalised industry, mining and urbanisation, and on the other, the “historical landscape” containing ruins and traces which evoke memories and become monuments in and of themselves.

The exhibition mainly presents contemporary landscape images, but also historical pieces. In the monumental photos

by Luc Delahaye, the earth is depicted as a (mass) grave. Susanne Kriemann and Alexandra Navratil examine the dissolution of the picturesque landscape into economically exploitable material. The exhibition also presents for the first time Paul Virilio’s “Bunker Archaeology” which documents the German bunkers of World War II interspersed along the Atlantic coast. A comprehensive publication of this photographic project is also planned. www.mgk-siegen.de

Artistic directors: Eva Schmidt, Kai Vöckler Curators: Branislav Dimitrijević (CS), Călin Dan (RO), Leen Engelen (BE), Artists: Marianna Christofides (CY), Luc Delahaye (FR), Forensic Architecture (GB), Cyprien Gaillard (FR), Anna Heinlein & Göran Gnaudschun, Markus Karstieß, Jan Kempenaers (BE), Anselm Kiefer, Aglaia Konrad (AT), Susanne Kriemann, et al. as well as a special project by the architect Paul Virilio Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen: 10 Jun. – 1 Oct. 2018; MCA, Bucharest: 14 Oct. 2018 – 1 Feb. 2019; MCA, Belgrade: 7 Apr. – 30 Jul. 2019; Luca School of Arts, Brussels: 13 Oct. – 31 Dec. 2019

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No Refuge for Jewish Refugees Exhibition on the Évian refugee conference of 1938

In the Cut

Alicia Framis, Cinema Solo, 1996, photograph © courtesy the artist

Sexuality in feminist art Sexuality has always played a central role in art history – as a visual theme, motif and catalyst for artistic production. Yet the female perspective of eroticism in art is still the exception.

In this exhibition on sexuality in feminist art, the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken presents works by female artists of the younger generation alongside im­ portant pieces by the first generation of feminists.

These include Louise Bourgeois, whose work critically examines gender attributes and the sexual taboos connected with them, and Carolee Schneemann, whose film and video works investigate sexual desire and eroticism from a female perspective.

The exhibition also features works

by Tracey Emin and Sophie Calle, two artists known for critically and provocatively exploring the themes of female desire, intimacy and sexuality. Photographic works by Herlinde Koelbl serve as the starting point of the exhibition. Koelbl’s photos of men are still regarded as an extraordinary and bold example of artistic and erotic interest, the first to be expressed in such a form by a female artist.

www.stadtgalerie-­saarbruecken.de

Artistic director: Andrea Jahn Artists: Louise Bourgeois (US), Sophie Calle (FR), Tracey Emin (GB), Alicia Framis (ES), Herlinde Koelbl, Eunice Golden (US), Julika Rudelius, Betty Tompkins (US), Carolee Schneemann (US), Jana Sterbak (CA) Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken: 18 May – 30 Sep. 2018

zfa.kgw.tu-berlin.de

Curator: Winfried Meyer Participants: Irene Aue-Ben-David (IL), Wolf Gruner (US), Roland Bank and others Special exhibition at the German Resistance Memorial Centre, Berlin: 5 Jul. – 15 Oct. 2018; online exhibition: begins October 2018; international symposium at the German Resistance Memorial Centre, Berlin: 20 Sep. 2018

Rodin / Nauman An exhibition by the Saarlandmuseum – Modern Gallery

Tracey Emin, Beginning of the Inside, 2015 © Courtesy Tracey Emin und White Cube © Bildrecht, Wien 2018

Herlinde Koelbl, Men (Frank Gewehr, New York), 1983 © courtesy the artist

The systematic persecution and expulsion of the Jewish population in the German Empire began almost immediately after the National Socialists seized power in 1933. By 1937, the Nazi regime had legally discriminated, financially plundered and socially marginalised approximately 130,000 Jews.

Many of them reacted to the repressive measures by emigrating, often with uncertain prospects. The international community saw the impending exodus of refugees coming. In July 1938, delegates from 32 countries and 39 Jewish and humanitarian organisations convened in the French town of Évian to agree on a solution – but in vain. There was hardly a country willing to accept additional refugees or even fully utilise existing quotas out of fear of reprisals from the Third Reich, for reasons of political strategy or because of their own racial animus.

The conference sealed the fate of countless Jews who ultimately fell victim to the National Socialists in the following war years.

As Europe struggles once again with a refugee crisis, this project reminds us of the circumstances, deliberations and repercussions of the historic conference in Évian. Conceived as both a physical and digital exhibition, the project will stage the show at the German Resistance Memorial Centre in Berlin in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the conference from July to October 2018, and then digitally on the project website. To provide a better sense of what the loss of homeland meant to the Jews, the exhibition includes texts, audio and film recordings from public and private archives. The exhibition programme is supplemented by a symposium, a series of feature and documentary films, and a catalogue.

This exhibition is the first to combine works by Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and Bruce Nauman (*1941) – two of the most influential artists of the 19 th and 21 st century, respectively. Their works have played an integral role in shaping discourse on the concepts of art, sculpture and space. The exhibition, which includes pieces by Rodin from the collection of the Saarlandmuseum, examines works based on key recurring themes in the creative process of both artists, for example, the body, psyche and space. Both artists are known to obsessively study the human body, appearing again and again in their works as a central theme. What Rilke once wrote about Rodin could equally apply to Nauman: “The body is the soul to him”. Rodin worked with torsos and fragments; he would turn an unfinished fragment into an autonomous work.

Nauman, too, describes his work with fragments and montages as a conceptual approach which

35 readily embraces all media and artistic techniques – from sculpture to video performance. A characteristic shared by both the pioneer of French modernism and the American post-minimalist is their indifference to prevailing notions of hand-crafted perfection and beauty. Both regard their art as process-based and interminable.

The exhibition presents works by both artists, produced during various creative phases of their lives, and is supplemented by an extensive educational programme with workshops, discussions and theatre performances. www.modernegalerie.org

Curators: Roland Mönig, Kathrin Elvers-Švamberk Artists: Auguste Rodin (FR), Bruce Nauman (US) Saarlandmuseum – Modern Gallery, Saarbrücken: 21 Sep. 2019 –26 Jan. 2020

festival congress has found two curators who are optimally acquainted with the protagonists, diverse scenes, their needs and desiderata, and can develop scenarios suited to improving the situation. The artistic accompanying programme aims to highlight a variety of possibilities for presenting poetry.

The combination of a congress and festival promises to consolidate poetry in the cultural landscape in the long term and, at the same time, finally ensure that poetry receives its due recognition as one of the most innovative art forms of our day. www.kultur.frankfurt.de www.frankfurt.de

Artistic directors: Monika Rinck, Tristan Marquardt Poets: Aleš Šteger (SL), Küçük İskender (TR), Lavinia Greenlaw (GB), Galina Rymbu (RU) and many more Festival congress, Haus am Dom, Roemer 9, Theater Willy Praml and other venues, Frankfurt am Main: 7 – 10 Mar. 2019

Focus on Poetry Festival congress on contemporary poetry

Into the Blue!

Over the past few years, a series of poetry events have helped generate growing interest in Germany’s po­ Exhibition by the Literaturhaus Munich on the relationship between literature etry scene. For the very first time in 2017, for example, and nature the Leipzig Book Fair Prize was awarded to a poet, Jan Wagner, who also received Germany’s most prestigious literature prize in that same year, the BüchSince the advent of writing, humans have written ner-Preis of the German Academy for Language and about nature, written in nature or incorporated naLiterature. It is a sign that poetry continues to gain ture into their stories. And now the subject of naacceptance as an autonomous artistic area. A positive, ture appears to be attracting renewed interest in but still largely unappreciated development is the literary circles. The literature and exhibition project “Into the Blue!” posits that modern contemporary recent arrival of a younger generation of poets, in­ spired by poetry slams, hip-hop, performance art and literature would hardly be understandable without digitalisation, who have rediscovered poetry and reits reference to the world of nature as a realm for coded it in subcultural circles. Others are exploring utopian experience. Consequently, it is all the more relationships and cross­ overs to New Music and the fine arts, providing proof of the cross-genre potential for development of contemporary poetry. Despite these successes, poets, their publishers and event organisers still find it relatively difficult to establish themselves in the cultural sector and fight against economic margi­nalisation. Most poets have no choice but to organise their activities themselves, especially when it comes to pub­ lish­ing and distribution.

This festival congress wishes to highlight impulses from the poetry scene and its networks, and create a broad international platform to help poets and poetry translators network and forge contacts with sponsors, cultural policymakers, mediators (event organisers, critics), educational institutions (schools, universities) and the book market (publication, distribution). By enlisting Tristan Marquardt and Monika Rinck as its Martin Mosebach, Pepple with barnacles Michael Fehr, artistic directors, the

astonishing that no one has yet written a “literary history of nature”. The project “Into the Blue!” wi­ shes to explore the significance of nature for our literary creativity from three angles: as a civilisa­ tional narrative, as a trove of stylistic devices and motifs, and as a space of creative self-awareness. In this exhibition at the Literaturhaus Munich, a number of well-known and yet-to-be-discovered artists demonstrate how literature can engender remarkable experiences in nature outside the norm. They aim to re-examine objects found in nature through language. Like an “art cabinet” or “Wunderkammer“, the presentation invites viewers to form new associations and conduct sensory experiments which could rattle their conventional ideas about the relationship between literature and nature.

Throughout the exhibition, the global dimension of this topic remains a central focus – in particular, our often questionable treatment of nature.

After its presentation in Munich, the exhibition will go on tour to other cities. It includes an accompanying programme, e.g. a “nature-writing seminar”, organised in cooperation with the British Council, discussion events and excursions. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition. www.literaturhaus-muenchen.de

Director of the Literaturhaus: Tanja Graf Project manager: Karolina Kühn Curator: Heike Gfrereis Artistic advisor: Judith Schalansky Artists and writers: Zora del Buono (CH), Michael Fehr (CH), Arno Geiger (AT), Eva Menasse (AT), Martin Mosebach, Marion Poschmann, Teresa Präauer (AT), Josef H. Reichholf, Jan Wagner, Judith Zander and others Design: unodue Literaturhaus Galerie, Munich: 22 Mar. – 7 Oct. 2018

KP Brehmer (1938–1997) Retrospective KP Brehmer belongs to a generation of artists which has taken a critical stance to the pictorial language of the Federal Republic of Germany since the 1960s.

He investigated the artistic, linguistic, and cinematic strategies and forms of communication used by mass media and public institutions, and reflected on the pervasive influence of advertising in everyday life in Germany. For example, infographics – an im­portant journalistic tool nowadays – play a central role in his works. In retrospective group exhibitions, Brehmer’s works are generally portrayed as a European, ironically subtle variant of Pop Art, whereby the integral, innovative dimensions of his work often go unnoticed. His presence at inter­national exhibitions, such as in Istanbul in 2009 and Venice in 2013 demonstrate, however, that his themes remain topical and relevant to a younger generation of artists.

Curators at four museums – in Nuremberg, Hamburg, Istanbul and The Hague – are collaborating on a project to rediscover this artist. They are jointly developing the exhibition for presentation at all four venues, each with different areas of focus. The exhibition combines KP Brehmer’s artistic examination of the efficacy of mass-media images with Rabbit skin

36 contemporary concerns regarding the reliability of our information and the crisis of trust plaguing the mainstream media (“fake news”). The exhibition includes newly discovered source materials and works which have never been shown before. www.nmn.de

Artistic director: Eva Kraus Curators: Selen Ansen (TR), Daniel Koep (NL), Eva Kraus, Petra Roettig Consultants: René Block, Sebastian Brehmer Exhibition designer: Kilian Fabich Neues Museum, Nuremberg: 25 Oct. 2018 – 3 Feb. 2019; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg: 15 Mar. – 16 Jun. 2019; ARTER space for art, Istanbul: 13 Sep. 2019 – 12 Jan. 2020; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague: 12 Mar. – 28 Jun. 2020

Slavs and Tatars Solo exhibition and lecture performances

Edgar Archeneaux, An Arrangement without Tormentors, 2003, Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen Magdeburg, photograph: Hans-Wulf Kunze

The artists’ collective Slavs and Tatars investigates reciprocal relationships between supposedly disparate cultural spheres. In its research-based works, it focuses on the “region east of the Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia” where Slavic, Caucasian and Central Asian influences intermingle. The installations, lecture performances, public interventions and artist’s books produced by Slavs and Tatars address such issues as faith, tradition and intercultural understanding and their respective political dimensions.

By staging the most comprehensive solo exhibition of works by this artists’ collective ever, the Albertinum in Dresden hopes to burnish its reputation as a museum of contemporary art. The significance of language, foreignness and cultural translation are central themes in the exhibition. The holdings of the Dresden State Art Collections (SKD), as well as the geographic proximity to Poland and the Czech Republic, offer additional points of reference for a new work currently in development. Slavs and Tatars will present their works at venues that highlight the global dimension in the local and make the past visible in the present, e.g. at the Dresden Damascus Room, the Ethnographical Museum, the Museum of Decorative Arts and the Green Vault. The lecture performances will be staged at various locations in Dresden and the SKD museums, followed by discussion events with experts and the public. The programme will be supplemented by a live musical act and a Czech-German youth competition. www.albertinum.skd.museum

Artistic director: Kathleen Reinhardt Artists: Slavs and Tatars Albertinum, Dresden: 1 Jun. – 14 Oct. 2018

Images of Sound and Shades of Music Art and music in the 21st century The fine arts and music have become more and more intertwined in recent years. This has made it increasingly difficult to ascribe one or the other genre to a growing body of works. We are seeing performance and video artists making use of existing and/or new music, while musicians and composers are incorporating visual elements into their artistic works. Due to a pragmatic and intensive exchange between numerous artists and interweaving genres, an array of complex groups of works has arisen. This new development is the focus of a large-scale, threepart exhibition by the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg. The first part of the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum presents selected sound installations and video works, and highlights the correlations between these genres. From September to October 2018, the curators will stage an installation along the Elbe River extending almost two kilometres titled the “Water Walk”, an obstacle course of sound sculptures and acoustic installations which will remain in place after the project has concluded. The third part features an extensive concert programme at the Haus für Musik. In addition to presenting contemporary trends, the venue will be used to present hybrid forms of live music and live painting as spatial image-art experiences. www.kunstmuseum-magdeburg.de

Artistic director: Annegret Laabs Musical director: Carsten Gerth Curators: Oliver Schneller (US), Uwe Gellner Artists: Edgar Arceneaux (US), Douglas Henderson (US), Jonas Englert, Annika Kahrs, Bjørn Melhus, Robin Minard (CA), Michaela Melián, Ari Benjamin Meyers (US), Carsten Nicolai, Marc Sabat (US) Yehudit Sasportas (IL), and others Kunstmuseum and Haus der Musik (exhibition and concerts), Magdeburg: 23 Jun. – 14 Oct. 2018

realities_united - ­ permanent installation at the ­ Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen Magdeburg, 2012, photograph: Hans-Wulf Kunze

37

Writing in ­Migration Berlin’s first intercontinental book festival There are many who regard Berlin as Germany’s capital of diversity. Countless cultural events are proof of the internationality of the city’s art scene. African writers play a central role in this, though they are only seldom acknowledged for their achievements.

The literature festival “Writing in Migration” hopes to change this. Staged for the first time in April 2018 at the Berlin Lettrétage, the three-day event will provide visitors with a view of everyday African life through the eyes of ten immigrant writers. The programme focuses on the central themes of trans­ culturality and transnationality. The festival organisers are encouraging publishers to explore current issues of African life on the continent and in the diaspora.

The festival, which takes a strong stand against ra­ cism, will be curated by the German-Nigerian artist Olumide Popoola and aims to engage audiences in dialogue even outside of Berlin. Following its debut, the festival will go on tour to five cities in Brandenburg. An accompanying publication will make selected literature accessible to readers beyond the scope of the festival. www.interkontinental.org/wim

Artistic director: Olumide Popoola (UK) Festival directors: Stefanie Hirsbrunner & Karla Kutzner (InterKontinental) Participating writers: Chris Abani (US/NG), JJ Bola (CD/US), Amma Darko (GH), Linda Gabriel (ZW/ZA), Helon Habila (US/NG), Elnathan John (NG/DE), Chigozie Obioma (US/ NG), Yvonne Owuor (KE), Chika Unigwe (US/ NG), Sarah Ladipo Manyika (US/NG), Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (UGA), Niq Mhlongo (ZA) and others Berlin and Brandenburg: 26 – 30 Apr. 2018

produced during her years in New York highlight the traditions of American painting in relation to current developments in pop culture. Her interest in techno, punk and hip-hop have also found their way into her paintings. In recent years, she has continued to explore historical paintings with new forays into the art canon, such as a painting series featuring new perspectives on works by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Cy Twombly. In a new cycle created especially for the exhibition, Koether alludes to Cy Twombly’s “Lepanto Cycle” at the Museum Brandhorst.

An event series curated by the artist herself will supplement the exhibition with concerts and performances at the Munich Kammerspiele and readings and discussions at the Museum Brandhorst.

In cooperation with the art colleges in Munich and Hamburg, the project includes a workshop for young artists and theorists. The pop-cultural references in Koether’s works provide a wealth of talking points for younger audience members, for whom an extensive educational programme is planned. www.museum-brandhorst.de

Artistic director: Achim Hochdörfer Curators: Achim Hochdörfer, Tonio Kröner Cooperation partners: Suzanne Cotter (AU), Christoph Gurk, Dieter Rehm Exhibition at Museum Brandhorst, Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich: 18 May – 16 Sep. 2018; event series, Munich Kammerspiele, Munich: 18 May – 21 Oct. 2018; workshop with Munich Academy of the Fine Arts and Museum Brandhorst, Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich: June 2018; event series, Museum Brandhorst, Bavarian State Painting Collections and Munich Kammerspiele, Munich: October 2018; exhibition, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto: 2018/19

Ruptured Society It seems that recent elections have been resulting more often in political stasis rather than political solutions. The arguments of competing political groups are sometimes so polarised that compromise seems all but impossible. Sharing views with like­ minded people within homogenous groups, compounded further by social media channels, often glosses over what distinguishes modern society: difference and the necessity of communication.

Based on the motto “Ruptured Society”, the Leipzig festival wants to investigate how photography can serve as a medium for social communication.

What are the specific qualities of democracy and how can photography enhance processes of negotiation and communication?

The festival is comprised of five exhibition segments which will be staged throughout the city of Leipzig and at the Baumwollspinnerei. In addition to photography, this year’s festival will also focus on illustration and the graphic novel genre. The festival exhibition will be supplemented by a film programme and symposium.

In the main exhibition in Hall 14, the architect and curator Eyal Weizman will present works by students of the research lab Forensic Architecture, for which photography plays a central role as a research tool. The exhibition at Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz will examine the year 1990 which – in contrast to 1989 – has all but vanished from collective memory.

A cabinet exhibition in the rooms of Galerie Dukan will be devoted to depicting election campaigns, party conventions and the parliamentary process.

In this context, the exhibition will showcase Ludovic Balland’s project “Day After Reading”. During the American presidential campaign of 2016, he travelled through the US and portrayed various people whom he asked about their memories of the previous day’s news stories. www.f-stop-leipzig.de

Jutta Koether

Artistic directors: Anne König, Jan Wenzel Festival director: Daniel Niggemann Curators: Krisztina Hunya (HU), Elske Rosenfeld, Andreas Rost, Sarah Schipschack, Leif Magne Tangen (NO), Eyal Weizman (IL) Artists: Ludovic Balland (CH), Paula Bulling, Nicolas Giraud (FR), Francesco Jodice (IT), Alexander Kluge, Susanne Kriemann, Ludwig Kuffer, Andreas Langfeld, Elisabeth Neudörfl, Bertrand Stofleth (FR) and others Baumwollspinnerei, Leipzig: 22 Jun. – 1 Jul. 2018

Tour de Madame Born in Cologne in 1958, Jutta Koether is a well-known painter, musician, theorist, performer and author. Her references to pop and media culture and her treatment of gender relations have left a lasting mark on the cultural land­ scape since the 1980s. The exhibi­ tion “Tour de Madame” is the first to offer international audiences an overview of her artistic production. With showings at the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, the Serralves Museum in Porto and the Madre Museum in Naples, the exhibition presents over 150 works that chronologically follow Koether’s artistic evolution be­ tween 1983 and 2017. The exhibi­ tion promises some surprises as many of the works have never Jutta been shown before or have remained in private collections since their original public display.

The exhibition begins with Koether’s early figurative paintings, in which she applies subtle humour to comment on the clichés and dynamics of art history. Self-portraits and new versions of classical artworks are the focus of her first prominent series of works, her so-called “red pictures”. The works

8. Festival of Photography f/stop

Koether, Starry Night II, 1988, oil on canvas, 75 x 95 cm © Jutta Koether

38 develops 3-D animations and virtual reality applications. In a new video installation featuring his existing works, he explores what would happen if almost every production and distribution process were managed by technologies. The film programme offers insights into the ordinary, ubiquitous, but typically invisible processes of logistics. In an accompanying colloquium, experts from the fields of sci­ ence, art and business will discuss current developments in data traffic and the transport of goods, e.g. via social distri-

The Walter Kempowski Project A four-part theatre production based on the novel series “German Chronicles” with a European perspective Walter Kempowski’s (1929–2007) autobiographical novels “German Chronicals” were responsible for putting the author on the literary map. In this novel series, Kempowski delves into his own family

Lawrence Lek, QE3, 2016, commissioned for Glasgow International 2016 © courtesy the artist

Werkleitz Festival 2018 – Picking Up, Dropping Off Exhibition, film programme, performance programme Not only is logistics a rapidly growing business sector; it also dictates the pace and rhythm of our time.

Based on the motto “Holen und Bringen” (Picking Up, Dropping Off), the Werkleitz Festival 2018 aims to investigate the advent of modern logistics since the beginnings of global commerce. It will examine what logistical forms have arisen since and how these are shaping our world today. Using Halle/ Leipzig as an example, the festival will describe the effects of technological advances taking place around the world.

The highlight of the festival will be an exhibition, accompanied by a film, performance and music programme, a colloquium and guided excursions to railway facilities in Halle, for which the Deutsche Bahn will participate as a partner. The exhibition features a series of new artistic positions. The design collective Foundland, for example, develops installations, investigations and visualisations based on archived and personal stories of migration, flight and expulsion. Their artistic works are devised to make suppressed and tabooed flows of movement visible. Candice Lin creates works which poetically investigate colonial history and the history of globally traded goods like tea or sugar. Lawrence Lek

bution and microdrones.

The festival will be staged at various locations in Halle where logistics operations and urban processes of transformation are visible. The Halle/Leipzig conurbation has increasingly become an important hub for the international transport of goods. For example, a new train formation depot, one of the most advanced systems for rail-bound freight transportation in Europe, is slated to begin operations in Halle (Saale) in 2018. www.werkleitz.de

Artistic director: Daniel Herrmann Curators: Arjon Dunnewind (NL), Anna Jehle, Sandra Naumann, Konrad Renner, Juliane Schickedanz, Florian Wüst Artists: !Mediengruppe Bitnik (CH/HR/DE), Mariechen Danz (IE/DE), Foundland (ZA/SY/ NL/EG), Hiwa K (IQ/DE), Lawrence Lek (DE/ GB), Candice Lin (US), Kassem Mosse, Sebastian Schmieg, Michael Stevenson (NZ/DE), Leanne Wijnsma (NL) Selected venues, Halle (Saale): 19 – 28 Oct. 2018

history and depicts scenes which illustrate the involvement of the German middle class in the First and Second World War. He describes the international connections in his father’s and grandfather’s shipping company as a part of German imperialism, and reports on the years of Russian occupation and his own eight years imprisoned in Bautzen.

The stage director and general theatre director of the Altonaer Theater, Axel Schneider, is adapting the nine-volume series of “German Chronicles” for the stage as a four-night production, scheduled to premiere at the Altonaer Theater during the 2018/19 season.

With such an extensive project that so vastly diverges from conventional theatre productions, the Altonaer Theater hopes to attract a broad and preferably younger audience which has no immediate connection to the world wars or to the post-war era of German division. www.altonaer-theater.de

Artistic director: Axel Schneider Dramaturgy: Sonja Valentin, Jan Philipp Reemtsma Musical director: Mathias Christian Kosel Choreography: Malcolm Ranson (GB) Camera: Eric Jacquet (FR) Musician: Natalie Böttcher (RU) Altonaer Theater, Hamburg: 1 Jul. 2018 –17 Jul. 2019

39

Computer Grrrls Exhibition Before the word “computer” was used to describe a machine, it designated an occupation that was largely performed by women at the beginning of the 20th century. Back then, computing was regarded as a woman’s job. In recent years, historians have begun describing these developments and presenting the life stories of important female computer programmers, such as the “Eniac Girls”. But how did computer science become such a male-dominated field? Why has the number of professional female programmers decreased since 1990? And how is society responding to the fact that women as de­ sign­ers of technological developments are marginalised?

The exhibition at the HMKV addresses these questions and presents works which explore the relationship between gender and technology in the past and present. In addition to focusing on central issues, such as cyber-feminism, the curators Inke Arns (HMKV) and Marie Lechner (La Gaîté Lyrique) spotlight new techno-feminist collectives and the feminist hacker scene which has formed in recent years. The project features female artists, hackers and theorists who work to promote an alternative view of technology by questioning the gender trends in the areas of Big Data and artificial intelligence, who are committed to an open and diversified Internet, who develop participative working methods, and who design utopian technologies and proto­ types. Following its run in Dortmund, the exhibition will be shown at La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris where it will be augmented by additional performances.

Visitors at both venues will have the opportunity to attend film screenings, discussions with the artists, and experimental workshops.

Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: Huma, 2017 © courtesy the artist

www.hmkv.de

Curators: Inke Arns, Marie Lechner Artists: Morehshin Allahyari (IR/US), Black Quantum Futurism (US), Hyphen-Labs (US), Kapwani Kiwanga (FR/CA), Tabita Rezaire (FR/ZA), Erica Scourti (UK/GR), Cornelia Sollfrank, Suzanne Treister (UK), VNS Matrix (AU), Pinar Yoldas (TR/US) and others HMKV, Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund: 19 May – 30 Sep. 2018; La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris: 2 Feb. – 5 May 2019

Intelligent Music – Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Special project featuring at the CTM 2018 – Turmoil The CTM Festival is one of the world’s leading festivals of contemporary electronic and experimental music. Since 1999, the organisers have scheduled the programme to coincide with the transmediale festival in Berlin, always focusing on music outside the established Western musical traditions. It sees itself as a platform for reflecting on music, its social relevance and the underlying conditions of its development.

In 2018, the festival turns its attention to the latest technological developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and their implications for the field of music.

Computer technology in music has resulted in automatisation and increasing softwareand machine-aided au- Göttingen tonomy, both of which support musicians with creating, producing and performing music. In certain areas, the capabilities of musical AI and machine-based improvisation systems already surpass the abilities of human musicians. None­theless, the developers do not yet fully understand how these systems produce their results which can be regarded as a form of creative output.

The festival wishes to show­case outstan­ding projects and artists, and present the current state of artistic and commercial research in various concerts and workshops.

Together with composers, musicians and researchers, the festival will invite participants to discuss the potentials and critical dimensions of these technologies in further detail.

www.ctm-festival.de

Artists: Antwood (CA), Dahlia Borsche, Frédérick Belzile (CA), George E. Lewis (US), Holly Herndon (US/DE), Ioann Maria (UK), Lawrence Lek, Marco Donnarumma (IT/DE), Marcus Schmickler, Mat Dryhurst (US/DE), Moritz Simon Geist, Peter Flemming (CA), Peter Kirn (US/DE), Roscoe Mitchell (US) and others Performances and workshops, installations: HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berghain, Festsaal Kreuzberg, Kunstquartier Bethanien and other venues, Berlin: 26 Jan. – 2 Apr. 2018

Wrested from Oblivion Symphonic music by Alexander Weprik The Ukrainian composer Alexander Weprik was a musical child prodigy who received a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory at the age of 24. In the 1920s and 30s, he was one of the best-known So­viet composers on the international scene. Hermann Scherchen conducted his “Dances and Songs of the Ghetto” in Leipzig in 1927, and in 1933, Arturo Toscanini performed his work at New York’s Car-

Symphony Orchestra, photograph: Frank Stefan Kimmel

negie Hall. After the National Socialists seized pow­ er, Weprik all but disappeared from concert hall programmes in Germany on account of his Jewish background. In 1943, he and other Jewish professors at the Moscow Conservatory were dismissed with­ out notice, and in 1950, under Stalin’s rule and with no explicit charges brought against him – was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the gulag.

After his release, he only composed a few pieces before dying prematurely from the effects of his incarceration, and his music sank into oblivion.

To this day, Weprik’s symphonic works remain an undiscovered musical trove. Under the direction of Christoph-Mathias Mueller, the Göttingen Sym­ phony Orchestra (GSO) will present various formats that pay tribute to this undeservedly forgotten composer and ensure that his music becomes accessi­ble to international audiences. As part of a CD re­ cording featuring a representative cross-section of Weprik’s oeuvre, the GSO plans to hold concerts and stage an international symposium on Weprik’s life and works, to which general theatre and music directors, dramaturges, musicologists and Eastern European Studies scholars are invited. A publica­ tion in Russian and German will serve to document the project. www.gso-online.de

Artistic director: Christoph-Mathias Mueller Artists: Göttingen Symphony Orchester CD label: Dabringhaus & Grimm Speakers at the symposium: Jascha Nemtsov (RU), Galina Ivanova (RU), Inna Klause (KZ), Friedrich Geiger Stadthalle (CD recording), Göttingen: 11 – 17 Jun. 2018

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FIND 2018 Festival of International New Drama 2018 The Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin explores a new topic for every edition of its Festival of International New Drama (FIND). In 2018, the festival will highlight the “Art of Forgetting”. The programme’s concept is based on the notion that in every corner of society and in every cultural and political context no matter how diverse, there exists a desire to be forgotten, to have collective and personal traumatic experiences expunged. In reality, suppressing traumas frequently results in an unchecked and unintentional reopening of old wounds; the suppressed ordeals return with a vengeance. Theatre, however, offers us a place where we can apply the “art” of forgetting as a means of coping with traumatic events. In 13 productions from ten countries on three continents, all of which have never been shown before in Germany or are being (co-)produced for the festival for the first time, FIND 2018 will make theatre the venue of memories, a place where suppressed conflicts are allowed to play out. In recent years, the FIND festival has led to the discovery of new productions which made their international breakthrough following their invitation to Berlin.

FIND offers German audiences an overview of the world’s newest trends in theatre and participates in the theatrical investigation of culturally provocative subjects.

To Keep Time from Standing Still Music theatre with Martin Smolka / Jiří Adámek / ensemble ascolta

www.schaubuehne.de

Artistic director: Thomas Ostermeier Artists: Mapa Teatro (CO), Angélica Liddell (ES), Caroline Guiela Nguyen, Rodrigo García (AR), Wajdi Mouawad (LB), Simon Stone (CH), Teatro La María (CL), Ofira Henig (IL) Festival, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin: 6 – 22 Apr. 2018

”Inflammation du verbe vivre“ based on Sophocles’ ”Philoctetes“, text and direction: Wajdi Mouawad (Paris), photograph: Pascal Gely, 2018

Wild Songs Marx’s music On 5 May 1818, Karl Marx was born in Trier. Two hundred years later, his ideas remain the focus of continued debate and discussion. His analyses on the cyclic nature of crises, on globalisation and the alienation of labour have hardly diminished in relevance. The project “Wild Songs” is based on the belief that even music – though seemingly unpolitical – can be described and analysed with Marxist terminology. As an intellectual product, music is an expression of social awareness which is defined and altered by material living conditions. At the same time, Marx regarded composing as an exam­ ple of “truly free”, i.e. unalienated, labour. Not only did music play an important role in his personal life, but he also penned an article for the Rheinische Zeitung, praising Rhenish musical culture. Entitled “Wilde Lieder” (Wild Songs), the young Marx ex­ tolled the power of music in romantic poems. Artists like Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht repeatedly attempted to put Marx’s works to music.

The project “Wild Songs” wishes to musically revivify Marx’s intellectual world and ideals. The project’s organisers have commissioned young composers from around the world to write music which

explores Marx’s themes and analyses, and encou­ rage listeners to perceive music in its societal contexts. Following an international call for scores, seven additional works will be selected for production at commemorative exhibitions in Great Britain and Germany – the two countries where Marx spent most of his life. Works of radiophonic sound art will be integrated into the exhibitions as sound installations.

www.karl-marx-ausstellung.de

Artistic director: Stephan Meier (GB) Curator: Stefan Fricke Musicians: Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (GB) Artists: Robert Reid Allan (GB), Frédéric Pattar (FR), Sergej Newski (RU), Kaspar Querfurth (GB), Ruiqi Wang (CN), Celeste Oram (US) International call for scores, Trier: 7 Jan. – 5 May 2018; sound installations, state exhibition, Trier: 5 May – 21 Oct. 2018; concert world premieres, Museum am Dom, Karl Marx Museum, Therme am Viehmarkt, Trier: 1 – 2 Sep. 2018; debut broadcast by Hessischer Rundfunk: 5 May – 2 Sep. 2018; Second performance in Birmingham (CBSO Centre): 4 Sep. 2018; Second performance in London, (British Library): autumn 2018

This joint project by the composer Martin Smolka and stage director Jiří Adámek combines and experiments with linguistic, musical and performative elements which exemplify “music as speech”, and vice versa “speech as music”. Sentences are broken down into words and syllables, and then inserted into the composition. Through repetition, for example, they demonstrate how individual text segments can mutate into musical elements.

For the project “To Keep Time from Standing Still”, the two Czech artists have developed a format combining concert, theatre and instrumental opera genres. At the invitation of and in close coopera­tion with the ensemble ascolta, the artists have com­ posed a piece which incorporates texts by Franz Kafka, Henry David Thoreau and Jiří Adámek. The artists sought a more profound encounter between speech and music. By concentrating on, reducing or wholly dispensing with external media and augmented technology, they were able to tap the potential of the existing material. Only in rare exceptions did they integrate pure singing, orienting the instrumental parts to the expression, tempo and rhythm of the spoken word. Smolka and Adámek avoided using texts to musically express sweeping, abstract ideas, which led them to the literature by Kafka and Thoreau – both of whom were masters of poetic detail, concrete metaphor and natural acoustic quality.

The world premiere of the project will be performed at the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik (Witten New Chamber Music Festival). www.ascolta.de

Artistic director: Erik Borgir Project manager: Florian Hoelscher Composer: Martin Smolka (CZ) Author: Jiří Adámek (CZ) Musicians: ensemble ascolta Performance venues at the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, Witten: 26 Apr. 2018; Theaterhaus Stuttgart: 5 Jul. 2019; performance venues at the Lucerne Festival: 23 Aug. 2019; Musikakademie Rheinsberg: 13 Sep. 2019

41

Beatriz González Exhibition This exhibition is the first monographic presentation of artworks by the Colombian artist Beatriz González in a European context.

González became widely known in Colombia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, but was only noticed by the rest of the Beatriz González, Naturaleza mesa viva, 1971 world much later. In colla- (Detail), Enamel on metal © courtesy the artist / Laura Jiménez / Juan Rodríguez Varón boration with partners in Bordeaux and Madrid, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin would Elizabeth Hobbs and Carola like to draw attention to this extraordinary artist, Bauckholt incorporate refeand examine issues of cultural transfer between rences from the fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Wife” South America and Europe using her works as an to demonstrate the driving example. The exhibition on González sheds light force of greed. And Susi Jiron her political activities and investigates the artist’s position on specific cultural circumstances in kuff and Joanna Bailie design her country. The project’s organisers hope that the an urban utopia which beexhibition will direct more attention to Latin Amelongs to everyone. Unlike tyrican female artists in Europe. In an extensive acpical concert performances companying publication, González’s works will be with an accompanying film historically reviewed and supplemented by contpresentation, the project emporary perspectives by international curators. wishes to explore new possiBeatriz González, Los Suicidas del Sisga No. 2, 1965 bilities of interaction between The project includes a diverse programme of pub© courtesy the artist / Óscar Monsalve the projections on screen and lic discussions and art-historical lectures which serve to examine González’s works within the Latin the performers, as well as challenge the audience The German-American author Irene Dische’s liAmerican art scene and in relation to global deto participate in a “European discussion”. bretto is based on the motifs and characters in Heinrich Hoffmann’s “Shockheaded Peter”. Dische velopments. www.mdjstuttgart.de uses the classic children’s book as a vantage point www.kw-berlin.de Artistic director: Sven Hartberger from which she casts a view on the everyday life and Artistic directors: Maria-Inés the situation of children today, their suffering and Artists: Michelle Kranot (DK), Iris ter Schiphorst, Rodriguez (FR), Manuel Borja-­ non-conformity. The British composer David RoSamantha Moore (UK), Malin Bång (SE), Rebecca Villel (ES), Krist Gruijthuijsen bert Coleman set the libretto to music for an orBlöcher, Eva Reiter (AT), Amelie Loy (AT), chestra, four singers and three instrumental soloists Artist: Beatriz González (CO) Misato Mochizuki (JP/FR), Elizabeth (double bass flute, accordion and electric guitar).

KW Institute for ContemHobbs (UK), Carola Bauckholt and Post-minimalism and the hyper music of classical porary Art, Berlin: others animation films serve as the musical reference 13 Oct. – 16 Dec. 2018 Theaterhaus Stuttgart: 10 Feb. 2019; points in this music theatre production. additional performances in Brussels, Vienna and other cities www.quillo.net

For the Common Good Twenty women artists initiate a European discussion on the future of the world The Austrian political scientist Christian Felber developed a concept for a new economic order, an “economy for the common good” which benefits everyone. Instead of focusing on competition, he calls for an economy based on cooperation, solidarity, and social and environmental responsibility.

Although the European Social and Economic Committee recommended anchoring the “Economy for the Common Good” (ECG) into the legal framework at the EU and national level of its member states, very few people are familiar with the concept in Europe. The project “For the Common Good” takes Felber’s concept as its premise and invites ten European filmmakers and ten European composers to initiate discussion about the future of Europe and the world.

Applying film animation and New Music, the women artists examine the goals of ECG, compare it with reality and invite the public to discuss its consequences. For each project, one composer and one filmmaker team up to address one topic. For example, Michelle Kranot and Iris ter Schiphorst examine the role women play in protests and revolution. Samantha Moore and Malin Bång investigate the usefulness of subsidies to developing countries.

Quillo Shockheaded Peter Revisited Chamber opera by Irene Dische and David Robert Coleman for the Ensemble Quillo The Kammerphilharmonie Uckermark e.V. along with their Ensemble Quillo were founded in Falkenhagen in the Uckermark region in 2004. As the only ensemble for New Music in the state of Brandenburg, the Ensemble Quillo has performed numerous works from the 20th and 21st century, including several world premieres. In addition to staging New Music concerts, the ensemble actively supports music education projects, such as “Junge Opernstätten” (Young Opera Venues) and “Kleines Musiktheater” (Small Music Theatre), as well as cross-genre projects and contemporary music theatre. The ensemble has also guest-performed at the Staatsoper Berlin in Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón” and the youth opera “Hans im Glück” (Hans in Luck).

The Ensemble Quillo is now developing and producing a bilingual chamber opera, scheduled to premiere in Brandenburg in 2019 with subsequent performances planned in Potsdam, Frankfurt (Oder) and Belfast.

Composer: David Robert Coleman Author: Irene Dische (US) Artistic director: Ursula Weiler Stage director: Walter Sutcliffe (GB) Ensemble Quillo: Ursula Weiler (flute), Daniel Göritz (guitar), Dominic Oelze (percussion) Chamber orchestra of the Brandenburg Symphoniker, chamber orchestra of the Northern Ireland Opera Theater Brandenburg, Brandenburg: 27 Sep., 2 Oct. 2019; Hans Otto Theater, Potsdam: 12 Oct. 2019; Kleistforum, Frankfurt (Oder): 18 Oct. 2019; Northern Ireland Opera, Belfast: 6, 8, 11, 14 Dec. 2019

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END CREDITS

How the Nazis destroyed German cinema G. P. Straschek (1942–2009) was a filmmaker and film historian. The exhibition “HERE AND NOW” pre­sents his cinematic works, including his legendary A Western for the SDS which was believed to have been lost since its confiscation by the East German autho­rities in 1968. The main focus of the exhibition is Straschek‘s television series Film Emigration from Nazi Germany (WDR 1975). Even in his days as a film student, Straschek was intrigued by the expulsion of Jewish and left-wing film artists during the Nazi years, and by the 1970s, he had made the topic the focus of his life’s work. For a planned lexicon, he had created biographical profiles on 2,800 individuals.

The result was a collective narrative about fleeing, starting over again and sometimes returning home.

Five unforgettable hours of television history which viewers have not seen since its original broadcast in 1977. The documentary features 50 émigrés who tell their personal stories – people like John Brahm, Renata Lenart and Lotte H. Eisner.

Preston Sturges hired him to do the film adaptation of Colomba. They prepared the movie for over a year. Sturges wrote the screenplay. It turned out that Sturges was an outstanding screenwriter and good producer, but he couldn’t keep his nose out of directing and always had to put in his two­ cent’s worth. The slow pro­gress and disarray came to the attention of Howard Hughes, who was Sturges’ partner. And Hughes, as everyone knows, was a difficult man. The whole thing came to a head in October 1946 – Sturges, Ophüls and I were kicked out.

The movie was finished by another director. I never watched it.”

“If it’s possible, then I’m leaving.”

John Brahm, director “I was baptised, my father was a Jew. I never knew anything about religion, my parents were completely unreligious and that’s how I was brought up. I went on tour with Dolly Haas who made it big with an Italian play in Scampolo. We travelled to every town and village where Dolly Haas had a name: Switzerland, Czechoslovakia and all of Germany. Because I was the producer, I was responsible for paying the bills, every night. One day a man came up to me – I think it was in Chemnitz – and he said, ‘Your name won’t be on the programme for very much longer.’ I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, Brahm, that’s a Jewish name.’ That was when I said to myself, ‘If this is possible, then I’m leaving.

Something bad is going to happen.’ So in 1934, I got in my small Steyr with all the money I could take with me – because they wouldn’t let you take any money unless you were travelling – and I started all over again in England.”

“Sturges, Ophüls and I were kicked out.”

Renata Lenart, secretary “I worked as a secretary for Max Ophüls. He had been in Hollywood since 1941. Things hadn’t gone well for him for five years – despite being so well-known, he just couldn’t get a job. He kept trying to produce remakes of his old movies through Enterprise. I was working as a freelance secretary, and he was one of my bosses. In 1945,

Lotte Eisner

Renata Lenart

HERE AND NOW at the ­Museum ­Ludwig Günter Peter Straschek.

Emigration – Film – Politics­

John Brahm

“You didn’t know who to shake hands with.”

Lotte H. Eisner, Filmhistorikerin “I got to know Henri Langlois in 1933–34. He collected old films which were usually just thrown away back then. He wrote me: Get out of Montpellier now! I had someone make me a fake carte at the time, so I travelled to Figeac. First, I was at a castle where we hid our films from the Cinémathèque, in the oubliettes (dungeons) under the hay. But eventually I had to leave when the people started asking, who are these secretive strangers? The pastor said: I’ve got a job for you as a cook at a girl’s high school. I stayed there for six months, cooking for 83 people. I had a helper, but whenever there were frozen potatoes to peel, she always said, ‘I have to go to mass’.

After the war, I got a job at the Cinémathèque Francaise where I became conservatrice en chef (head curator). I was interested in historical research. As an archaeologist and art historian, I was used to research and stylistic development. In 1953, I was sent to Berlin to attend the film festival.

The city had changed so much.

You didn’t know who to shake hands with.”

Günter Peter Straschek (1942–2009) was one of the first to research German exile cinema and is still widely regarded as one of the great pioneers in this field. As part of its “Here and Now” series, the Museum Ludwig will dedicate an exhibition to Straschek based on the extraordinary and now largely forgotten WDR documentary “Film Emigration from Nazi Germany” (1975). The documentary film (229 min.) presents the life stories of some one thousand film artists – directors, producers, camera operators, cutters, actors, scriptwriters, critics and film historians – who went into exile during the years of National Socialism. Straschek demonstrates an exemplary capacity for portraying the interviewees and discussing flight, exile and assimilation. His choice of aesthetic means far exceeds the economic constraints of television and reflects the influence of the filmmakers Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.

In addition to presenting the film, the Museum Ludwig also plans to feature materials from Straschek’s archive. The exhibition shows the extent of his research endeavours and the precision with which his private archive was created for want of support from state agencies.

The exhibition is accompanied by a film programme at the Filmforum NRW featuring Straschek‘s early films, his working environment at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in Berlin (Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki, Helke Sander) and films by exiled filmmakers. Based on these films, the exhibition portrays the impact of avant-garde filmmaking on contemporary art.

The project contains diverse references to the collection at the Museum Ludwig which owns numerous classical modernist works by artists who went into exile or suffered persecution in Germany. The accompanying catalogue offers a detailed look at Straschek’s filmmaking and journalistic activities. www.museum-ludwig.de

Artist: Günter Peter Straschek Museum Ludwig, Cologne: 3 Mar. – 1 Jul. 2018

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Our Stage 4th European Civic Theatre Festival The first German-European civic theatre festival debuted in 2004 at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden with the support of the Federal Cultural Foundation. Since then, civic theatre festivals have steadily gained significance in Germany’s theatre scene. Civic theatres work with non-professional actors. The Civic Theatre Festival sees itself as a showcase of high-quality participative theatre and a forum for debate about its artistic qualities and social relevance. In the previous three editions of the festival, the organisers focused on German participative theatre in terms of the programme and the target audience, but over time, European impulses have become more and more impor­ tant. Like in Germany where numerous civic theatres have established a working group representing 24 member theatres under the aegis of the German Stage Association, the rise and organisation of participative theatre in other European countries has followed a similar development. The organisers had already forged contacts to their European counterparts in the three previous editions of the festival – contacts which have been activated for the project “Our Stage”. The 4 th European Civic Theatre Festival has an explicitly international focus that encourages dialogue about the forms, content and experience of civic theatre, and serves to create a European network which strength­ ens the development of participative theatre on the whole. For this reason, the festival is cooperating with the ETC − European Theatre Convention, an association of 40 theatres from over 20 European nations which aims to concentrate more strongly on participative theatre in the coming years. A total of eleven productions will be selected for presentation at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden by the experienced curator Miriam Tscholl with support from a six-member European artistic council. The jury will give equal consideration to German and European independent theatre and performance productions. Some 30 artists, theatre directors and researchers of diverse disciplines from at least ten European nations will be invited to participate in workshops, lectures and discussions on artistic, social and political issues related to participa­ tion and theatre.

Cuba emprende – A Family Affair Or the Museum of Revolution in the Age of Privatisation – theatre performance The revolutionary leader Fidel Castro is dead, the Rolling Stones played in Havanna, President Obama paid an official visit – Cuba has opened its doors and is changing with the times. The theatre project “Cuba emprende” makes use of this extra­ ordinary situation and asks where the country is heading 60 years after the Revolution. It starts by investigating an emblem of Cuban identity: the Cuban family, or the “familia compuesta” – a community of distant relatives, lovers and divorcees who live together under one roof for lack of available alternative housing.

Together with a group of young theatre artists who call themselves “Laboratorio IBSEN”, Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll) went on a fact-seeking mission and spoke with two kinds of Cuban experts: the “combatientes” (revolutionaries) and the “cuentapropistas” (self-employed people), each of whom often belong to different generations of one family.

The former fought for the goals of the revolution all their lives, while the latter embrace capitalism as fiercely as their grandparents once did the revolution. Yet both social models have arguably produced similar results. For instance, what makes the shared housing in communist Cuba, the private restaurants or ridesharing in ramshackle American

www.staatsschauspiel-­­ dresden.de

Artistic director: Miriam Tscholl Artists: Anestis Azas & Prodomos Tsinikoris (GR), Jérôme Bel (FR), Nuran David Calis, Common Wealth (GB), Marta Górnicka (PL), Royston Maldoom (GB) Concept workshop ETC Dresden, Staatsschauspiel Dresden: 7 – 10 Feb. 2018; first meeting of the artistic advisory board: 13 – 14 Apr. 2018; second meeting of the artistic advisory board: 26 – 27 Oct. 2018; civic theatre festival, Staatsschauspiel Dresden: 17/18 and 25/26 May 2019

Foreign Homeland, photograph: Jürgen Berger, original: private

sedans so very different than the prototypes of AirBnB, couchsurfing and Uber? This question is the catalyst for the theatre laboratory to research a Cuban film archive, produce a film on modern-day Cuba, and listen to people whose lives are caught up in ideological combat. The project elevates the smallest possible community – the family – as a basis for reappraising Cuban history and discovering lessons we can learn from Cuba today for the world tomorrow. www.rimini-protokoll.de

Artistic director: Stefan Kaegi Dramaturgy: Yohayna Hernández González (CU), Aljoscha Begrich Camera: Marta María Borrás (CU) Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin: 22 – 24 Mar. 2019

Pátria Estrangeira / Foreign Homeland Brazilian-German theatre project by Jürgen Berger, Mirah Laline & ensemble The Brazilian-German co-production “Foreign Homeland” tells the story of descendants of German immigrants in Brazil. In and around Brazil’s metropolitan region of Porto Alegre, there are numerous people of German descent in every social class.

In fact, 30 percent of all inhabitants of that state have German ancestors who came to Brazil from Germany in several waves over the past 200 years. In the 19 th century, the majority of German immigrants were poor farmers, while during the global financial crisis around 1920, most of the new arrivals were working class families.

Later, Brazil was a destination for those who suffered persecution under the Nazis, and after the war, former Nazis sought refuge there to escape prosecution. German is still spoken in some immigrant families even today.

Against this background, the German author Jürgen Berger is re­ searching for and writing a play which will be directed by the Brazilian stage director Mirah Laline.

Together with the performers, actors and musicians, Laline will use biographical information and interviews to create a docu-fictional piece about homeland and belonging, but also immigration and integration policy issues. For exam­ ple, how does identity-building work in families with an immigrant background? To what degree do members of immigrant communities position themselves conservatively against their new homeland?

And what parallels can we draw to the current situation in Germany?

Performances will be staged in Porto Alegre and Karlsruhe with additional guest performances planned in Germany and Switzerland.

44 www.staatstheater.karlsruhe.de

Author: Jürgen Berger Stage director: Mirah Laline (BR) Video: Maurício Casiraghi (BR) Production managers: Daniela Mazzilli (BR), Primeira Fila Produções Artistic director / dramaturgy: Jan Linders Ensemble: Camila Falcão (BR), Martina Fröhlich (BR), Karin Salz Engel (BR), Philipe Philippsen (BR), Luis Quintana Goethe-Institut Porto Alegre: 30 Aug. 2018 – 7 Sep. 2019; Staatstheater Karlsruhe, Studio: 21 – 23 Sep. 2018 and 26 – 28 Apr. 2019

Invisible Republic ­(Revolutionary Review) Andcompany&Co. revisits 100 years of revolution: 2018–1968–1918 When we look back at 1968, what is our impression?

Is it a date in a history book, a turning point, a mythical time? Exactly fifty years later, the performers of the theatre collective andcompany&Co. are developing a piece that addresses these questions. The group andcompany&Co. is known for artistically exploring historical and political themes and has developed a theatre language of its own, shaped by pop culture. In 2018, the performers embark on a theatrical research expedition through Europe in search of the spirit and the ghosts of the past revolutions of the 20 th century.

The first stop on their tour will be Frankfurt am Main where they will speak with contemporary witnesses of 1968 and work as artists in residence at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm. The expedition will then continue through France and along the German-French border, where they will develop a theatrical intervention with the French director Phillipe Quesne. In Sofia they will join the ACT Independent Theatre Festival to investigate the history of the World Youth Festival which took place in Sofia in 1968. Additional stops are planned in Prague and St. Petersburg. The Access Point festival and the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg will support the performers’ research efforts and organise interviews with contemporary witnesses on location.

At every stop, the collective will stage artistic interventions and produce videos. These will serve as the source material for a stage production which will premiere in St. Petersburg and later at the HAU in Berlin. www.andco.de

Artistic directors: Alexander Karschnia, Nicola Nord, Sascha Sulimma Artists: andcompany&Co. Set and costume design: Janina Audick Video: Kathrin Krottenthaler Residence equipment: Raul Walch Performers: Nina Kronjäger, Mira Partecke, Claudia Splitt Residence, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main: 30 Apr. – 20 May 2018; lecture / happening, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main: 5 May 2018; preview, Alexandrinsky Festival, St. Petersburg: 28 – 30 Sep. 2018; performance at HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin: 12 – 17 Oct. 2018; performance at the ACT Festival, Sofia: 10 – 11 Nov. 2018; performance at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main: beginning of November 2018; performance at FFT, Düsseldorf: 25 – 26 Jan. 2019; performance at brut, Vienna: 8 – 9 Feb. 2019

Hinterland A hostile takeover The geographical term “hinterland” has several meanings. It can describe the rural outskirts of large metropolitan cities. Statistics show that those who live in the “hinterland” generally earn lower incomes and are not as highly educated. In military circles, the term defines the area behind the front lines. “Hinterland” can also have a psychological connotation, expressing a frame of mind which is shared by certain segments of society and manifests itself in feelings of fear, powerlessness or rage.

The interdisciplinary project by the Wiesbaden Biennale 2018 symbolically situates the “hinterland” in the centre of Wiesbaden. Eight international artists of various generations are developing interventions at locations around the city which exa­ mine the collective emotions and self-images of our society. The American photographer Roger Ballen’s installation plays in a vacant shopping arcade, underscoring the fear of social decline and loss of control. The Swedish architect and installation artist Thomas Bo Nilsson takes a radical approach to investigating the significance of cultural institutions. In rooms wrecked by vandalism, the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué conjures the illusion of civil war – a mirror world of imagination and manipulation. The contribution by the Spanish concept artist Santiago Sierra visualises people’s fear of foreigners and creates a tangible expression of the powerful desire for isolation. www.wiesbaden-biennale.eu www.staatstheater-wiesbaden.de

Artistic directors: Maria Magdalena Ludewig & Martin Hammer Photographer: Roger Ballen (US) Participating artists: Roger Ballen (US/SA), Katy Biard (UK), Samira Elagoz (FI), Vincent Glowinski (FR), Rabih Mroué (LB), Kim Noble (GB), Santiago Sierra (ES) Interventions, public space, Wiesbaden & Rhine-Main region: 16 Aug. – 2 Sep. 2018; Installations, performances, interventions, City Passage, Reisinger Anlagen, Hessisches Staatstheater, Wiesbaden: 23 Aug. – 2 Sep. 2018

Publication of Hannah Höch’s Address Book Symposium and visit to the artist’s residence The Berlin Dada artist and collagist Hannah Höch (1889–1978) kept an address book for over six decades – from 1917 to 1978. Composed like a collage, she created an approximately 350-page compendium listing her numerous contacts to fellow artists and gallery owners, architects, writers, art critics and philosophers. Her address book contains more than 1,400 notable names, e.g. Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Lyonel Feininger, El Lissitzky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Hans Scharoun, Oskar Schlemmer and many more. The book accompanied her throughout her long life and through some of the most tumultuous chapters of German and European history. The first entries originated during the era of the German Empire and were followed by new addresses in the 1920s. She kept the information up to date during the Nazi regime, during which time she was vilified as a cultural Bolshevist, and continued building on it in the post-war years of inner emigration on the northern outskirts of Berlin until her death. The publication of the elaborately restored address book was the final missing piece of the otherwise entirely published Höch estate. The Berlin-based Transit-Verlag will publish excerpts of her address book containing some 500 names along with descriptions of their personal connection to Höch, supplemented by 77 facsimiles of the original address book pages, as well as photos, letters and images of various artworks.

Höch lived in the Netherlands for several years during the 1920s, for which reason the project will organise an art-historical symposium at the Dutch Embassy where scholars will discuss Hanna Höch’s life and works, as well as the restoration and significance of her address book. www.transit-verlag.de

Author: Harald Neckelmann Participants: Hanne Bergius, Jula Dech, Christine Fischer-Defoy, Anita Knop, Tanja Samrotzki, Danny Verbaan (NL) Dates: 21 Sep. 2018 – symposium, Dutch Embassy, 20. Aug. 2018 – book publication, Berlin, 21 Sep. 2018, visit to the residence of Hannah Höch, Berlin

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A STORY ON EVERY PAGE Hannah Höch’s Address Book

Paul Dresler Grootenburg Pottery Workshop Krefeld, Violstr. 93 Tel 24625 Doesburg. Rue D’Arcueil 2, Villa Corot, Paris 14.

Delauney Sonja. Paris, Bulv. Malesherbes 19.

Nelly’s mother, den Haag, ­Violenweg 16. Tel. 51137

Doorn (­sent by Kurt Schwitters) Haag, Laan Copes 145 Haag C. Domela-Nieuvenhuis Berlin Pommerschestr. 12a.

Uhland 5119.

Hamburg Mittelweg 151 near ­Hamburg 2 Danilo Stuttgart, ­Deutsche Auto-Versicherungs A.G. ­Goethestr. 14 private: (…) Werastr. 60.

Hannah Höch's address book, 1917-1978, estate of Hanna Höch, scan: Berlinische Galerie

Dresler, Paul (*1879, Siegen – †1950, Krefeld, ceramics artist), Krefeld.

Dresler is one of the best-known ceramics artists of the 20th century. He influenced the design of ceramic vessels like no other in the period between the two world wars. With financing provided by the city of Krefeld, he founded the “Grottenburg Pottery Workshop” in 1913/14. van Doesburg, Theo (*1883, Utrecht – †1931, Davos, Dutch painter, writer, architect, sculptor, typographer, art theorist), Clamart, Strasbourg, Paris.

Doesburg was the founder of the Dutch De Stijl movement. He and Hannah Höch were friends and often discussed artistic matters on a theoretical level.

Höch was also very close to his wife Nelly who was known under pseudonym Pétro (née van Moorsel; 1899 –1975).

Nelly was a Dutch dancer and pianist.

Raoul Hausmann first introduced Höch to the Doesburgs. The Dadaist and Constructivist Congress which Doesburg organised in Weimar on 25-27 September 1922 was the last major

Dadaist class reunion. Höch was also invited but couldn’t attend as she was in Upper Bavaria at the time. In April 1924, Höch visited the Doesburgs in Paris who “never tired of acquainting me with the Parisian art world, and we visited one studio after another”. On a calling card, Doesburg praised Höch as “une artiste sincére et devouée” (“a sincere and dedicated artist”). One photo shows Nelly van Doesburg in Höch’s studio posing nude in front of the mirror. She is holding the artist’s Dada dolls on her lap. It appears Nelly stood as a model for Höch on several occasions.

Nelly’s mother. Reference to Nelly van Doesburg’s mother.

Delaunay-Terk, Sonia (née. Stern, *1885, Gradischsk – †1979, Paris, Russian-French painter, designer), Paris. Delaunay-Terk was the wife of the French avant-garde painter Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) who also wrote treatises on art theory. She was friends with the writer Tristan Tzara and

designed the costumes for his play “Le coeur à gaz”. Höch made some notes before travelling to Paris in 1925 to ask Delaunay about fabric patterns. Höch jotted the following: “Paint surface in one colour (possibly black) and when completely dry, apply radiant colours with palette knife.”

Doorn (sent by Kurt Schwitters), Den Haag.

Domela-Nieuwenhuis, César (Ces) (*1900, Amsterdam – †1992, Paris, Dutch painter, graphic artist, photographer). Domela-Nieuwenhuis moved to Berlin in 1920. His abstract pictures were shown in the exhibitions of the November Group. As a member of De Stijl, Domela-Nieuwenhuis kept in regular contact with Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian in Paris.

Between 1927 and 1933, he worked in Berlin as a commercial photographer.

After the Nazis seized power, he moved to Paris permanently.

Danilo (Höch) (Höch jun., Friedrich (Fritz), 1891–1975, nicknamed Danilo; brother) Stuttgart, Düsseldorf. Hannah Höch’s younger brother Danilo was married to Luise (Liese) Höch with whom he had a daughter named Eva-Maria (Evchen). Hannah Höch trusted him. On 23 January 1938, Höch wrote the following about her brother: “He is the only one who thinks about me once in a while and shows something of personal interest – of all my siblings.”

When World War II began, Höch stopped writing to her friends in exile.

She remained in close contact, though, with her brother. “Even my last remaining friends left and could no longer be reached by letter. I didn’t send anything to exhibitions for the longest time.

Nobody trusted each other. You didn’t talk to people anymore. You forgot the language.” After her brother’s second divorce, the artist told him: “I’ll paint you a beautiful woman who will stay with you forever.”

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im/possible ­bodies A project on the decolonisation of the body, sexuality and perception at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main The “Sexual Revolution” was born fifty years ago this year, and with it came a lasting, fundamental process of liberalisation which continues today – from the introduction of the birth control pill to the legalisation of same-sex marriages. With each new development, heated public debate always followed. In metropolitan cities, queer life­ styles have become established and continue to enjoy a growing following. But according to the project “im/possible bodies”, this development masks other forms of wide­ spread discrimination, for example, against transgender people. Despite unarguable success stories, sexual liberalisation is largely limited to white, heterosexual Westerners and rarely applies to minorities. Indeed, very little focus has been placed on the reciprocal relationship between heteronormativity and colonialism, as well as other related forms of societal heteronomy. This is where the project “im/possible bodies” begins; it lends a voice to those who are marginalised and overlooked, those who are queer, black and of colour. The project hopes to generate long-term artistic dialogue in dance and performance which highlights and artistically presents the body as a stage of social and colonial confrontation.

Starting in December 2017, the project will host several artists’ conferences, residencies and art presentations at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm and other venues in Frankfurt am Main and Birmingham. The main event of the project, the “im/possible bodies” festival and follow-up symposium, will take place in April 2018. www.mousonturm.de

Artistic director: Elisa Liepsch Artists: niv Acosta (US), Fannie Sosa (AR), Simone Dede Ayivi, Nuray Demir/ Tümay Kılınçel, Danny Banany, Andrez/Barra/Caio/Fernanda/ Gui/Iaci/Luiz/Tereza (BR), Last Yearz Interesting Negro (UK), Jaamil Olawale Kosoko (US), Aaron Wright (UK) and others “im/possible bodies” festival at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main: 16 – 30 Apr. 2018; artist-in-residence programme, showings and symposium leading up to and featuring at the Fierce Festival in Birmingham 2018/19

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, photograph: Andrew Amorim

Brandenburg Concerts Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker / Amandine Beyer / Rosas / B‘Rock Orchestra The Brandenburg Concerts by Johann Sebastian Bach are among the composer’s most popular, non-religious works. Each concert is an experiment that tests the limits of the genre and constantly combines the courtly instrumental complement in new and different ways. For the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, famous for her analytical treatment of music, Bach’s piece represents a constant in her own artistic work. But unlike her earlier Bach-based pieces, she is working together with a large ensemble for this production.

In order to sharpen and increase the visibility of the connection between choreography and music, De Keersmaeker assigns a dancer to each solo instrument. In so doing, she refers to one of her own innovative artistic approaches, i.e. demonstrating that the act of music-making possesses a unique equivalent in dance. The musicians of the B’Rock Orchestra will perform the piece under the direction of the French conductor Amandine Beyer. Specialised in historical performance practice; the orchestra always strives to combine ancient music with theatre, dance or the fine arts in their concerts.

Following its world premiere in Berlin, the production will go on tour through Europe and North America. www.volksbuehne.berlin

Artistic director: Marietta Piekenbrock Choreography: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (BE) Musical director: Amandine Beyer (FR) Set design: Jan Versweyveld (BE) Costume design: An D’Huys (BE) Dramaturgy: Jan Vandenhouwe (BE) Dancers: Boštjan Antončič (SI), Carlos Garbin (BR), Frank Gizycki (FR), Marie Goudot (FR), Robin Haghi (SE), Cynthia Loemij (NL), Mark Lorimer (UK), Michaël Pomero (FR), Jason Respilieux (BE), Igor Shyshko (BY), Luka Švajda (HR), Jakub Truszkowski (PL), Thomas Vantuycom (BE), Samantha van Wissen (NL), Sandy Williams (CA), Sue-Yeon Youn (KR) Musicians: B’Rock Orchestra (BE) Four performances, Volksbühne Berlin: 13 – 16 Sep. 2018 co-produktion, P.A.R.T.S., La Monnaie / De Munt, Brussels and other venues

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