Magazine #27 of the Federal Cultural Foundation / Kulturstiftung des Bundes

Autum Nº 2 n / Wi nter 2 7 016

World

2 EDITORIAL The world is all that is the case. And indeed, the German Federal Cultural Foundation funds projects all around the world. As our readers might know, in order to receive funding, projects not only have to be visible in Germany, but also possess an international dimension and optimally, the potential to ­generate global attention. It might seem that some of our national programmes don’t quite fit this definition. For instance, there is the programme City ­Companions – Fund for City Museums in New Partnerships, or TRAFO – Models for Culture in Transformation, or 360° – Fund for New City Cultures. But at a closer look, one can easily identify their international aspects.

By supporting cultural institutions in Germany with implementing suitable ­concepts that respond to demographic change in a progressively internationalised society, the Foundation is doing its part to address issues and topics that have arisen as our world has grown closer and more interconnected.

In our last issue, we devoted a large section to the culture of the Sinti and Roma which is deeply rooted in many European countries. We are proud to support the often unacknowledged independence and individualism of these artists through the Rom­ Archive project. In this issue, we turn our attention to collaborative projects, funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, with non-European artists. It’s impossible to discuss these projects without highlighting their heterogeneity. On pages 6 to 16, we present projects and backgrounds of Mexican, Korean, Iranian and Indian artists and cultural producers. Despite their differences, the one thing they all have in common are their portrayals of the difficulties facing creative artists and how large a role expressive forms play in social processes of transformation. The African continent is also represented here; the German edition of our magazine includes the latest issue of the magazine Chimurenga Chronic, a publication we’ve been funding through the TURN – Fund for Artistic Cooperation between Germany and African Countries in recent years. For each issue of our magazine, we ­commission an artist to produce a photo spread.

Most of the photos featured in this issue were produced in Africa by the documenta artist Akinbode Akinbiyi, one of the most remarkable photographers in Germany at present and winner of the Goethe Medal, recently awarded in Weimar.

This issue also includes several feature articles on exhibitions and their central themes which we hope will encourage a kind of “global turn” in the museum sector. How can museums modernise their operations and prepare for the future in response to a world in which artistic relationships and interaction are becoming ever closer? The curatorial team responsible for the exhibition Postwar at the Haus der Kunst in Munich under the direction of Okwui Enwezor offers a new take on the post-war history of the fine arts. By radically detaching its history from the Western narrative, the exhibition impressively demonstrates how much we stand to gain by expanding Western art historiography to include a global perspective (p. 25). Three other renowned museums, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main and the Nationalgalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, are thoroughly investigating their collections under the motto Changing Museums and presenting them in new international (art-)historical contexts which have received far too little attention until now. Monica

Juneja, a Heidelberg professor and internationally renowned researcher in the field of “Global Art History”, outlines the possibilities and requirements of globally oriented curatorial concepts which innovative museums are having to address today (p. 29).

You may wonder why we conclude with the a­ rticle that opens this issue, namely an essay by the ­Russian writer and activist Maria Stepanova (p. 4). She ponders the causes that are driving nationalist and ­populist movements in Europe which fear the increasing “worldliness” of our continent. That, sadly, is the case, too. Artists might not be better at knowing how much is at stake for us, but they usually sense it earlier than others. And as they trace their path into the future, we, the Federal Cultural Foundation, are happy to accompany them on their way.

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

3 CONTENT

NEW PROJECTS

On the Brink of the Unmodern Age What face would today’s conservative trend be wearing? The face of a rejuvenated dark sorcerer.

— An essay by Maria Stepanova Page 4

Female Voice of Iran Festival of female Iranian musicians Ayşe Erkmen & Mona Hatoum Displacements Planet B 100 ideas for a new world Together Apart Choreographic approaches to European cohesion GOOD SPACE – Political, Aesthetic and Urban Spaces Crossing Media Natural Time Nature in the age of its technical reproduction Woman_Architect For over 100 years: Women in the architectural profession You May Also Like – Robert Stadler Solo exhibition Tetsumi Kudo Retrospective Uncertain States Artistic action in states of emergency Armed and Dangerous On the influence of the military and violence in everyday life Planetary Consciousness Musical performance Sensibilities Festival on homosexuality and literature Hybrid Layers Branding, network identity, innovative materials and new forms of presentation The World without Us Narratives of the non-human era The Moving Museum Arrivals and departures TECHNE Production platform for live art and media art Cage, Maierhof, Radigue @ klub katarakt 2017 World premieres and debuts in Hamburg Silent Songs into the Wild Franz Schubert – Staged concert Poem of a Cell Triptych of love and ecstasy Nadia International theatre project highlighting the reasons for fleeing PLAY! zeitkratzer plays She She Pop ¡Adelante!

Iberian-Latin American theatre festival Gypsies An international theatre project about the Roma in Europe africologne Festival 2017 An artistic platform for transnational exchange in an African-European network Eurotopia Eight artists. Eight international statements Terra Mediterranea: In Action German-Cypriot cooperation project The Self-Made Aristocracy A communitarian theatre and dance project by “La Fleur” Transit Europa An international cultural project Thicker Than Water Familial concepts in contemporary art Exil Ensemble An ensemble of refugees

I am 132 ... 133 134 135 Civil society in Mexico is bravely fighting a battle against everyday violence. One of its weapons is culture. Peter B. Schumann introduces us to the protagonists of this creative resistance.

Page 6 Two poems by Luis Felipe Fabre Page 8/9 When the Wave Crashes K-Drama, K-Pop, K-Fashion, K-Art. Despite the overwhelming success of Korean culture, Young-jun Tak takes a critical look at the status of artists in his country.

Page 10 What we wish for with all our hearts Marc Sinan and Iva Bittová discuss the musical theatre project “Rajasthan” – an artistic journey to the mythical origins of the Roma in search of their music.

Page 12 The Female Voice of Iran Why aren’t women allowed to sing solo on stage?

An Iranian writer describes the relentless struggle for musical equality in her home country.

Seite 15 New Projects Page 17–20 I WONDER AS I WANDER PHOTOGRAPHS BY AKINBODE AKINBIYI Inlay The Sazlı Melaike “Aziz had mended the sequined miniskirt and could finally slip it on. His eyes were already heavily made up, but he felt they needed much more. ...”

— A short story by Ahmet Sami Özbudak Page 21 What Could Global Modernism Look Like?

Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel and Ulrich Wilmes on the world as a global network of relationships from the perspective of art.

Page 25 Beyond the Glass Wall The art historian Monica Juneja examines the challenges and opportunities of globalism for art museums.

Page 29 On Eccentric Modernism, Global Resonances and Simultaneities Examples of how the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-­ Westfalen, the Nationalgalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin and the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt are opening their collections to non-Western artists.

Page 30 New Projects Page 32–37 Committees & Imprint Page 38

AN ESSAY BY MARIA STEPANOVA

4

On the Brink

of the

Unmodern Age

5 n the Soviet Union, the writer Evgeny Schwartz was considered a teller of fairy tales, and it was perhaps this circumstance – while his friends and contemporaries were censured and executed one after another – that enabled him to survive, that is, to live until his natural, not prematurely inflicted death. He wrote popular plays about dragons, naked kings and bears which one might have taken for light entertainment – or at a closer look, one might have discovered ­between the cracks and gaps in the text the subtle, pointed allusions to the rapidly darkening political reality of the times, perhaps even the darkness in himself, lying in wait to ambush the reader. In 1940, Schwartz wrote a story that would later be included in almost every reading book. Its title, Tales of the Lost Time, sounds surprisingly Proustian, but its narrative is straightforward: Evil sorcerers steal the time allotted to children in their childhood, turning them into wrinkly, old people. The sorcerers become children, who once again enjoy a carefree life between ice-skating and slacking off on homework. In order to retrieve what has been stolen from them, the heroes must turn back the hands of the clock seventy-seven times to when the children were still children and the villains were old sorcerers.

The conservative shift we have been seeing recently has no uniform face, but if it did, it would be the face of such a rejuvenated sorcerer: unnaturally childlike, with dimples and blond curls, a face from an advertising poster, chimera of a strange futuristic fantasy from a time when Schwartz wrote his story and Auden, from across the ocean, realised that Europe had suddenly joined the ranks of the darkened lands of the earth.

For a long time, it seemed as if this face had disappeared forever. The post-war world – and in this point, the West and the Soviet Union, Europe and America hardly differ – was committed to learning from its past mistakes and building a system which would prevent it from repeating them in the future.

Professorships and school classes, generations of intellectuals, all of the powerful machinery of culture worked on this “Never again!”. Remembrance, knowledge, vigilance – these were the watchwords of the hour.

About a year ago I attempted to identify the causes of Russia’s development in recent years, those altered modes of perception (in the sense of Sontag’s “sensibility”), which had made everything possible: the silent majority behind Putin, the war in Ukraine, the politically-motivated trials and the never-ending festivities organised throughout. At the time, it seemed to me that the events in Russia were an extreme case which could not be reproduced under ­different conditions, and therefore, were quite instructive. The basic features of world perception which I tried to grasp appeared very heterogeneous and in their combination, oddly consistent. These were the lingering character traits of a society that had been shaped by an unimaginable history of violence lasting over a century. This specific Russian trait – namely that the trauma cannot be reduced to one borderline experience, but is a chain of such experiences, each of which leads to the next and deepens its severity, a kind of corridor of permanent pain – seems extraordinary to me still.

It is all the more peculiar and bitterly ironic that one year later we find the same traits in the rhetoric and political practice of countries we had only recently regarded, if not as models, then at least as variants of the norm – in the sense of lifestyles held together by the invisible web of an ethical code. Now I see the familiar hybrid pattern here too, the pairing of irreconcilable viewpoints, the inconsistency, the hasty switch of strategies and solutions, the twisting of facts for the purpose of stirring emotions. Even the staginess, the artificiality of it is familiar. One

invokes non-existent precedents, traditions invented out of thin air, and phantoms portrayed like objects of vibrant nostalgia. One claims possession of foreign lines of discourse with no consideration of context or meaning. Truth and lies, good and bad, black and white are mixed together in this logic, blend into one another seamlessly. And all of these truths and untruths speak a language of yesterday. The key word in the slogan “Make America great again” is not the word “great”, but “again”. Imagining the future is not on the agenda, but rather dreaming of the past.

It’s impossible to localise or even describe this “past” because it is not historical – it’s fantastical. It is mainly characterised by happiness and immutability. Stasis as a national policy was the unspoken goal of Putin’s political project – a project solely oriented on an image of a magnificent past which the regime has tried to cobble together as best it can. Until recently, it was hard to imagine that the charm of political re-enactment could attain global potential. But today, it seems even the desire to return to the world of 1913 is already passé. We have never seen so many dystopian and apocalyptic movies as we have in the last twenty years. And we have fully internalised their message: The future is always worse than the present, and therefore, must not be allowed to happen. We must fight it at all costs, or at least ensure that it resembles the past as closely as possible.

The new perception behind this shift-to-theright does not normally see greatness or happiness or even security as something we can look forward to. One can neither obtain it nor inherit it, one can only imitate it. The loftiest goal is perfect imitation, an image of the past, free of subsequent layers, of the traces of globalisation, multiculturalism, of every reference to the universal-human character, to the possibility of working together to achieve a better life.

For a long time, the world did not respond to the idea of change with such helplessness and trepidation as it does today. The moment should stay – not because it is so beautiful, but because we distrust everything that comes afterward; the only thing we can safely hold on to is the past, the terrain of (presumably) exact knowledge, of reliable models.

All of this forms a comprehensive pattern that has nothing in common with 1917 or 1933. It is not about recasting the world in a new design, but rather barring the door from inside. What is currently happening in Russia, Europe and America seems to have more to do with metaphysics than with politics. The development which I’ve been closely observing and which is changing the map of the world is equivalent to a desperate attempt to fight the march of time, to fight the inevitability of aging and decay.

A world no longer in love with its future has no use for the concept of progress, the incremental movement toward something better. The same applies to the concept of newness – not in the sense of the newest gadget, but newness in itself, something unknown, unsettling, which defines our life in terms of courage and responsibility. Rimbaud’s appeal to “be absolutely modern” no longer has a place in this new perception of the world, or perhaps worse, has drifted into the lifestyle and Instagram spheres and has become a parody of itself.

It seems to me that the “Game of the Past” that so many are playing nowadays is partly a product of high culture of recent decades, engendered from exactly that cult of historical remembrance which aimed to prevent the past from repeating itself. The mere idea of an optimistic project has been so thoroughly discredited by National Socialism and communism; dystopias have taken the place of utopias – the ­futuristic visions of the post-war era began with Orwell’s 1984, and they continue today in the same vein.

Culture saw its obligation as one of learning from the

6

I am

mistakes of the past, and this may have caused us to concentrate on the past far more than the world could handle. I’m referring here to my own, but by no means only personal conduct. The past is of primary interest to too many of us; it is the optical device through which we view the present, and it’s the language with which we talk about the future. It is possible that the cultural scene, which fosters no sympathy whatsoever for Trump or the Af D, shares a common basis with its followers in this point. The fear of the future, the fascinated view of the past, the distrust of the concept of mutual effort – all of this applies to us as well.

With regard to Schwartz’s story, written on the brink of catastrophe, another detail suddenly comes to mind today. To regain the lost, stolen time one must turn the hands of the clock backwards, seventy-seven times against the current of time and history. The sorcerers have accelerated the time, driven it forward, and in so doing, rejuvenated and refreshed themselves, while artificially aging everyone else. From today’s point of view, from the perspective of that untimely, pitiful age which dwells on memories of better times and which has infected Russia and now Europe, it often seems as if we were moving all too quickly toward the future. For me, one of the most important realisations of the unmodern era lies in the fact that we, the children of history, by trying to turn the clock back, do not gain time, but lose it. If we were to turn back the clock of humanity seventy-seven times, we would find ourselves in 1939. And that is something we must clearly avoid.

Maria Stepanova (*1972) is an international prize-winning poet, essayist and online journalist. In 2007, she became the editor-in-chief of the independent online magazine Open­ space.ru which was renamed COLTA.RU in 2012, a cultural journal entirely financed through sponsoring. The online magazine addresses cultural, social and political issues and has more than 900,000 visitors per month. Maria Stepanova lives in Moscow.

PETER B. SCHUMANN

In a world that recoils from the unknown, the position of the “other” is superfluous at best, if not dangerous. It is replaced by the preferred object of interest, i.e. our people, “people like us”, the “likeminded” – a gallery of busts and reflections, an entire regiment of patterns and precedents, in which the processes of post-modernism are unexpectedly revived. The “other”, on the other hand, is loathed as something indistinctly foreign, lurking in the dark world outside.

132 …

133 134 135

Using culture to combat a culture of violence – not only citizens of Mexico, but also numerous artists are fighting for social transformation in their country. The

expert for Latin American affairs Peter B. Schumann offers his view on this courageous and creative resistance movement.

7 In metre-high letters, dozens of activists wrote the words “Fue el Estado!” (“It was the state!”) on the Zócalo, ­Mexico’s largest demonstration and parade grounds in the heart of the capital in front of the presidential palace. They scrawled their message in over-dimensional lettering so that the media would have to react to it. They wanted to call out the Mexican government for their legal diversionary tactics in shirking responsibility for the kidnapping of 43 students of the Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa.

It was the most spectacular action by the artists’ collective Rexiste thus far. Its name is a direct reference to its slogan “Existo porque resisto” – I exist because I resist. These young people are not only taking their resistance to the streets.

They are also expressing it in graphic works, in a broad range of visual materials. Yet they do not simply revert to the traditional iconography of the leftist movement, to the “red stars and posters of raised fists in black-white-red, because we can no longer identify with what used to be revolutionary.” Instead they have chosen bright, rather flashy colours for their images of those murdered students from Ayotzinapa, for their posters of ­solidarity, animated videos and murals.

Theirs is an art which does not deny the spirit of the times, but rather consciously reacts to it at a political level.

Rexiste follows a long tradition of ­political art in Mexico which reached its height in the 1940s with the Taller de Grárica Popular. Essentially it’s the contemporary expression of this great legacy.

For its part, however, the artists’ collective wishes to have little to do with it. It does not want to be beholden to it, not to history and certainly not to politics.

“We don’t want to be a part of this political system and we keep our distance from all the parties. We want to be free to express our opinion, and in so doing, change reality.”

This distrust toward any form of institutionalised organisation is widespread among socially critical artists, as well as the younger generation of middle-class Mexican society in general. Though they may lack political experience, they have grown up in one of the most violent phases in their country’s recent history. They have experienced and witnessed the wars between drug gangs, how they escalated with the state’s military intervention, how state institutions became perpetrators themselves, how the system of impunity grew more rampant as the judicial system became mired in corruption, how the political class got rich as a result and the traditional political left practically disbanded itself.

Against this backdrop, it is no wonder that a committed group of this younger generation has sought its own path. The movement YoSoy132 (Iam132) is perhaps the most impressive example of their success. In May 2012, they uploaded a video on the Internet which had 131 students holding their IDs to the camera, showing their numbers and names. They wanted to demonstrate solidarity with the student protests against the presidential

candidate at the time, Peña Nieto. He had appeared at a campaign event at the Ibero-American University, assuming he’d be speaking to a friendly crowd at the elite university which hadn’t staged any notable political demonstrations so far.

However, when he was confronted with critical questions which he tried to evade, he was met with fierce protests, forcing Nieto, who is now president, to make a hasty escape. The state-sponsored media responded with a scathing report, describing the protesters as idiots and fascists. These responded to the ­discriminations with their video. Within just a few hours, it was downloaded 20,000 times. Furious posts and tweets were shared via Facebook, Twitter and e-mail. A hashtag appeared and gained an enormous following. Students at many other universities joined the movement and mobilised hundreds of thousands to participate in demonstrations, the likes of which the country had rarely seen. For the first time, a social movement formed in Mexico via the Internet: YoSoy132 (meaning, I am the 132nd of those 131 students who identified with the protest).

At a general assembly, the students formulated the political tradition in which they see themselves. “We do not forget the revolutionary struggles of the worker movements, the campesinos, train workers and doctors. The struggle for university autonomy, the armed social resistance of the 1970s. Nor do we forget the student movement of Tlatelolco in 1968! We are heirs of the fraudulent elections of 1988 and 2006, the economic crises of 1982, 1996 and 2008! We are the heirs of the Zapatista uprising, the Acteal massacre, the unpunished murders of women in Ciudad Juárez and in the state of Mexico! We are part of this history and we demand justice. For this we will fight!

Today and forever, we, the 132nds!”

After the much-anticipated election victory of Peña Nieto, the movement splintered into smaller interest groups.

For many activists, the experience remained strong in their minds and sharpened their awareness. Their impact is still visible on the Internet. Even today they continue experimenting with new possibilities of communication and new political practices. They are no longer investing all of their energy in large-­scale actions, but are focusing rather on ­smaller, target-oriented, more aesthetic ­interventions like that of Rexiste.

They represent a different form of political activity, for example, by trying to intervene in everyday life, like the women’s trio Hijas de violencia (Daughters of Violence). When the three actresses are sexually harassed on the street, they pull out a confetti gun and shoot at the guy while singing their “Sexista Punk”: “Every day the same look / the same gentle words: / Mamacita, sweet little ass, / may I please? / Do you know what you’re doing / is called rape. / I look forward to the day / when I can walk on the street / without having to guard my body. / Sexist, macho, / what do you really want? / To prove your masculinity? / Then get the fuck out of my sight!”

In a country with the world’s highest feminicide rate, they hope to encourage other women to fight back. Their credo, “We don’t think we’ll change the world this way. But we have changed ours” is a message that certainly applies to many other artists.

For this generation, taking on the drug mafia and its culture of violence is not the main focus of its activities. This is something that’s always reported in the media. Rather they are interested in addressing the violence in the political sphere which has produced the narcos, has tolerated or insufficiently combatted them. And their victims – like the students of Ayotzinapa who were kidnapped by a police unit in 2014 and, with the full knowledge of military, were handed over to a drug gang which slaughtered them.

To this day, the perpetrators have yet to be brought to justice. For this young generation, it was a telling example of the failure of their state, or even evidence of its complicity.

The same applies to the collective Másde131 (Morethan131). This group of young journalists, photographers, designers and filmmakers want to expose social injustice which is ignored by the media and often caused by state authorities, for example, when public agencies don’t pay pension benefits on time or private companies don’t pay their workers as promised, when public authorities grant permission to build a private access road straight through a village or when legal loopholes are used to snatch land away from indigenous communities.

The impact of the group’s investigative reports, films and videos are little more than pinpricks. Its members are aware of that. But in 2012 they also witnessed “what it means to upset the unified front of the media, and what consequences it can have on the reality of a country.” And Másde131 is just one of countless groups in Mexican civil society which are bringing about change one step at a time. A sign of just how seriously the system is taking their Internet activities is the recent hacker attacks which all but shut down their websites for two weeks in July.

Peter B. Schumann (*1941 in Erfurt), journalist, has intensively reported on the political and cultural situation in Latin America since the 1960s in numerous radio features, television reports and film documentaries. At present, he is especially interested in the repercussions of neoliberalism and the renewed strength of social movements in Latin America.

A Streetcar Named Desire Theatre in Mexico – A festival about escape, identity and the depiction of violence

Mexico and Germany have agreed to stage bilateral events in 2016/17 which aim to deepen each other’s knowledge of their respective national culture, economy, technology and research sector.

As part of these events, the Munich Kammerspiele is organising a festival titled A Streetcar Named Desire with a focus on the performing arts. Current independent theatre productions from Mexico will be invited to guest perform at the festival, many of which will be European premieres. In addition to guest performances by established groups, the festival will feature young directors and performers who are staging their own first productions. With its focus on Mexico, the festival directs attention to a region marked by disparities in wealth between the north and south, as well as the impact of violence and organised crime on everyday urban life. The centrepiece of the festival will be a production by the Mexican director Ángel Hernández who addresses the theme of escape and migration in a European context. In Mexico his works have come to represent a new form of political theatre. Using art, he tries to ­reclaim and revitalise spaces and venues for art purposes which have been taken over, damaged or even destroyed by organised crime. His intervention in A Street Named Desire highlights a theme which he has explored for many years, namely that of working ­migrants in freight trains, and invites the viewers to compare the situation on the borders of Europe to that of the United States.

Curators: Christoph Gurk, Ilona Goyeneche, Matthias Lilienthal, Anne Schulz Artists: Ángel Hernández Arreola (MX), Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol (MX), Gabino Rodriguez (MX), Marianna Villegas (MX), Polly­ ester and others Munich Kammerspiele: 22–27 Nov. 2016 ↗ www.muenchner-kammerspiele.de

8 El poema de mi amiga Cuando leo mi poema la gente llora, me confiesa. Pero tú no, me recrimina: yo te he visto, me señala, tú no lloras, me subraya, tu no lloras cuando leo mi poema, me recalca.

Me pregunta: ¿Que a ti no te importa lo que pasa en este país? ¿No te duelen los muertos?, ¿Los miles de muertos? ¿Las mujeres violadas? ¿Los migrantes masacrados? ¿Los secuestrados? ¿Los desaparecidos, los acallados, los silenciados por la violencia, por los criminales, por el gobierno, por los militares, por los medios? Todos a los que yo doy voz en mi poema, ¿no te importan?, me pregunta, me cuestiona, me recrimina, me reclama.

Pero a la gente sí, me explica, me aclara: la gente

LUIS FELIPE FABRE

aplaude, aplaude mucho cuando leo mi poema, la gente llora y aplaude y luego la gente se me acerca, me dice cosas.

Me susurra: la gente me dice que le gusta mucho mi poema. Pero tú no aplaudes, me confronta, o aplaudes poco, me describe, porque a ti no te importa, me dice, a ti no te importa, me repite, a ti no te importa, me insiste, a ti no te importa lo que pasa.

Lo que pasa es que me tienes envidia: me descubre.

Lo que pasa es que a ti te hubiera gustado escribir mi poema: me acorrala.

Lo que pasa es que tú no podrías escribirlo: me vence: me aplasta: no podrías escribirlo porque a ti no te importa lo que pasa.

Luis Felipe Fabre (*1974 in M ­ exico City), poet, writer and publisher, is becoming one of the most fascinating voices of Latin ­America’s younger generation of a ­ rtists. He has written several volumes of poetry and edited two anthologies of contemporary Mexican poetry. The following are two poems from his P ­ oemas de Terror y de Misterio, published in 2013, which address the current social situation in Mexico. According to Fabre, ­there are some things that can only be understood through poetry. His poems break with ­traditional forms, are strongly influenced by cinematic aesthetics and pop culture, comics, crime stories and pulp fiction. The zombie theme reflects Fabre’s fondness for splatter films. Fabre participated at the Literaturwerkstatt poetry festival in Berlin in June 2016.

9 From the cycle Notas en torno a la catástrofe zombie

11

(“Notes on the Zombie Catastrophe”):

¿Y la Santa Muerte? ¿Qué relación hay entre el culto a la Santa Muerte y el alzamiento de los muertos vivientes?

1 ¿Cuál es el origen de la catástrofe zombi?

12 ¿Es posible entender a la Coatlicue

2

como un antecedente zombi?

¿Qué relación hay entre la catástrofe zombi y el Enigma de la Casa sin Puertas?

13 3

¿Mictlantecutli era claramente un zombi?

“Entrad y encontraréis refugio, hijos míos”, decía dulcemente, desde el interior de la Casa sin Puertas,

14

una voz que aseguraba ser la mismísima

“Dense prisa y entrad, hijos míos, antes

Virgen de Guadalupe.

de que sea demasiado tarde: no hay salvación para México, hijos míos, entrad:

4 Zombi: ¿quién te dijo “levántate y anda”? ¿El jesús-virus desconocido? ¿El jesús-vudú? ¿El jesús-tetrodotoxina? ¿El jesús-radioactividad?

5 La Casa sin Puertas: un impenetrable bloque de cemento en cuyo interior reverberaba inexplicable una voz: “Entrad, entrad. Una catástrofe se avecina: hijos míos, pronto, presto, entrad...”

6 ¡Pero no se podía entrar!

7 ¿Por qué en México?

8 A causa del maíz transgénico, aseguran los ecologistas.

9 ¿El jesús-maíz transgénico? ¿El jesús-violencia extrema? ¿El jesús-drogas adulteradas? ¿El jesús-arma experimental?

10 Jesús no tiene nada qué ver con todo esto, asegura el vocero de la Arquidiócesis de México.

¿no estoy yo aquí que soy vuestra madre?”

YOUNG-JUN TAK

10

When ­

the

Wave

Crashes

The global success of Korean cinema, art, pop music and fashion, all of it marketed under the K-brand, demonstrates the potential and dynamics of Korean artists.

Yet in the capitalistic, highly competitive society of South Korea, they find themselves struggling to survive in precarious social circumstances, dependent on public funding and confronted with state censorship. The art critic Young-jun Tak takes a critical look at the status of artists in his country.

11 ImIn May of this year, the writer Han Kang became the first Korean to win the Man Booker International Prize for her novel The Vegetarian. On that same day, the poet Young-mi Choi, celebrated as a rising star of the literary scene after selling over 500,000 copies of her volume of poetry At Thirty the Party Was Over, announced that she was living on the dole. At last year’s Venice Biennale, the artist Heung-soon was the first Korean ever to receive a Silver Lion, awarded for his video piece “Factory Complex”, whose touching imagery poignantly conveys the exploitative working conditions of women in Asia. One year earlier, a painting by the artist Seun-­ dam Hong was removed from the special exhibition commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Kwangju Biennale. The work in question, titled “Sewol Owol”, ironically portrayed South Korean President Geun-hye Park as a rooster. The incident sparked a debate about censorship and ultimately led to the resignation of the president of the Biennale foundation, Yong-woo Lee. According to data provided by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, there were between 40,000 and 50,000 fine artists working in South Korea in 2014, which is quite a large number given the size of the Korean art market. Until America’s financial crisis spread to Korea in 2008, the country had experienced a brief golden age.

The going joke for two or three years was that any piece of canvas with even a trace of paint on it was as good as sold. Today, most artists find it almost impossible to live from their artistic endeavours. Once they have finished their studies, their struggle for survival begins – which is something which must be taken literally in South Korea.

In 2011, the death of Go-eun Choi caused quite a stir – the young female artist died of starvation. The media reported extensively about the incident which eventually led to the passage of the so-called “Go-eun-Choi Act”.

The law ensured that artists would receive public funding for their artistic work, as well as the possibility of taking out accident insurance. To be eligible, applicants had to be recognised by the Korean Artists Welfare Foundation, also established in 2011, as artists who actively work in the fields of literature, fine arts, music, Korean traditional music, dance, theatre, film or entertainment.

Nonetheless, one continues to hear reports of impoverished artists taking their own lives – which isn’t surprising in a country with the highest suicide rate of all OECD nations. Years ago, the British newspaper Economist claimed that the “enormous pressure to achieve, vanishing traditions, loneliness and poverty are the killers in South Korea”. According to a report by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism on the living situation of artists, the average annual income of artists in theatre is 12,850,000 won (about 10,400 euros), in film 8,760,000 won (about 7,100 euros), in the fine arts 6,140,000 won (about 5,000 euros) and in literature, a meagre 2,140,000 won (about 1,700 euros). The monthly living expenses amount to at least 1,960,000 won (about 1,600 euros). Consequently, the majority of all artists are not able to support themselves through their artistic endeavours alone.

Undoubtedly this is due to the fact that politicians regard the none-too-generous public funding as a kind of social welfare benefit. The changing governments do not share a vision that supports culture and art in the long term. Their policies are limited to superficial ­d­isplays of support, at best spontaneous, improvised ­solutions – and in exchange, they expect an increasing amount of artistic goodwill.

For their part, artists themselves are working to improve their situation. Fine artists, in particular, have launched various projects and founded the association “Art Workers Gathering”. They are interested in establishing an “artists’ fee”, stipulating payment for artists.

After the directors of the 4th Art Factory Project failed to pay any of their participants, the artists took to the barricades. Their protests eventually generated increased social interest in artists’ fees and willingness (albeit slow in coming) among institutions to find a way to pay artists for their work.

THE DREAM OF K-ART

Until that point – with the exception of a handful of stars who could establish themselves in the international art market – most artists relied on public subsidies (the most important cultural promotion fund is managed by the Arts Council Korea) or corporations like Samsung, Hyundai, LG and Kumho Asiana, whereby Samsung, the largest cultural sponsor, shocked the art world at the beginning of the year when it announced it would close its gallery “Plateau” for financial reasons.

Koreans are passionate moviegoers; they attend concerts once in a while, less so theatre, even less frequently exhibitions, and hardly any readings or dance performances. This reluctance increases the artists’ dependency on public funding and private-sector sponsoring, which in turn causes problems. First of all, K­orean politicians expect that publicly financed art achieve commercial success. They regard cultural content as a resource, in the same way they believe successful pop bands and TV soaps are the ideal art form because they lend the country’s cultural exports, known as the “Korean Wave”, a cool, dynamic image.

Currently the government is dreaming of another trademark: With “K-Art”, like the YBA (Young British Artists) long ago, officials hope to provide Korean art a major boost.

The second problem is censorship. The Korean government constantly interferes in the selection process in order to block funding to artists who do not share their conservative political views, or sabotage projects that address sensitive social issues. For instance, in 2015, the Arts Council Korea stopped the play “All Soldiers Are Pitiful” by director Geun-hyung Park, first by pressuring the jury which had recommended funding for the play. After the jury refused to reverse its decision, the Arts Council forced the director to voluntarily forfeit his subsidy. Why was the commission so intent on dropping Geun-hyung Park from their funding list? And why did the national Korean Institute of Traditional Music (National Gugak Center) remove a piece

by Geun-yung Park from their concert programme?

The answer can be found in his previous play “Frog” which voiced a suspicion that the last presidential election was rigged and parodied Jung-hee Park, South Korea’s former dictator and father of the incumbent president.

DEAR PAINTERS, PAINT ME A ...

One could say that a business owner (the state) o­ rders a product (an artwork) from a client (an artist) through his agent (a funding programme), but the said product turns out to damage his business interests and therefore he cancels payment (funding). One could also say that what’s happening in South Korea is political censorship of the kind Koreans are familiar with from dictatorial times of the past.

In a turbo-capitalistic society in which culture bears enormous pressure to market itself, public funding is often the only possibility to promote artistically daring and socially relevant art. In South Korea, one can see how the state keeps its artists in check with this promise, which leads to the third and perhaps greatest problem – self-censorship. The funding coffers of public institutions are like weapons that can be used to put artists under pressure for the simple reason that without funding, they would no longer be able to pursue their artistic ambitions.

Therefore, they plan and only seek funding for such projects which they can be sure do not contain messages that run counter to the political direction of the government.

Even theatre directors and curators choose to propose more politically neutral exhibitions and performances in order to avoid unnecessary problems later on.

Walls Iphigenia in Exile

German and Korean theatre artists plan to produce a contemporary version of Goethe’s “Iphigenia in Tauris” and reflect on the history and current events in their home countries. Like in Goethe’s classical drama, Walls – Iphigenia in Exile depicts the historic, religious and social determinacy of humans and their attempt to escape from it – surmounting obstacles within and outside themselves. The industrial nations of South Korea and Germany have experienced division and walls. Despite their prosperity, ­there are tendencies in both countries to erect walls against immigrants. Who are we keeping out, and who are we imprisoning? The production also touches on the timeless questions of desire and obligation, and truth and deception.

Four Korean directors and one German director will interpret one act each, while two playwrights from Germany and South Korea will ­write and incorporate new texts into the play.

Walls will be performed bilingually by a German-­ Korean ensemble and will premiere in South Korea. Afterwards, the play will be shown to German audiences as a repertory production at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.

Artistic directors: Sonja Anders, Jungung Yang (KR) Stage directors: Kon Yi (KR), Jungung Yang (KR), Kyungsung Lee (KR), ZinA Choi (KR), Tilmann Köhler Set design: Karoly Risz Video & Music: Daniel Hengst Authors: Mario Salazar, ZinA Choi (KR), Kon Yi (KR), Kyungsung Lee (KR) Dramaturgy: Ulrich Beck, Danbi Yi (KR) Production manager: Ulrich Beck, HeeJin Lee (KR) Actors: Dakyung Yoon (KR), Hyun Jun Ji (KR), Kotti Yun (D/KR), Helmut Mooshammer, Sabine Waibel Asia Culture Center (ACC), Gwangju: 14 Oct. 2016 (premiere); Kammerspiele des Deutschen Theaters, Berlin: 23 Oct. 2016 –30 Jun. 2017

↗ www.deutschestheater.de

Some time ago the government in Seoul introduced a measure under the motto “Prosperity of Culture” which provides free admission to all museums in the country on the last Wednesday of every month, dubbed “Culture Day”, and reduced prices on theatre performances. “Prosperity” is a term used in economics, but culture is not just a matter of increasing the number of visitors to exhibitions and performances. True prosperity comes when artists feel free and happy to touch and enrich the lives of their audience. When that happens, there might be more than just one “Culture Day” per month.

Young-jun Tak is a researcher and art critic. Tak studied Art, English Literature and Comparative ­Cultural Studies at Sungkyunkwan University in ­Seoul.

He went on to develop an education programme for the Arts Council Korea and worked as an editor for Art in Culture, a monthly Korean cultural journal. Today he writes reviews and essays for magazines and websites, such as ArtReview Asia, Canvas Magazine, H ­ arper’s ­Bazaar Korea, Bazaar Art Korea and The Artro. Youngjun Tak currently lives and works in Berlin.

JAKOB KNESER SPEAKS WITH MARC SINAN AND IVA BITTOVÁ

12

What

we wish

our hearts

for with all

13 welve million Roma live in Europe, making them the largest minority group on the continent. Though little is known of their early history, experts have determined that twelve hundred years ago, the Roma people left present-day Rajasthan in northwest India and travelled via the Balkans to Europe. It is likely that the Roma originated from the lower castes, like the Doma, whose members eke out their existence as dancers and musicians. As to why the Roma left their homeland, we can only speculate.

According to one theory, the Roma may have wanted to escape the restrictive caste system in Rajasthan to pursue a new life in freedom.

“Rajasthan”, funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, is organised by the Dresden Symphony Orchestra featuring the Berlin guitarist and composer Marc Sinan – a project that hopes to find traces of the mythical origins of the Roma. In September and October 2016, European Roma musicians and artists embarked on a journey to the northern Indian state to collaborate with Indian musicians and develop a musical production under the direction of Marc Sinan. “Rajasthan” is not the first experiment of this kind which March Sinan has taken on.

His previous musical expeditions with the Dresden Symphony Orchestra, such as “Dede Korkut” and “Aghet”, with which the orchestra and general theatre director Markus Rindt attracted enormous political and media attention in 2016, were primarily directed at the Turkish-Armenian cultural sphere.

India is new terrain for Marc Sinan. Rajasthan is a place of wishfulness and escape, as well as the beginning of a complex history of Roma identity and affiliation.

Jakob Kneser: Marc Sinan, what inspired you to do this

project?

Marc Sinan: This is clearly all about belonging and not

belonging, it’s about stigmatisation, about vitality, it’s about the beauty of culture which can arise under any circumstances, or which is possible under no circumstances.

JK What is your particular interest in the Roma?

MS What I find interesting about the Roma is that

they’re a community which the whole world uses as a projection surface for its prejudices. There is no place in the world, I believe, without prejudice against the Roma. At the same time, the Roma are at home everywhere and nowhere, and thus have achieved to a certain extent what we always wish for in our dreams, namely freedom from limitations.

It’s a completely different way of looking at life and society, something we wish for with all our hearts, but something we are so frightened by that we have no choice but to despise it. I find this incredibly interesting!

“Rajasthan” is much more than a musical experiment. It basically boils down to the age-old antagonism between the “travelling folk” and the settled inhabitants. Their view of the “Roma travellers” has always been one of fascination mixed with fear, admiration mixed with revulsion. As border-crossers and transnationalists par excellence, the

Roma have always aroused suspicion among the settled people. But most of all, it’s about the history of a stigma which the Roma have never been able to shake off even after a thousand years since their exodus.

JK What traces of the Roma can we still find in Rajas­

than today?

MS There are no Roma in Rajasthan anymore, only this

legend of the Roma exodus from Rajasthan. The musicians we’re working with are musicians of different castes, like the Bhopas. This caste is just like the Roma in Europe, or like anywhere else in the world at the lower end of society. These are people who are so poor, they have no land and no cattle, they have no choice but to work as musicians just to scrape up enough money to live. That corresponds with the cliché of how we imagine a gypsy musician. For all those social occasions that require music, these Bhopa musicians, these traditional musicians, are around and live in traveller communities. They aren’t explicitly Roma, but they do hold the same social position as the Roma do today in Europe, in the same way the Roma probably were forced to live in Rajasthan twelve hundred years ago.

JK The Roma left this caste system behind after mi-

grating to Europe – or haven’t they?

MS That’s what I find so amazingly shocking – after

having left India, how can this caste stigma perpetuate in society in situations where it’s no longer necessary? In a way, it’s like a prophecy that sticks with them, and even though they escaped this place in haste, they cannot escape the racism, the stigma of not belonging, this position in society.

One of the European participants in the “Rajasthan” ex­ periment is the Czech singer and violinist Iva Bittová.

She is the daughter of Koloman Bitto, a Roma musician of Slovakian-Hungarian origin. Bittová, who now lives near New York, has developed her own distinctive style that oscillates between jazz avant-garde and Moravian folk music. I had planned to interview her about her fa­ ther’s Roma heritage following a concert in Ulrichsberg in upper Austria, but it fell through; Iva Bittová was too tired. Yet she was charming, and bummed a smoke off me before taking her leave. A few weeks later, we were able to conduct the interview via Skype. Iva Bittová had re­ turned from her European tour and was now sitting in her yard at home in New York state.

JK How important is your father’s Roma heritage to you?

Iva Bittová: I never say that we’re a Roma family, at least

none of us spoke of it at home. It was my sister who brought it all up after my father passed away. There’s no one we could ask anymore since my father’s no longer alive, and she started feeling like a Roma two years after my father’s death. My mother, who is still alive, always says that he used to speak Hungarian in school and with his family and friends. But there’s simply no reliable information about my father’s relationship with the Roma. It’s bewildering and always leads to an argument between my mother and my older sister Ida. And I’m in the middle and accept both sides. My father would have been the only person to answer the question. But unfortunately he’s been dead a long time.

JK In interviews, your sister Ida has claimed that your

father had denied his Roma identity all his life – out of shame, fear of discrimination and exclusion. Can you understand that from your point of view today?

IB I don’t think my father was trying to hide anything.

Generally he didn’t talk very much, and what he did say, he said through music. He was a wonderful musician, very emotional. He played Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian folk music, but I honestly cannot

14 recall any Roma songs. But there was always a lot of emotion there, lots of tears, lots of laughter. It was marvellous. I just can’t imagine that such an expressive, emotional person could have hid something like that all his life.

JK What role has Roma music played in your own music?

IB What I do is not actually based on Roma music. I

only know a few Roma songs from a time when I was seventeen, not earlier. But perhaps there are some similarities. What I admire about gypsy musicians is their temperament, their incredible talent.

Everything happens very spontaneously in their music, just as it does in mine. I’m very wild in my music, in my expression, I don’t stay within certain limits, I’m open, lots of things happen instinctively, spontaneously. So there are parallels with how Roma make music.

JK Would you say that the parallels to Roma music in

your music are not so much based on specific songs, melodies or rhythms, but rather on a certain attitude?

IB You could describe it that way. In my music, it’s es-

sential to be “naked”, so to speak, as a human being so that I can express what I have to express. There’s nothing there to hide behind, no mask, I am totally exposed. And it’s similar for Roma people, how they sing and perform, it comes straight and unfiltered from their heart and soul. And it also leaves one vulnerable in the sense that people can quickly see who you really are. This music doesn’t try to achieve a certain effect, it’s simply an immediate reaction to what’s happening to me in my life.

JK What made you decide to participate in the “Rajas­

than” project?

IB Ever since I began my career, I’ve felt that India was

the place I had to go. India is basically the most important source of inspiration for us musicians, just think of the Beatles. I’ve always hoped that someday I’d have the opportunity, but somehow it never worked out. And so when I received the invitation from Marc, I thought it was the best thing that could ever happen because we’ll have the time to really work together with the musicians. What’s more, we won’t be in a big metropolis, but in small towns in the country. You can concentrate so much better on the music that way and don’t get distracted by the noise and sounds.

JK Is the “Rajasthan” project something like a search

for your heritage?

IB Perhaps, once I’m there, I’ll learn more about my

roots. And maybe it will help me understand the experiences of my childhood. When I was a kid, I had darker skin than the others, even than my siblings who were blond. And sometimes people would call me “gypsy girl” or kids wouldn’t want to sit next to me in school. Being in Rajasthan might help me understand these kinds of stories better.

Iva Bittová doesn’t want to be labelled a “Roma musi­ cian”; she considers her music “global”. And isn’t it true that an unnecessary stigmatisation is attached to the label “Roma musician”, an outdated definition of art based on ethnic heritage? Doesn’t it simply perpetuate stereotypical thinking which has long become obsolete? But then again, why would Iva Bittová participate in a project which explicitly aims to investigate the origin of Roma music?

For Marc Sinan, this detached, almost defensive attitude toward one’s heritage is symptomatic – and to a certain extent, also an integral part of the project.

JK Can you understand Iva Bittová’s detached attitude

with regard to her father’s – possible – Roma ­heritage?

MS My grandmother in Turkey is an Armenian, and I’m

the only grandchild who officially recognises that.

The others feel something between shame and rejection. I see a similar situation in Iva’s case. It’s like a psychologically collective predisposition or an unresolved trauma. And I also find very interesting how Iva reacts to her sister who has fully embraced the Roma heritage and a mother who responds to it with a big question mark, call it rejection, shame or insecurity. Iva herself is torn in this sense. And yet when asked if she’d like to participate as a soloist in a Rajasthan Roma project, she said unequivocally – yes, because I’ve always wanted to visit that place.

JK Could this dismissive attitude be a productive con-

tradiction for the “Rajasthan” project?

MS What I definitely don’t want is a clichéd gypsy pro-

ject, and that’s why I actually find it interesting that Iva Bittová keeps a certain distance to her Roma background. Because that means we are basically not at risk of conducting a clichéd project, which is very important. I’m interested in Iva as a musician and performer, and I think we’ll just have to see what effect the project has on her while we’re there.

It is inevitable that “Rajasthan” will also have to address prejudices and clichés, particularly with respect to the sup­ posedly innate musicality of the Roma. These are presump­ tions of unharnessed temperament, eruptive passion which the over-civilised, self-controlled members of settled soci­ ety often regard with a combination of envy and disdain.

JK Many Roma musicians identify themselves with

these stereotypes of passion and musical virtuosity.

How do you plan to avoid such “cliché traps”?

MS When you see with what simplicity and roughness

and hardship people in Rajasthan survive in both nature and society, and yet develop music of such depth and joy, then you ask yourself whether music is not first and foremost synonymous with vitality and the will to live. But the moment I say that, I might be painting the Roma musician as the virile, happy gypsy. It’s a basic question I keep asking myself: How can I approach this narrative without succumbing to my own biases? And I think we have to do it by observing more than judging.

JK As a “gadjo” – a non-Rom – were you concerned

that you would be “hegemonialising” the Roma with this project, as has so often occurred in the past?

In what way do you feel justified in using Roma traditions for your project?

MS Americans use the term “appropriation” when re-

ferring to a non-member of an ethnic group who feels qualified to speak for the ethnic group. Naturally I don’t want to do that, and it won’t happen.

In this case, I take a different approach. I am not inventing fiction, I am rather a documentarist. You would never ask a documentary filmmaker whether he was a Rom or non-Rom while he accompanied Roma on their way to Rajasthan to find a connection to their Roma heritage. And that is exactly my role; I’m like a documentarist who uses the tools of documentary music theatre to put together a narrative in which the Roma are the protagonists. That is, I believe, the only possible and correct way to approach this story.

Marc Sinan, born in 1976, is a composer and guitarist with German-Turkish-Armenian roots. With the Marc Sinan Company, established in 2008, and in cooperation with other artists and ensembles, Sinan has developed a number of multimedia productions on current political topics in recent years, such as “Hasretim” (2012), “Dede Korkut” (2014/15) and “Komitas” (2015). In 2016, ECM will be releasing Sinan’s latest album which he recorded together with the Turkish musician Oğuz Büyükberber.

Iva Bittová, born in the Moravian town of Bruntál in 1958, is a singer, composer, violinist and actress. She has gained widespread acclaim beyond the borders of the Czech Republic for her masterful violin and cross-genre performances. Bittová has received numerous awards for her achievements in music and acting. In 2003 she played the leading role in “Želary”, which was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign-language film. In 2015, Pavian Records released her interpretations of Béla Bartók’s Slovakian folk songs.

Jakob Kneser, born in 1968, grew up in Munich and Bonn and is an author and filmmaker. After studying Philosophy and History, he began his career as a music television editor.

He then made a name for himself as a filmmaker with science and culture documentaries for ARD, ZDF, 3Sat and ARTE. Today Kneser lives with his family in Bonn.

15

The ­

Female Voice of Iran

Over the course of its history, Iran has always been a place of encounter for many different peoples – the Kurds, Aseri Turks, Lurs, Balochs, Turkmens, Talysh and dozens of other ethnic groups who have lived side by side, each with their own musical culture, each as old as Iran’s history itself. When one listens to the music of a certain region, one gains a sense of the lifestyle of those who live there. Mothers raise their children with lullabies. Through music, they teach them language and rhythm and how to understand emotions and feelings.

Half of Iranian culture is comprised of regional music. And this music was originally created by women and has been an inseparable part of their lives, from lullabies to songs sung during their daily chores, weaving rugs or milking the animals, singing alone or in groups.

Such songs are becoming less common nowadays because many people have moved to the cities. For women, however, city life poses limitations. Religious beliefs in families and fanaticism in society, as well as changes in political leadership have always had a drastic influence on the role of women, and by extension, on music. In the first few years after the Islamic Revolution, many laws were passed which forced music underground.

There were hardly any concerts, and even musical instruments vanished from the public eye because the ruling class believed that music contradicted the religious convictions of Islam. But even though there were many laws forbidding all musical performances, people were still allowed to perform religious or revolutionary hymns.

However, the voices of women were absent from these musical activities because, according to popular opinion, the female voice excited men and therefore violated Islamic law. Women were not even allowed to perform in purely instrumental ensembles. Fortunately, things have gradually changed in Iranian society.

CHOIR SINGING, YES – SOLO SINGING, NO

Despite repeated objections by Islamic scholars, ­ usic schools gradually reopened, universities started m offering Music as a course of study, and women assumed a more visible place in society. Today, more than half of all university students are women. The number of women in the music scene has also grown considerably. Families are sending their daughters to instrumental classes and even singing lessons. Yet many problems still exist, particularly regarding musical performances by women.

For a long time, performances by women singers were absolutely forbidden. Women could get into big trouble for singing. Often they were afraid to practise at home, and lessons took place in basements or other soundproofed locations. Eventually new laws were passed that permitted women to sing in choirs, but categorically forbid them from singing solo.

The views of religious scholars were and still are s­ evere to varying degrees depending on who is in political control of the Islamic Republic. Female solo singing in public was forbidden until several cities passed laws allowing women to give special concerts exclusively to women. Many female musicians took advantage of this opportunity, while others were opposed because they believed that music should not be reserved for one ­particular group. For a short time there was a music ­festival for women called “Yasmin”, at which many ­women performed music for other women. But when the ­festival director was replaced after two years, it was discontinued.

“CAN ONLY MEN BE ARTISTS?” Iran possesses a rich musical heritage. For many years after the revolution, however, the regime only allowed people to play war hymns and trivial instrumental pieces. And to this day, women continue to demand the

right to sing and perform in public, wherever and to whomever they wish. In the following, a female Iranian writer* describes the bitter struggle for musical equality in her country.

The Fajr Music Festival is held every year, and in past years, its programme included several concerts performed by women and for women. But even then, such concerts are subject to numerous requirements, in other words, chicanery. For instance, all women in the audience must

16 submit to a body search to ensure they are not carrying any kind of recording device or mobile phone. Even the musicians themselves are not allowed to record their own performance because otherwise their voices could be transmitted beyond this special venue.

In the meantime, new guidelines have been issued allowing women to sing together with men as long as all religious rules are followed. Most women are not happy with these rules, complaining that they are prevented from making their true voices heard. The reason being, they are usually forced to match the vocal range of the men with whom they are singing. Despite these rather inacceptable circumstances, many women are willing to comply so as not to be entirely silenced. The number of joint performances is growing, many male musicians support the female colleagues, and there are efforts to change the legal situation. According to several leading religious scholars, they do not object to the female voice in music as long as it does not lead to immoral behaviour.

During the festivities marking the fourteenth anniversary of the “Iranian House of Music” at the Tehran Wahdat Hall in 2013, and in the presence of the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the master tar performer and spokesman of the “House of Music” Dariush Pirnyakan announced his support of the women’s right to sing in Iran: “The area of music has endured a hard winter for twenty-four years. Many people in our country still believe that religion forbids music. But there is no evidence showing that music should be forbidden for religious reasons, and it is not right to ignore the vast masses of people who listen to music. I challenge the Islamic legal scholars to explain where in our faith it says that music is forbidden.

Moreover the House of Music demands to be allowed to broadcast female singing.”

Half of all musicians in Iran are women, and they are still not allowed to sing. Pirnyakan sparked a debate about the reasoning behind the ban on female singing, and other leading figures joined in. Such as Hossein Alizadeh, the acclaimed virtuoso, composer and director of the ensemble “Hamavayan”, who criticised the segregation of men and women in the Iranian music scene: “It is not right to believe that wherever women are, danger is not far away, for there would be no art without women, and man and woman are partners in all areas.” Even earlier after the victory of the Islamic Revolution, Alizadeh had questioned the rationale for forbidding women to sing: “Why are they erasing the woman’s voice from musical memory? I am against every type of gender segregation. Can only men be artists and sing?”

“WOMEN’S SINGING SPREADS IMMORALITY”

It seems as if the taboo of listening to the voices of female singers is about to crumble. And perhaps under President Hassan Rouhani, who promised during his campaign to loosen some of the restrictions, an agreement on women’s singing may not be completely inconceivable in the foreseeable future. And maybe we will see the ban on female singing in Iran finally lifted with the consent of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Our hopes are dampened, however, by influential Shiite scholars who have argued against women in music, including the Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi, who, in response to the debate on female singing by certain legal scholars, stated: “They have no idea that a student requires twenty years to achieve the first level of ejtehad (interpretation of sacred texts) and forty years to reach the level of mojtahed (theological expert).” And Shirazi warned: “The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance should know that the people will distance themselves if such a thing [i.e. female singing] happens again.” And Hojjatol-Islam va‘l-Muslimin Alidust, head of the law faculty at the International Centre of Islamic Studies in Qum, stated: “For those who recognise the reprehensive practices of society, such performances result in nothing

less than the loss of chasteness and the collapse of the protected sphere of the family. Listening to a woman’s singing voice is clearly not permitted for non-family members.” Finally, even a woman, Laleh Eftekhari, a Tehran parliamentary member, blatantly threatened: “The Government has sworn to defend the values of Islam and the achievements of the Revolution, and the Minister for Culture and Islamic Guidance, Mr Jannata, must take forceful steps to clamp down on women’s singing. Women’s singing spreads immorality and licentiousness in the name of culture, which must be resolutely countered, for otherwise the people will take matters in their own hands to protect their religious values from these cultural rule breakers and to defend the achievements of the Islamic Revolution and the Iranian and Islamic culture.”

Such threats have motivated many women to leave Iran. Others, however, have chosen to remain and are trying to improve the plight of women on location. Although they are still not allowed to give solo performances, and numerous concerts in cities have been cancelled shortly before starting or even in the middle of the programme merely because women were present, they continue to hope that their situation will someday improve. Paradoxically, these women are studying music or attending one of the many music schools in the same Islamic society. In other words, Islamic society is in some way guiding and supporting women in their efforts.

Just like when Iranian women singers participate at international festivals – in front of audiences of women and men. As long as these foreign performances are purely musical in nature and contain no religious or political message, the Islamic state of Iran supports these festivals and the female artists can return to Iran and continue their work without fear of retribution.

We can only hope that such contradictory policies disappear. Iranian society is currently undergoing a multitude of changes, and fortunately the role of women is becoming far more apparent. * Because of her portrayal of the political situation in Iran, the author has asked not be named.

Female Voice of Iran Festival of female Iranian musicians

The music of Iran is an amalgamation of numerous Middle Eastern musical ­traditions, a blend of Arabian, Turkish, Armenian, Afghan and many other influences. Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran’s cultural life and especially its musical scene have been strictly regulated; aside from a few exceptions, women are forbidden to sing in public. Many ­female singers have left Iran and now live in exile. In recent years, however, many music schools have begun offering singing lessons to an increasing number of young women. Yet the opportunity to present their abilities to audiences in public performances remains barred. The goal of the festival “Female Voice of Iran” is to bring female singers from various regions of Iran together with female ­Iranian musicians who live and work in Germany. During the festival and under the direction of the German-Iranian ­musician Cymin Samawatie, participants will develop a group composition which they will perform at the final concert.

Curators: Yalda Yazdani (IR), Cymin Samawatie Artists: Jivar Sheikholeslami (IR), Yalda Abbasi (IR), Shadi Behyari (IR), ­Cyminology and others Villa Elisabeth, Berlin: 23–26 Feb. 2017 ↗ www.zeitgenoessische-oper.de

17

New Projects

In spring 2016, the interdisciplinary jury of the Federal Cultural Foundation ­recommended funding for 31 new projects with a total volume of 4.8 million euros.

You can find detailed information about the individual projects on our website www.kulturstiftung-bund.de or on the websites operated by the respective project coordinators.

The members of the jury are: Joachim Gerstmeier, director of the performing arts department at the Siemens Foundation / Dr. Angelika Nollert, director of the Neue Sammlung – The International Design Museum Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne / Dr. Andreas Rötzer, publisher and managing director of Matthes & Seitz Berlin publishing house / Dr. Eva Schmidt, director of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen / Albert Schmitt, managing director of the German Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra in Bremen / Gisela Staupe, deputy director of the German Hygiene Museum in ­Dresden / Karsten Wiegand, general theatre director of the Staatstheater Darmstadt

Planet B 100 ideas for a new world

© courtesy of the artist

In this exhibition, 100 artists, designers, architects, researchers and entrepreneurs present their utopias for the 22nd century and artistically address the dramatic changes shaping our planet. More than 60 million people are currently displaced; climate change is endangering the equitable distribution of natural resources and public security. Religious fervour and outrage toward dissidents have seldom been so great.

These are the themes and conflicts which the participating artists in the exhibition will be exploring. The centrepiece will be a large-scale room installation by the Düsseldorf artists' collective Labor Fou, which will host an artist-in-residence programme for the duration of the entire exhibition. For example, the Swiss concept-art duo “Atelier für Sonderaufgaben” (Studio for Special Tasks) will create social and political interventions in public space. Hörner/Antl-­ finger are developing a project together with refugees. And the French photographer Constantin Schlachter will present his nature photos as visions of the future.

The designer Kathryn Fleming uses ­animal taxidermies to create fictitious, yet remarkably realistic-looking animal forms which have been optimised for life in the future. The exhibition will steadily evolve over time; the displays and installations will be successively redesigned and ­supplemented by contributions from the participating artists and exhibition goers.

Ayşe Erkmen & Mona Hatoum Displacements

The Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig is staging an artistic dialogue between the works of the Turkish artist Ayşe Erkmen and the Palestinian-British artist Mona Hatoum. The exhibition is the first joint project between these two internationally acclaimed female artists.

The central theme of the exhibition is “displacement” – a state in which familiar things suddenly become foreign as a result of relocation, shifting or even uprooting. Both artists regard location and historic context as an integral part of their artistic reflection. In their own way, each examines issues of identity, self-determination, control, power and domination.

Artistic director: Alain Bieber Cultural manager: Joanna Szlauderbach Artists: Hörner/Antlfinger, Labor Fou, Atelier für Sonderaufgaben (CH), Brad Downey (US/DE), Ben J. Riepe, Kathryn Fleming (US), Mathieu Tremblin (FR), Alvaro Urbano (ES/DE), Eric Winkler, Valentina Karga (GR/DE), Constantin Schlachter NRW-Forum Düsseldorf: 2 Jun. – 21 Aug. 2016 ↗ www.nrw-forum.de

↑ Vladimír Turner: Balcon Public

Whenever Erkmen begins a new piece, she studies the unique characteristic of the venue in question. She develops her installations by incorporating elements of the site’s historic, political and institutional contexts. She often applies a strategy of displacement by presenting existing artworks in a new context.

In Mona Hatoum's works, questions of cultural identity, the body and gender play an important role. She often utilises techniques of displacement, e.g. by creating a sense of alienation which evokes anxiety. Seduction and sensuality can become sources of danger and result in frightening scenarios. Spaces and objects are redefined and everyday items gain an artistic significance.

For the exhibition in Leipzig, Hatoum and Erkmen are developing new artistic interventions which explore the theme of displacement from uniquely different perspectives. The project also includes an exhibition catalogue and educational programme which uses new intercultural approaches developed in cooperation with students.

Artistic director: Frédéric Bußmann Artists: Mona Hatoum (GB), Ayşe ­Erkmen (TR)­ Museum der bildenden Künste­ Leipzig: 18 Nov. – 18 Feb. 2017 ↗ www.mdbk.de

Together Apart Choreographic approaches to European cohesion

Marking the tenth anniversary of the choreographic centre K3 | Dance Plan Hamburg, this project will organise an international residency programme.

Three experienced artistic-choreographic teams will be given the opportunity to develop productions which will later be presented during the “Together Apart” festival in Hamburg. The three invited projects investigate real and ideal cohesion in Europe from various artistic perspectives. The EU-funded technology project TALOS is the focus of Israeli choreographer Arkadi Zaides’ research work. The mobile robotic system is being developed to guard Europe’s outer boundaries and is supposed to recognise and prevent people from illegally crossing the borders. Zaides’ production is a re-enactment of the TALOS project which takes issue with its ethical mechanisms, as well as political and economic interests. The production by the Italian choreographers Chiara Bersani and Marco D’Agostin uses the format of the Olympic Games to choreographically deconstruct the principle of peaceful athletic competition. And the collective Marble Crowd working with the Icelandic choreographer Saga Sigurdardottir and the composer Hallavarour Asgeirsson will present three dance essays which probe the potential of trust,

18 faith and collaborative action.

In cooperation with the research training group Performing Citizenship, the project is developing an accompanying programme featuring numerous artistic and participative formats which invite audiences to become better acquainted with the respective themes. An international conference will host a discussion on the possibilities of collaborative work in dance and choreography.

Artistic director: Kerstin Evert Artistic project director: Solveigh Patett Participants: Marco D’Agostin & Chiara Bersani (IT), Marble Crowd (IS), Igor Dobricic (RS), Rudi Laermans (BE), Arkadi Zaides (IL/BY) Festival: 29 Mar. – 9 Apr. 2017

Photo: Uwe Dettmar, Deutsches Architekturmuseum

↗ www.k3-hamburg.de

GOOD SPACE – ­Political, Aesthetic and Urban Spaces Crossing Media

This exhibition project, organised by the art galleries of the City of Esslingen, focuses on the appropriation, perception and construction of space. Presenting perspectives from the fields of art, architecture and science, “Good Space” examines the function and significance of public space and asks how these can be designed in view of finite natural resources and limited space. The artist Jasper Niens, for example, investigates how sites are redefined by manmade structures. Los Carpinteros explores impoverished urban areas in order to develop models of the future for cities and societies. Stephen Willats compares the dreams of those living in nondescript, large-scale housing projects with the reality of their constructed environment.

And Hito Steyerl illuminates surveillance and invisibility in digital space. The exhibition also describes how the study of plant evolution has resulted in future-oriented technologies in the areas of bio design and urban ecology. As an “exhibition in the ­exhibition”, a special installation titled “Everything is Architecture” historically presents the visionary and utopian spatial and architectural concepts of the 1960s and 1970s from a contemporary perspective.

“Good Space” aims to appropriate spaces in the city itself; not only is the exhibition presented at the Villa Merkel, but also in the surrounding park and side buildings. The exhibition will be accompanied by lectures, workshops and concerts, while “walking expeditions” and cooperative projects with the university and youth organisations serve to form an additional connection to the city.

Artistic director: Andreas Baur Artists: Los Carpinteros (CU), ­Martin Creed (GB), Binelde Hyrcan (AO), Jon Rafman (CA), Hito Steyerl, Ryan Trecartin (US), Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud (CH), Stephen Willats (GB), PNAT (IT), raumlaborberlin and others

↘ Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky: Frankfurt kitchen Villa Merkel, Esslingen am Neckar: 25 May – 21 Aug. 2016 www.villa-merkel.de www.goodspace.villa-merkel.de

Natural Time Nature in the Age of Its Technical Reproduction

The exhibition project “Natural Time – Nature in the Age of Its Technical ­Reproduction” explores the relationship between humans, nature and art.

The title – a reference to the essay by Walter Benjamin “The Artwork in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” – emphasises that “reproducibility” is no longer a mere possibility, but a fact of our present day. We are already witnessing the artistic “reproduction” of nature – genetically, biochemically, in the form of renaturalisation or fetishisation through advertising and media.

What does it mean for the relationship between humans, nature and art when nature and the immediate aesthetic experience of nature is changed and manipulated through reproduction?

When the natural can no longer be distinguished from the artificial, when the artificial becomes identical to nature?

To what extent has art itself become an instrument for presenting and perceiving nature due to the ubiquity of new visual technologies? These questions are addressed in the exhibition, which starts by focusing on the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with its rural tradition. The relationship between humans and nature in this region is be-

ing subjected to strong processes of transformation and therefore possesses exemplary significance.

The exhibition includes newly produced paintings, drawings, installations and films. The programme will be ­supplemented by four related projects in public space, including a joint project between the “Environmental Ethics” working group at the University of ­Greifswald and the Greifswald Botanical ­Institute. The artists, scientists and ­environmental activists are collaborating closely in all areas of the exhibition.

Artistic directors: Andreas Wegner, Terezie Petišková (CZ) Curators: Andreas Wegner, Vendula Fremlová (CZ) Artists: Markus Ambach, Marcel Broodthears (BE), Brian Conley (US), Karl-Heinz Eckert, Thomas Heise, Helmut Hoege, Christoph Keller, Gerd Rohling, Blashoslav Rozboril (CZ) and others Kunstverein Schwerin: 5 May – 24 Sep. 2017; Brno House of The Arts, Brno: 15 Sep. – 5 Nov. 2017; University library, Greifswald: 20 Oct. – 10 Dec. 2017 ↗ www.kunstverein-schwerin.de

Woman_Architect For over 100 years: Women in the architectural profession

Architecture has been the domain of men for a very long time. It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that German universities started training women to become architects. Today, less than one third of all architects are women, but that number is expected to increase to more than half by 2020, as there are currently more women than men enrolled in architectural degree programmes. The German Museum of Architecture (DAM) in Frankfurt wishes to draw attention to this development with an exhibition and a large international symposium.

The exhibition “Woman_Architect” (Frau_Architekt) will portray such prominent women architects as Emilie Winkelmann, Lilly Reich, ­Karola Bloch and Sigrid Kressmann-­Zschach-Losito.

On the basis of their biographies, the curators wish to highlight and explain various historical developments. Winkelmann, for example, opened her own office in 1907, which made her the first self-employed female architect in Germany. Karola Bloch, wife of the philosopher Ernst Bloch, put food on the table for her family by working as an architect while in exile in the United States. Later the avowed communist moved to former East Germany to the city of Leipzig, where she worked as an architect before resettling in West G ­ ermany in 1961. ­Sigrid Kressmann-­Zschach-Losito was a celebrated architect in West Berlin in the 1960s. With 300 employees working under her, she designed several large-scale projects such as the Steglitzer Kreisel in

19 Berlin. Lotte Cohn, who had studied at the Technical College of Architecture in Berlin, moved to Palestine/Israel where she became the region's first freelance female architect.

The accompanying conference will offer insight into the status of international research on emancipation and the women’s movement in the 20th century.

It also hopes to shed light on the circumstances today and develop scenarios for the future. A catalogue will document the research findings.

Research supervisor: Mary Pepchinski Architects: Emilie Winkelmann, ­Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff, Marie Frommer, Lotte Cohn (IL), ­Grete Schütte-­Lihotzky (AT), Lotte StamBeese (NL), Grit Bauer-Revellio, Iris Dulin-Grund, ­Verena Dietrich, Lilly Reich, Karola Bloch, Sigrid Kressmann-­ Zschach-Losito and others Speakers: Edina Meyer-Maril (IL), Mary McLeod (US), Harriet Harris (GB), Helena Mattsson (SE), Mariann Simon (HU), Lynne Walker/Elizabeth Darling (GB), Katja Frey/Eliana Periotti (CH), Yasmin Schariff (GB) and others Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main: 22 Sep. 2017–25 Feb. 2018

Solo exhibition – Retrospective

Born in Austria and now living in France, Robert Stadler is one of the few contemporary designers who productively unite art and design. His works explore and creatively play with the boundary separating art and design, the boundary which classifies objects as products or as works of art.

One of Stadler’s central themes is the increasing digitalisation and resulting repeatability and non-binding character it brings to the physical or visual world. Consumption and production are key issues which he also takes up in his work. The planned exhibition at the Lipsiusbau in Dresden will be the first in the German-speaking region to present works by the designer and his critical view of our world of objects.

Stadler’s works will be accompanied by a selection of pieces owned by the State Art Collections (SKD) Dresden, such as furniture, tools, masks, paintings and curiosities. Stadler will select the items together with the French curator Alexis Vaillant, as well as create several new pieces for the exhibition. The result will be a multi-genre, multi-epochal “community of objects” which offers new perspectives on contemporary design and the collections of the SKD. For the Dresden Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Arts and Crafts), the exhibition

represents an important step towards contributing to the international discourse on contemporary design. The museum plans to present the exhibition at additional venues in Germany and other European countries.

Artistic director: Robert Stadler (FR/AT) Curator: Alexis Vaillant (FR) Artist: Robert Stadler (FR/AT) Staatliche Kunstsammlungen ­Dresden, Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau: 18 Mar. – 1 Nov. 2017 ↗ www.skd.museum.de

Tetsumi Kudo Retrospective

This exhibition at the Fridericianum in Kassel offers an in-depth, comprehensive view of works by the Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo. With the retrospective, the Fridericianum wishes to build on its past exhibitions, e.g. “Inhuman” and continue the discussion on human restructuring in times of technological transformation.

Inherent to Kudo’s artworks is the call for a “new ecology”, for which the atomic bombing of Hiroshima represents the seminal event. He interweaves nature, culture and technology so closely that the viewer constantly wonders where

one sphere ends and the next begins. The human component in Kudo’s works is always depicted as wired, circuited, crammed or mutilated. In his machine gardens, incubators, cages and greenhouses – all of which seem to have come from an eerie world of science fiction – toxins, poisons and nuclear catastrophe not only cause destruction, but also serve as catalysts for creative processes. Biological processes, organic physicality and technoid apparatuses are closely interconnected. This may be the reason why his works are an important point of reference for criticism of the Western, Eurocentric concept of humanism.

The educational concept focuses on how the human image and physicality are changing with respect to advances in technology. The relationship between nature, humanity and technology will serve as the subject of discussions with scholars and artists, as well as that of long-term cooperative projects with schools and other institutions of learning.

Artistic director: Susanne Pfeffer Artist: Tetsumi Kudo (JP) Fridericianum, Kassel: 25 Sep. 2016 – 1 Jan. 2017 ↗ www.fridericianum.org

Photomontage: Studio Robert Stadler, Photos: Herbert Jäger, Constantin Meyer

↗ www.dam-online.de

You May Also Like – Robert Stadler

↑ Johann Joachim Kaendler: Bolognese dog, Porcellain Collection, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Robert Stadler: Chair 107, Thonet GmbH, Photomontage: Studio Robert Stadler

20 Uncertain States

Planetary ­ Consciousness

Artistic action in states of emergency

Curators: Werner Heegewaldt, Anke Hervol, Jeanine Meerapfel, Johannes Odenthal Curatorial advisor: Katerina Gregos (GR/BE), Diana Wechsler (AR) Artists: Reza Aramesh (IR), Ayşe Erkmen (TR/DE), Yervant Gianikian/ Angela Ricci-Lucchi (IT), Mona Hatoum (LB/GB), Isaac Julien (GB), Zineb Sedira (DZ/FR), Graciela Sacco (AR/GB), Nasan Tur, Micha Ullmann (IL), Arkadi Zaides (BY/IL) and others Objects and documents from the archives of Erich Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ruth Berlau, Bertolt Brecht, Valeska Gert, Lilian Harvey, Heinrich Mann, Bruno Taut, Kurt Tucholsky and others Akademie der Künste, Berlin: 15 Oct. 2016 – 15 Jan. 2017 ↗ www.adk.de

↓ Timur Si-Qin: Axe Effect, 2011

Armed and Dangerous On the influence of the military and violence in everyday life

Design is a rarely mentioned, but significant aspect of weapons. Guns as designed products are now the theme of an exhibition at the Frankfurt Museum für Angewandte Kunst.

What makes this exhibition unique is how it presents the close connection between art and design, between the artwork and the designed objects. The spectrum of works ranges from purses featuring moulded pistols by the designer and concept artists Ted Noten, to a “throne” created by the Mozambiquan artist Gonçalo Mabunda by welding scrapped AK-47s which were used in the civil war in his home country. In an installation resembling an information stand, viewers can watch an artist dismantling a Glock 17, the most commonly sold handgun in the world, and investigating every single piece. Perfume bottles by Viktor & Rolf shaped like hand grenades draw attention to the aestheticisation of weapons and violence in everyday life. Following the curatorial premise that design often provides very precise insights into the hidden fears and wishes of society, the exhibition aims to confront visitors with the other side of the “peaceful Western society”. The exhibition itself is designed to resemble a

trade fair, reinforcing the link between art and design by presenting works of applied art and fine art as commercial goods or popular collector’s items.

In collaboration with the Excellence Cluster of the University of Frankfurt, the project will also stage lectures and host a podium discussion on the sociological, anthropological and psychological aspects of aggression and violence.

The project is also developing a film ­series in cooperation with the Filmmuseum which deals with the aesthetic ­depiction of ­violence.

Curators: Ellen Blumenstein, Daniel Tyradellis, Matthias Wagner K Curatorial assistants: Juliane Duft, Anna Gien Designers/Manufacturers: Gaston Glock (AT), Raffaele Iannello (IT), Juan Cristobal Karich (CL), Helmut Lang (AT/US), Gonçalo Mabunda (MZ), Alexander McQueen (GB), Ted Noten (NL), Philippe Starck (FR), Viktor & Rolf (BE) and others Artists: Omer Fast (IL), Clara Ianni (BR), Barbara Kruger (US), Oliver Laric (AT), Kris Martin (BE), Rami Maymon (IL), Julian Röder, Ala Younis (KW) and others Museum Angewandte Kunst, ­Frankfurt am Main: 10 Sep. 2016 – 26 Mar. 2017 ↗ www.museumangewandtekunst.de

Humans have made an indelible mark on nature and thus become a “force of nature” themselves. As natural resources grow scarcer and climate change and environmental problems intensify, the global disparity between winners and losers continually increases with millions of refugees displaced or fleeing. The project “Planetary Consciousness” addresses the common relationship that we all share on this planet at several levels, investigates the connections between climate change and migration, and invokes the visionary ability of humans. Over the course of nine months, the transnational ensemble Hajusom, the Ensemble Resonanz, the Burkinese Éco-Art project “The Garden of Silmandé” and other international artists and researchers will present their positions for a sustainable lifestyle in the future and a new world community. These will be eventually combined and intertwined to form a musical performance at Kampnagel.

The goal of “Planetary Consciousness” is to allow visitors to feel and experience visions of a different kind of world. To achieve this, the organisers will convert the Medienbunker Hamburg into a research lab in which the participants will develop music, text, choreography and props, and conduct themebased research. The interim results will be presented to and discussed with the public. A second laboratory will open in the “Garden of Silmandé” in Ouagadougou; starting in September 2016, children will begin planting and cultivating trees together with the participating artists. The video artist Josep Tapsoba will accompany them during the process and integrate the video footage into the stage design of the concluding musical performance.

A co-production with Kampnagel Hamburg, Gorki Theater Berlin, Theater im Pumpenhaus/Münster and C.I.T.O. Ouagadougou.

Artistic directors: Dorothea Reinicke, Ella Huck Musical directors: Juditha Haeberlin, Viktor Marek, Wolfgang Mitterer (AT), Tim-Erik Winzer Composers: Wolfgang Mitterer and others Performers: Ensemble Hajusom Musicians: Ensemble Resonanz Stage and set design: Jelka Plate and others, Choreography: Jochen Roller and others, Video: Joseph B. Tapsoba (BF) Kampnagel, Hamburg: 1 – 4 Jun. 2017 ↗ www.hajusom.de

© Timur Si-Qin

With more and more refugees arriving in Western Europe since 2015, states of emergency have become almost everyday occurrences. The Akademie der Künste is developing an exhibition titled “Uncertain States” which explores the topic of escape and migration. The artists’ experiences under National Socialism and during the Cold War are presented in combination with recent scientific, social and artistic findings. The aim is to create a dialogue between the historical experience of escape and exile, the latest findings in migration research and thematically related artistic positions.

The exhibition opens with a “Room of Experience” which illuminates the experience of escape based on selected biographies and items from the archives of the Akademie der Künste, e.g. from Heinrich Mann and Walter Benjamin.

Not only do the materials portray disturbing and traumatising aspects of escape, but they also offer the potential of new beginnings which could prove useful for addressing the present circumstances.

Contemporary artworks – for example, by Mona Hatoum and Arkadi Zaides – frequently focus on vulnerability and instability, violence and loss. The project also includes a parallel “think-tank” featuring discussion forums for guest researchers and artists, and the presentation of current and model projects, such as the Grandhotel Cosmopolis from Augsburg and the Migration Audio Archive from Cologne.

Musical performance

I wonder as I wander

Photographs by

Akinbode Akinbiyi

I WONDER AS I WANDER Akinbode Akinbiyi 1.

The important thing is how it guides us, how the light continually illuminates our path ahead, our way, and accompanies us like a close friend. Be it in the darkest corners of the night, or during the day when we assume we’re able to see everything. But that’s it, our vision is limited, focused, and most of the time concentrated on a certain point. But the light is everywhere. Be it tree, plant, building, street or wandering soul – the light blankets everything, radiating in its all-encompassing glory so that we must ultimately realise how dearly we depend on it.

I have been wandering the labyrinth of streets since my childhood. They say I ran away from my parent’s home when I was a child, not yet three years old. Someone found me and brought me back, but I was already infected. Since then, no faraway corner has been too far, no hill shimmering in the distance too steep to make me want to turn around and return home along the same path. Only further, further, deep into the night, deep into the forest.

2.

My wanderings used to be entirely carefree without any expectation or hidden wish. I would simply head out and enjoy the rhythm of physical movement, the fresh air in my lungs. I discovered new parts of town, new streets, gained a better understanding of the commercial and social circumstances of the area. Back then, reading so-called “world literature” was very important to me. I drew inspiration from many different writers as to how I could experience a city in a more profound and nuanced way. The market­ places, the entertainment districts, the residential areas – I tried to traverse them all, experience them as intensively as possible.

London, Lagos, Ibadan were the cities that appealed to me the most back then. I always went to London during the summer months to earn money and dance the nights away like a maniac.

I lived in Ibadan because of my studies, and often returned home to Lagos. Ibadan played an especially decisive role in my life. There was so much to discover there. The streets and crooked alleyways were truly labyrinths, a tangle of sheer endless corners and narrow passageways winding between mostly clay buildings and more durably built townhouses. The city rolls across several hills, sitting squatly near the ground, and back then, resembling a sea of corrugated sheet-metal roofs.

As I said before, these wanderings were carefree (I almost wrote “innocent”) – without a camera, without the wish to visually seize possession of the surroundings.

3.

The visual confrontation began in Germany, in Heidelberg. I purchased my first camera – a single-lens reflex from Japan which had exceedingly sharp focus and forced me to take a closer and more reflective look around me. I was still exploring my surroundings, became well-acquainted with the historical part of town and the outer districts, and after a time, went to Frankfurt am Main to explore a larger city again. But this time, never without my single-­ lens reflex camera.

After that, it was Munich’s turn and Hamburg’s, cities that attracted me and never seemed able to reveal enough of themselves. I changed equipment, moved on to medium-format cameras and intensified my wanderings. Lagos was calling me from afar since I was spending most of my time in Europe, in Germany. A long time in Munich and then finally in Berlin. But I always returned to Lagos, searching for my background, for my past in the present sprawl of new suburbs and traffic congestion that received worldwide notoriety. People considered Lagos chaotic back then, un­ governable, dangerous, criminal. Indeed, it was chaotic, but amidst the chaos there prevailed a certain order, a certain rhythm. It was hectic, sometimes brutal, very dynamic, and underneath lay the order of the urban population, its distinctive song rising from the noise and heat.

I’ve often spoken of that intimate dance between the sensitive wanderer and the city through which he wanders. It is not a dance between two equal partners, as the city dominates and always insists on leading. It points to where the path continues and tells us where to place our feet. It embraces the lonely wanderer as well, pressing him close to her bosom, so tightly he can barely breathe.

The city I love is also the city that oppresses me and entirely takes control of me over time. Especially those “megacities”, cities with more than fifteen, twenty million inhabitants. Incredibly vast, almost unimaginable. Masses of people who fill the streets every day and create congestion that some would say is intolerable. And then there’s Balogun Market on Lagos Island – sometimes so packed and impenetrable that non-locals cannot imagine how to get out of there again. The market extends around several neighbouring city districts, so seemingly endless and sprawling that one can easily lose orientation. Nonetheless, experienced buyers find what they’re looking for, be it fabrics, automotive spare parts, furniture or electrical goods.

4.

Special moments – those individual, intuitive moments – are decisive. The common thread is the road ahead, the street, the sidewalk, the path. I wander and wonder. I wonder as I wander, a poem by the African-American Langston Hughes, has accompanied me for decades as I have wandered through cities. Moments that are difficult to describe. They’re serendipitous, they happen by chance. You’re standing at an intersection, watching the comings and goings, and suddenly you feel something in the air. Often it’s the premonition of an accident as the traffic becomes hectic and uncontrolled. And then it happens, the accident, and many are shocked, taken aback. Often what happens is too gory, too traumatic to be photographed. Not everyone is interested in the sensation, the spectacle of broken, injured bones and bodies. But there are also other moments that go beyond that. When people pull out their mobiles for a quick snapshot, held cocked in their hands like a small handgun or a spyhole – it was this moment I captured on film in Bamako when I encountered a group of people standing around a horribly injured man. At first I thought he had been hit by a car. But then someone explained that he was a thief whom the mob had brutally beaten. When the ambulance came, the onlookers moved aside and allowed the beaten man to be carefully lifted onto the stretcher and carried away. This was the moment when I took a picture of these people doing the same thing that I do for a living, taking pictures of a special moment. They snapped photos with their mobiles. I captured the moment with my medium-format camera. And between us, the unconscious, battered man.

5.

As is so often the case in life, it’s all about coming and going, or better yet, giving and receiving. I go out in order to take something.

But by giving myself completely to what I find, the mood of the day, the uniqueness of this particular moment, I also receive something from the surroundings. The images contain and convey special moments. Several images in a sequence form a story, about the city, about the path. The pictures are narrative moments, meticulously composed fragments which, the longer one looks at them, reveal hidden depths, allow other layers to appear.

These layers lie below the surface of the images, so to speak, underneath, and require a concentrated, constant gaze, a plunge into the visual river. The city, the cities, they’re not only noise and urban bustle, not only crowds and traffic, but are also places of deeply-engrained rituals, places where we, the wandering inhabitants, try to find meaning and purpose for our being here.

6.

I wonder as I wander, but more than that, I photograph in order to understand the constantly encroaching visual fragments.

Akinbode Akinbiyi (*1946) grew up in England and the Nigerian city of Lagos. In the 1970s he started taking photos as an autodidact and soon become an internationally acclaimed news and architectural photo­ grapher. He has curated numerous exhibitions of African art and ­photography in Germany, as well as the German presentation at the ­Photography Biennale in Bamako. Last August he received the Goethe Medal. In 2017 Akinbiyi will be showing new works at the documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens. Akinbode Akinbiyi lives in Berlin.

AHMET SAMI ÖZBUDAK

21

The

Sazlı

Melaike Aziz had mended the sequined miniskirt and could finally slip it on.

His eyes were already heavily made up, but he felt they needed much more. He applied another layer. And then another!

“Take it easy, you’re going to gouge out your eyes,” Mesut warned, pulling off his wig and then falling into an armchair at the back of the room.

“You’re totally overdoing it with this Cleopatra concept.”

He was used to Mesut taunting him to get him into a good mood, but tonight he was just annoying. Aziz would have liked to stab him in the eye with a pen. He drew a deep

breath. Then he put on the golden necklace, inspected the elephant on it and gently stroked the embossed design with his fingers.

“You never get enough of petting his trunk!” Mesut’s incessantly babbling voice was like a hand whose long fingernails were scraping at his bowels. He stood up, dabbed jasmine oil behind his ears and clover oil over his chest and on his shoulders.

Then he put on a violet and lightpink coloured feather mask. He spun around. ­ The bells and sequins on his skirt jangled delightfully.

“Those perfumes give me a headache,” Mesut complained behind him.

But Aziz only responded with a sexy swing of the hips.

Kabarett

Masturi!

AHMET SAMI ÖZBUDAK on the treatment of homosexuals in Turkey I would like to begin with the place I spent my childhood, for childhood is the seed from which we become adults. It’s exciting to think that the magnificent things we see when we look at a tree all emerged from a seed. I spent my childhood in Alanya. I was different from other children, maybe it was there that I experienced the first great traumas of my homosexuality, creating the tree you see before you now, grown from a seed trampled and kicked about under the fascism of normality. Alanya was a small city. I suffered the first fascist blows during my childhood, from relatives, from friends, from my family. Perhaps they’re only poking fun at you sometimes, but what’s most hurtful are the looks, and they were even worse during my childhood. People hurt you first with their looks. In a conservative Muslim society, it’s especially brutal and painful. This fascism that I was exposed to naturally influenced my development as a writer. In one of my first plays titled Iz (“The Trace”), the main character is a transvestite named Sevengül. I felt that the depth and truth of this character differed from those of the others, for the character Sevengül unites moments on that agonising path shared by numerous homosexuals living in Turkey today.

The “picture-window morality”, or moral hypocrisy, was also the central theme in my debut novel Masturi Kabare (“Masturi Cabaret”).

Developing the various lifestyles in the world of the main character Aziz, I tried to reflect the general attitude toward homosexuality in Turkey. Aziz’s uncle, for example, is a conservative, uneducated, rigid-thinking man, the kind of man one often encounters in Turkey, a walking cliché so to speak. Much like his parents. Compared to his uncle, they are more tolerant, but still think on the same wavelength. When I was describing the parents, I touched on another important point, namely that of non-acceptance. The biggest problem in families of homosexuals is their inability to accept, their refusal to believe. They are clearly aware of the situation, but because of the moralistic fascism, they refuse to accept reality. And the same goes for Aziz’s parents; they ignore Aziz’s homosexuality, their deepest wish is to see Aziz get married one day and start a family.

The homosexuality of the other two main characters in the novel, Ceylan and Eren, addresses something else, namely how homosexuality is dealt with in middle-class society. The wealthy, who dominate Istanbul’s night life, are especially keen on the overtures of homosexual shows. Locations showcasing men in women’s clothing, transvestites belly-dancing and gay singers performing have always been popular. The middle-class view of “the gays” isn’t

22 very unlike viewing monkeys at the zoo. In the lives of these people, these characters are among their greatest sources of amusement.

And in Masturi Cabaret I tried to portray the point of view of these circles, to which Eren and Ceylan also belong.

Now that we’re on the topic of Istanbul, I’d like to offer my impression of what gay life in Istanbul is really like. It’s not a simple matter, it’s rather detailed and complex. The moral hypocrisy I mentioned above strongly characterises homosexual life in Istanbul as well. On any night of the week, you can see dozens of transvestites and transsexuals walking the streets between Osmanbey and Şişli. Who are their customers? One could say they come from all walks of life – from married men to younger people, from police officers to well-to-do businessmen. Most of them are undoubtedly conservative, they lead completely normal lives during the day and the word “homosexuality” would never cross their lips. But at night, their psyche changes; they get into their limousines and cruise down the strip, looking to hook up with a male sex worker.

One could call this the dark side of gay life in Istanbul. On the other hand, there are also a considerable number of people who choose not to conceal their relationships from the public eye. This group is mainly comprised of artists and designers, but also committed supporters and activists of the LGBT movement.

Like many other areas of Turkish society, the gay community in Istanbul achieved a new dimension during the Gezi demonstrations, and since then, has become better organised and more outspoken. During the weeks of the Gezi demonstrations in summer 2013, the Gay Pride March was held and received with incredible euphoria. Not only did the gay-pride parade have the backing of gay groups, but widespread support came from heterosexuals as well. This enormous energy annoyed the Turkish government, and in the following year, the parade was massively attacked, marred by police violence and the use of tear gas.

On one hand, the LGBT movement in Turkey gives me reason to hope, but on the other, occasion for concern. In the predominant conservative atmosphere which exists at the moment, the movement is trying to find a voice and is struggling to survive. The fact is that in an Islamic country, openly living one’s homosexuality is unacceptable. If the current Islamic atmosphere continues to intensify and Turkey evolves into a more Islamic-oriented country, the gay community’s struggle for survival will become considerably harder. Gay life will have to arrange itself with the moral hypocrisy I mentioned above. Its members will more frequently be forced to live their lives underground, though this underground element is quite prevalent even today.

However, if the political atmosphere shifts in the opposite direction, we can look forward to strong, progressive circles who dominate a large part of the artistic, cultural and design fields in Turkey.

Ahmet Sami Özbudak, May 2016, Istanbul

The Sazlı Melaike was absolutely packed at the weekends – not even a pin could fall to the floor. Daughters and sons of wealthy families celebrated bachelor parties there.

Young guys with gelled hair doused themselves with entire bottles of cologne, Casanovas who had escaped their spouses …

infiltrated his life and didn’t allow Aziz to join her circle. Those nights when Zambak Sude stuck to him, he felt miserable.

The club was the temple of Istanbul nightlife. A place where masses were staged for the masses, whose worship of pleasure was divine. The grand finale of the mass was the dance show by the trio Mesut, Mügü and Aziz. They were fully aware of this when they went on stage. In the opening programme, three buxom dancers appeared and announced the show.

Tonight was one of those nights.

His identity as Aziz remained hidden. ­

The regulars at the Sazlı Melaike knew it was time for their entrance when Mashallah was sung, the duet

by Alabina and the Gipsy Kings.

The three of them attracted attention: Mügü, a woman in her late thirties who had no other options, Mesut in his early forties who played his last trump cards, and Aziz who performed under the pseudonym Zambak Sude, the Painted ­ Lily. Month after month, they worked together on a new concept and put together a dance show based on the respective motto. At the end of the show, Aziz did a pantomime number, brazenly showing off his body in all its elegance and beauty, for which some women would envy him. It wasn’t anything he did that drew admiration, it was just his body. When he broke into a sweat, he smelled of jasmine and cloves. The scent of his skin mixed with the crowd, following him wherever he danced, leaving his ­ mark. Some of them, he knew, would masturbate that night with that smell. How he loved to play this game of forbidden fruit with both men and women! He glided through the crowd and everyone sniffed him as he passed.

No one saw through his dance, his show. But everyone craved him.

“Who is that?”

“Who is that?”

“Who is that?”

The question trailed him as he passed through the crowd. Someone began the question and another finished it.

“Who is that?”

Until he removed the mask, he didn’t even know himself who he was. He wiped off the make-up with an oiled piece of cotton, wiping and wiping. Until Aziz reappeared.

On some nights Aziz reappeared earlier, in others, not at all. He went on stage as Zambak Sude, she

I wasn’t able to turn back into Aziz, I’ve stayed Zambak Sude, where might this night take me? he asked himself sometimes.

He exited at the back entrance of the Sazlı Melaike. It always looked the same here. Hundreds of plastic bottles, cases of liquor, workers smelling of sweat, cats by the dozen, cigarettes glowing in the dark like stars. That was the other face of the Sazlı Melaike. At the front entrance, a bustling Istanbul street wafting in perfume, and at the rear, a damp, wretched, foul-smelling hole. Aziz preferred to go out through this door. He even liked it. At least here, there was no tinge of that life of hypocrisy inside. Here everything was just the way it was. If it was misery, then that’s what it was – misery.

He walked along the quiet alleyway and headed toward Nişantaşı. The night was orphaned. The alleys belonged to the cats and dogs. The ­ quarter was completely different from daytime-Nişantaşı, perhaps it was the only seedy district in Istanbul that put on a nightshirt. It was getting chilly. Aziz walked, Aziz walked fast. He perspired like he did on stage.

“Now go to sleep, Zambak Sude, hey Aziz, come on and show yourself”, he mumbled quietly to himself.

He wouldn’t come out.

He was tingling.

He walked along the curb of the sidewalk. The devil had planted a spark of excitement in his chest.

The excitement grew with each step.

Finally the moment came when he stopped at the side of the road.

The cars honked. He gave the drivers furtive glances. Should I have some fun tonight? He thrust his butt toward them, more conspicuously into the headlights of the cars that gave him a signal. He wriggled his butt cheeks like an idling motor. The men queued up next to him.

A man with a light complexion and grey hair. His laugh sounded fake, so not him.

A spring chicken with a peach-fuzz moustache. He had seen him at the club, a cheapskate.

A nice grandpa in his mid-sixties.

Not worth the trouble.

A chubby blond guy. The limousine

23 he was driving didn’t belong to him; he was just the chauffeur.

A hairy thirty-something. The jeep was his status symbol. He seemed incredibly nervous. He wasn’t worth it.

Apparently Zambak Sude wasn’t going to get the chance to have fun tonight, and Aziz was gone without a trace. What a let-down the night was! He had walked all the way from Harbiye to Elmadağ. Now he lowered his gaze. And was happy he didn’t run into anyone. He shouldn’t do it. Even though his body yearned for waters he had never sailed, he should leave it alone. There had been a few times he had done it, embraced complete strangers. A brief flutter of the heart, what use was that? He was still deep in thought when headlights from a car came up from behind, flashing low and high beams. Who could that be?

Somebody who was very persistent obviously. A geezer or a pimp, a kook or a pervert. He turned around. A Chevrolet, model 1960, indigo blue. Crazy. To him, this rumbling thing was just an old car.

Like an old man on the verge of a coughing fit.

Aziz wasn’t in the mood to put in the effort. He turned into a street heading down to Dolapdere. At the corner of the monstrous housing project Sarıcazade Abdullah Osman Bey, its courtyard deserted, the guy cornered him. Pressed up against the wall, Aziz stared at the car. The headlights blinded him. If the guy wanted to squash him, he’d stick fast to the wall.

Sharply exhaling, Aziz shivered. It crossed his mind that it might be someone from before.

The rattling motor stopped, the door opened.

A girl wearing an orange wig got out. She had pinned up the hair of her wig and placed a lace butterfly on top. She was wearing a polka-dotted mini dress. Leaning on the car door, she broke into peals of laughter. Totally crazy.

Laughed.

Wouldn’t stop laughing.

The more Aziz shivered, the louder she laughed.

“Scared, honey?” she asked and erupted in boisterous laughter again.

“Come here, sweetie, I’m taking you with me!”

Unable to think clearly, Aziz shook his head.

“Aww, come on, get in. I won’t bite, don’t worry.”

Sensibilities

The girl was presumptuous and very forward. Maybe a customer at the club. But how could she have recognised Aziz? Was it even possible to recognise him behind the mask? Aziz obediently got into the car. The girl winked at him and then smiled.

Festival on homosexuality ­ and literature

How relevant is one’s sexual orientation for discussing texts, for writing and reading? How are biographical experiences expressed in literary processes, formats and stylistic structures? And in what way does one’s social environment and intellectual lines of discourse influence European contemporary literature? These questions were addressed at a writers’ conference hosted by the Literarisches Colloqiuum in Berlin in July 2016.

The title of the several-day event referred to the book The History of Sensibility.

Homosexuality and Literature which had caused quite a stir when it was published in 1987. The author Hubert Fichte tried to answer the question of whether a particular style of writing was specific to a writer’s sexual orientation. His book initiated a ­series of contentious debates involving the most diverse positioning, self-definitions and aesthetic concepts. The project invited writers, scholars and leading figures of the European GLBTI community to Berlin to examine and discuss homosexuality as a ­topos of European literature in public ­forums, discussions, readings and performances. An accompanying exhibition ­featuring photos by Leonore Mau on the theme “Mask, Body, Writing” served as a source of inspiration for the participants and will soon be presented in Austria and Slovenia.

“Man, what a cutie you are!” She pinched his cheek.

The car coasted down the hill.

“You hungry?” The girl was relaxed as if they were old friends.

“Could you drop me off somewhere?”

“Gosh, you got the jitters, little bunny! Would you be so desperate to get out if a man were sitting at the wheel?”

She laughed again. She was as straightforward as before.

“I’ll pay whatever you charge.”

“You got me all wrong, I don’t walk the streets.”

Again the girl guffawed.

“Listen, I’m famished, let’s drive over to the Golden Horn and we’ll eat a soup?”

Aziz didn’t say anything.

Artistic directors: Samanta Gorzelniak & Thorsten Dönges Writers: Mario Fortunato (IT), Masha Gessen (RU/US), Saleem Haddad (GB), Hilary McCollum (IE), Murathan Mungan (TR), Ahmet Sami Özbudak (TR), Masha Qrella & Band, Antje Rávic Strubel, Abdella Taia (FR), Suzana Tratnik (SI), Michał Witkowski (PL) and others

“Come on, we’re going,” the girl decided cheekily.

When they parked in front of the soup kitchen, he felt embarrassed to be seen by the restaurant staff.

With the utmost self-confidence, the girl got out. Everyone immediately fawned on her. A grey-haired giant in front of the restaurant greeted her euphorically as soon as he caught sight of her. Apparently a Don Juan who had gotten on in years. Now Aziz found himself wondering about the girl.

“Crazy girl, what have you done to your head? How’s Cengiz Bey? Everyone okay?” The man barraged her with similar questions, interspersed with exuberant laughter.

Aziz observed him indifferently.

They sat down at one of the tables with a view of the Golden Horn.

“Tripe soup for both of us,” the girl ordered, “I chose for you, but the tripe soup here is really good.”

She acted as if Aziz weren’t even there, but still tugged him around by the sleeve to introduce him to her world.

Aziz was still in a daze. Had a glass of whisky soda ever made him feel this disoriented? His psyche floated in a vacuum. This girl had skilfully picked up his loose strings and pulled them. Like a master puppeteer.

↗ www.lcb.de

“What’s your name?”

“Aziz.”

“I’m Ceylan. You can call me Ceyo.

But actually I think it’d be nice if you called me Anfisa.”

They sat quietly for a moment.

“What do you do?” Ceylan asked, although she knew exactly what the young man did for a living.

“We’re self-employed.”

Ceylan persisted as forward as ever. The employees seemed used to it. Whenever things got moving, they smirked, throwing sidelong glances their way.

“Yeah, well, everyone’s self-employed nowadays.”

24 “We’ve got a restaurant in Çemberlitaş, that’s where I am. My father, my uncle and so,” Aziz explained.

“Oh, I love the cook-shops in that area. There’s a street where there’s one restaurant after another, is that where your place is?”

“No, we’re in Çemberlitaş.”

“I’ve got a friend, Ismail, he makes fashion, I used to go there with him often to look at fabrics, marvellous!”

Soon they had eaten their soups and had warmed up to each other, even acting like friends. Aziz had always gotten along well with women and girls. It had been that way since primary school, so he wasn’t surprised.

“Wanna come over to our place?”

Ceylan asked.

“No, I’ve got to go home, Ceylan Hanım.”

The girl burst out in her grating laughter.

“Ceyo, man, Ceyo!”

She smoked pretentiously and drove roughshod without wasting a thought on what kind of car she was driving.

“So where do you live?”

“In Yedikule.”

“Hey, I’ll take you there.”

“I can get there on my own.”

“How do you plan to get there at this hour?”

She was spirited, almost to the point of being obstinate. She would not be dissuaded from bringing Aziz right to his door on Hacı Kadın Street in Yedikule. She stopped the car and looked him in the eyes.

“Do your parents know about you, sweetie?” she asked impertinently.

“Of course not.”

With a tender and compassionate gaze, Ceylan planted a long, confident kiss on his lips. She kissed him, fiery and brashly. Surprised, Aziz let the kiss happen, unanswered. Undoubtedly his mother was peeking at them through the curtains at this very moment. And probably his father too.

“Faruk!” his mother would call to his father joyfully. “Aziz is sitting in a car with a girl, look!”

Both would draw a deep sigh of relief.

only consolation was that their son went to night school.

Stunned by the kiss, Aziz got out and inserted his key into the lock. The door opened before he could turn the key.

Who could tell what would have happened if they had ever seen the school Sazlı Melaike with their own eyes. That would stay a secret. ­

“How are you, my son?”

“Fine, Mama.”

This tone, how she said my son!

She was practically overflowing with tenderness and joy.

His father was occupied with something else, but his thoughts ­ were undoubtedly with them. He was eagerly carrying out the ritual washing, clearly ecstatic. The water from the tap splashed onto the floor.

“Watch what you’re doing, Faruk, I just mopped,” his mother scolded.

“Allahhümme salli,” his father grumbled.

Aziz went up to his room without a word. His mother called after him, “Are you hungry?”. He pretended not to hear her. He entered his room. His cousin Cemile was sleeping on her mattress on the floor.

Lying in bed on his back, he immediately started thinking of ­ the strange girl he had run into.

A crazy chick. Aziz was used to strange nights. But nothing this crazy had ever happened to him before. Who could say how happy his parents were? Obviously they would be overjoyed if he got married. Hadn‘t the neighbours ­ been talking? They weren’t stupid.

If they saw Aziz, the colourful bird of the neighbourhood, walking the streets, they’d nudge each other and start gossiping. If he walked past the café on the street, he heard the muttering.

Most of this was playing inside his head. A mob, stones in hand, pursuing him, and soon they’d pelt him, but suddenly somebody would yell, “Aziz, how’s your Papa? Tell him I said hi!”

Not that the guy was really interested in Faruk’s state of health, but rather he and the others took pleasure in Aziz’s naive reply.

His mother Zambak and father Faruk were clearly and completely aware of what was going on. They were probably thinking the same thing that very moment as they lay in bed next to each other, staring at the ceiling. What was to become of the boy? The doubts gnawed at them bitterly. They tried to impress on his subconscious that he should marry. What if, God forbid, the boy was truly what those damn neighbours said he was? With a quick prayer they both tried to drive away these thoughts. Their

Ahmet Sami Özbudak (*1980 in Hatay/Turkey) spent his childhood in Alanya and studied Archival Studies at the University of Istanbul.

Since then, Özbudak has been living and writing in Istanbul. He also works as the general theatre director and playwright of the theatre company GalataPerform. His play “The Trail”, published as a novel in May 2016, received the European Writers Award at the Heidelberg Play Market in 2011. In 2013, Özbudak was named Playwright of the Year by the Turkish magazine Theatre Theatre. In 2014, Özbudak was awarded the Cevat Fehmi Başkut Prize as part of the Afife Theatre Awards. Özbudak’s play “Hayal-i Temsil” (“Performance of a Vision”) about the life of the actresses Afife Jale and Bedia Muvahhit was added to the repertory of the Istanbul Municipal Theatre. He recently directed the play “Kar Küresinde Bir Tavşan” (“A Rabbit in the Snow Globe”) at ikincikat Istanbul. “The Sazlı Melaike” (which roughly means “Event Angel”) is an excerpt from Özbudak’s debut novel Kabarett Masturi (Istanbul 2014).

With regard to the present situation in Turkey, Ahmet Sami Özbudak states: “As much as the current events in Turkey have tried to snatch away my motivation to write, I will work to continue offering resistance with my writing. Writing gives me courage, I can feel myself breathe when I write.”

OKWUI ENWEZOR, KATY SIEGEL, ULRICH WILMES

Global Modernism

What Could 25

­Look Like?

26 The years after World War II that followed the decisive defeat of Germany in Europe and of Japan in Asia marked a turning point in global history. The catastrophe and chaos caused by the war had destroyed entire cities and nations, resulted in the death of millions and produced a massive refugee crisis as millions of stateless people sought a new home. And this against the backdrop of the first use of the atomic bomb and the unspeakable horrors of the concentration camps. The ethical and technological legacies of Hiroshima and Auschwitz became a symbol of the crisis of humanism.

ostwar – Art between the Pacific and ­Atlantic, 1945–1965” could well be the first exhibition in Germany to move beyond the Eurocentric or Western perspective and portray postwar art as a global network of relationships in an increasingly interwoven and interdependent world.

The following is an abridged version of the exhibition concept by the curators Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel and Ulrich Wilmes – an essayistic overview of the global constellations and lines of art development in the postwar era.

In the field of art, the postwar period marks a particular historical and cultural turning point, too, for it brought about the waning dominance of Western European art capitals and the rise of the international presence and hegemony of contemporary American art, popular culture and mass media. This cultural shift, in fact, mirrored the shift in geopolitical power in which defeated Europe acquired and acquiesced to new patrons and protectors. In Europe, as the Cold War divided the continent into two separate spheres of influence — the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern and Central Europe allied with the Soviet Union, and the NATO countries of Western Europe allied with the United States — the state of the arts also revealed a distinct ideological fault line: between communism and capitalist democracy, “socialism and liberal democracy”.

Informing this simplifying binary, which obscured more complex motivations for artistic production, were the ideological and artistic rationale behind the terms “abstraction” and “socialist realism.” These terms became moral equivalents in the contest for a renewed vision of art after the war. The same spheres of influence also divided the Pacific region between the United States and the Soviet Union into two unyielding competitors. On a global scale, however, several factors complicated this binary — decolonisation struggles, independence movements and anti-colonial resistance in Africa, Asia and the Middle East — even as the Cold War powers courted and sought control of the new nations. These increasingly independent actors suggested quite different orientations and alliances — including pan-Africanism and the Non-Aligned Movement — in the wake of imperialism and the end of the war.

The question being asked everywhere was: What could global modernism look like?

If we had to rearrange the cartographies of postwar modernism once more, which methods could we use?

To what extent did the political sphere influence the aesthetic world, or the cultural sphere the artistic world? And conversely, how did artists, critics and intellectuals negotiate, resist and undermine political ideologies? How were artistic practices and aesthetic frames reconstructed in disseminated political and cultural contexts? And how did intellectual movements in the former colonial peripheries shape the modernist terrain? In other words, how did the cycle of art, objects, discourses and ideas form the global contours of postwar modernism? What connections – if at all – existed between form and context in the postwar world?

The postwar era is introduced by the apocalyptic image of the atomic bomb — a technology that ushered in an era of intertwined beginnings and endings, promise and betrayal. As accounts of the Holocaust and images of the concentration camps put an end to European aspirations to moral universalism, the bomb and the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signalled the end of Europe’s political power in the world and the beginning of an era of American military dominance. This, in turn, prompted a new kind of war: the Cold War and the arms race. While the end of World War II heralded an era of military occupation in Japan, it also sparked fights for freedom and independence in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere. Ubiquitous both as an image of itself and in the threat it posed to the entire world, the iconography of the mushroom

27 cloud helped create a new consciousness of the planet as a single, interconnected entity, a new sense of scale emphasised by the space exploration programme that would emerge from military technology, affording views of the Earth that reinforced this sense of global integrity and interconnection.

The American use of the bomb represented and enacted American military and economic dominance. Despite their scepticism toward the American government’s reasoning for employing the bomb, artists were excited by the wondrous natural revelations and awed by the Biblical scale of the bomb’s power, as evident, for example, in Normal Lewis’s work “Every Atom Glows: Electrons in Luminous Vibration” (1951) and “Nuclear Explosion” (1951) by the Italian Movimento Arte Nucleare. The bomb was also a Japanese story, told through photography (much of it suppressed, only to be later released) by artists such as Iri and Toshi Murki who returned to Hiroshima just three days after its destruction and decided to create an ambitious photo series titled “Hiroshima Panels” (1950–1982), portraying the suffering they saw there. In the wake of futurism’s worship of technology, Italian artists were also keenly focused on the bomb. In 1952, Enrico Baj painted the “Bum Manifesto”, a head in the shape of a black mushroom cloud against a poisonous yellow background, overwritten with anti-atomic slogans and mottos, such as: “People’s heads are filled with explosives / every atom explodes”.

Photographs and films of ruined cities and concentration camp survivors were released in the immediate postwar period. The shock of these images, and the full realisation of the scale and depth of the horror of the camps, inspired numerous artworks in Germany, such as Andrzej Wróblewski’s “Rozstrzelanie z gestapowcem (Rozstrzelanie IV)” (1949), Gerhard Richter’s “Atlas” (1962–present) and Wolf Vostell’s cycle “German Views from the Black Room” (1958–63).

Hiroshima and Auschwitz laid bare the failures of Western civilisation. In the wake of these shocks came ambivalent political attempts to establish geopolitical systems that would be more just, through such new legal forms as the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — putatively global but in fact dominated by Western authority — and the struggles for full citizenship and autonomy of people in former European colonies. Philosophers and artists sought to inquire more deeply into human nature itself, in debates that included the discourses of négritude and existentialism, and the rights of individuals and groups within larger (often oppressive) social and political entities.

These artists often deliberately combined figuration and materialist facture, refusing the choice between abstraction and representation — or between physical and social life, seeing the binary as not only ideologically false but also deeply destructive. At a postwar art conference in Darmstadt, West Germany, the political adversaries Hans Sedlmayr and Theodor W. Adorno surprisingly found common ground as they both lamented the lack of a centre of contemporary culture for it seemed that contemporary art wasn’t capable of addressing fundamental human concerns, not to speak of emotions and everyday life. This issue was also discussed by East German immigrants, such as Georg Baselitz who avoided and deformed the politically charged choice between abstraction and socialistic realism, yet represented extremely vivid individual figures. In his introduction to the MoMA exhibition “New Images of Man” which included images by such artists as Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti, the theologian Paul Tillich warned against “the danger that resides in modern man – the danger of losing one’s humanity”, a danger that exists in totalitarianism and in a technology-oriented mass society to an equal degree.

The most significant counterforce to universalist Western humanism came, in different veins, from former European colonies. In 1961 Léopold Senghor wrote of the necessity of distinguishing and locating human na-

ture, and that, in contrast to modern (Western) as well as Marxist univeralism, “man is not without a homeland. He is not a person without skin colour or history or state or civilisation. He is a West African man, our neighbour who is precisely defined by his time and his place ... a man who has been humiliated for centuries, and in his dignity as a physical human being not so much because for being hungry or naked, but because of his colour and his culture.”

This specific dignity is perhaps best portrayed in the images of the human body performing hard physical labour by artists such as Hamed Owais and Inji Efflatoun.

Sometimes, as with Franz Fanon’s “new man,” the formerly colonised claimed a moral right to define humanism broadly and universally, a right forfeited by the West with its inhumane behaviour during the war and its colonial conquests. We recognise this new form of humanism, for example, in the thinkers portrayed by the Indian artist Francis Newton Souza – coloured bodies who acquire the traditional intellectual and ethical privilege of Westerners.

The other side of the Cold War binary is, of course, the socialist realism in Soviet, Chinese, and Eastern and Central European art. Here, to a greater extent, institutional appropriation came before, not after, artistic production. Nevertheless, accounts of this category, too, can be overly fixed. Even in the heyday of its enforcement, socialist realism was not a single style. Under Mao Zedong, Chinese artists produced large official portraits of the Chairman (Jia Youfu, “Marching Across the Snow-covered Mount Minshan” (1965)) and scenes depicting model workers. But there was also tolerance of traditional ink painting, with the addition of appropriate symbols of the new order, such as the red flag. In the Soviet Union, art from the 1940s to Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 is primarily characterised by affirmative images of work, especially by heroic images of party leaders (Yuri Vasilyevich Yakovlev, Portrait von Georgii Zhukov, marshal of the Soviet Union, 1946). During the post-Stalinist thaw, genre painting influenced by the 19th-century Russian Wanderers became more prominent, as well as the “severe style”, influenced by Soviet art of the 1920s and early 1930s.

Outside the Soviet Union there was considerably more latitude for artists working with official socialist representation, and painters such as the Lithuanian native and Cracow-resident Andrzej Wróblewski, who produced works which, while depicting officially sanctioned subjects, introduced personal drawing styles as well as surrealist elements.

While the international abstract style that dominated the postwar world was primarily materialist and gestural, prewar geometric abstraction did persist, albeit with an impetus quite distinct from that of European prewar artists. With Max Bill’s first visit to Argentina and his participation in the first biennial in São Paulo in 1951, a genetic link was formed between neo-concrete art in South America and European concrete art. But this style also contained local impulses such as Joaquín Torres García’s vitalism which it combined with elements of European modernism and became an entirely independent phenomenon, incorporating the viewer as a participant and venturing far beyond the forms of painting and sculpture.

Parallel to this development, a nationalist style developed which not only refuted the tenets of Western capitalism but figured in competition with it.

Following the massive upheavals resulting from World War II, the terms associated with cosmopolitanism shifted radically. People were on the move. Massive populations — refugees, stateless people, and diasporas — were moving between continents, countries, and cities, forming dispersed lines of displacement, migration, exile, ­affinities, and settlements. In his essay “Reflections on Exile”, Edward Said touches on the dilemma of exile, ­observing that “exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience”. The hostile policies and limited opportunities at home incited African American writers and artists like James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney to seek cosmopolitan refuge and emigrate to Paris.

Postwar Art between the Pacific and ­Atlantic, 1945–1965

In cooperation with international institutions, the Haus der Kunst in Munich has developed a research and exhibition project which examines the cultural influences and legacies of art production around the world since 1945 from three different perspectives: postwar, post-­ colonialism and post-communism.

The first part of the project focuses on art of the postwar era between 1945 and 1965. From 14 October 2016 to 26 March 2017, the exhibition “Postwar” at the Haus der Kunst examines postwar art from multiple vantage points – East and West, North and South, the colonisers and the colonised, Pacific and Atlantic – highlighting their respective interests and dynamic relationships on a regional, national and transnational level.

The exhibition is divided into eight thematic sections: 1. Aftermath: Zero Hour and the ­ Atomic Era; 2. Form ­Matters; 3. New ­Images of Man; 4. Realisms; 5. Concrete Visions; 6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms; 7. Nations Seeking Form; 8. Networks, M ­ edia & Communication.

Artistic director: Okwui Enwezor Curators: Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, Ulrich Wilmes Artists: Lygia Clark (BR), Öyvind Fahlström (SE), Gutai (JP), Tadeusz Kantor (PL), Wifredo Lam (CU), Ernest Mancoba (SA), A. R. Penck, Gerhard Richter, Gerard Sekoto (SA), Anwar Jalal Shemza (PK), Andrzej Wróblewski (LT) and others ↗ www.postwar.hausderkunst.de

28 For Mark Tobey, China and Japan were places of freedom – albeit in a rather different form. When we think of cosmopolitanism, we should also regard it as inherent to processes of change, upheaval, opportunities and imagination, and as a form of cultural overlapping and transnational artistic self-development.

“New hybridities”, as scholars put it, have emerged in modernism and contemporary art when citizens of present and former colonies studied formally and informally in the West, or when refugees fleeing oppression and racism left their homelands to find safe places elsewhere. World War II was possibly responsible for one of the largest and most extensive cultural and artistic ­migratory movements ever. We can reflect on postwar art in newly hybridised terms as both a process of acclimatisation and withdrawal from a culture, in which artists contributed to an international style of abstraction with ­indigenous, traditional and local imagery, fused together in a new aesthetic logic and new formal concepts. Categories like local, tradition, nationality, autonomy and universal etc. collide and combine to form new meanings.

Related diaspora situations, various colonial legacies and money channelled to support exchange during the Cold War helped send artists around the world to study and participate at centres of modern art production and marketing. Even magazines like Black Orpheus served as an important source of virtual travel and interaction during the entire postwar era. This suggests that we should not only reflect on diaspora and exile, but on consciously chosen affinities in thinking. How would our image of cosmopolitanism change if it were not so much oriented on the afterglow of colonial relations, but rather on a dialectic relationship to nationalism?

Nationalism is one of those key terms that have been in constant motion during the postwar period. Benedict Anderson employs the idea of “imagined communities” to describe the fluctuating currents of thought regarding nation and nationalism. In his ground-breaking study on nations and nationalism, he provides decisive insights when he challenges us to think about “the ‘political’ p­ ower of such nationalisms versus their philosophical poverty and even incoherence”. Artists in the US and Europe o­ ften declined to align themselves with their national governments, which had proven corrupt and militaristic. ­Nationalism had a different valence for artists in countries that had newly struggled for and won independence, such as Iraq, Cuba, China, India and Pakistan, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa. For this reason, those artists sought cultural forms to articulate and represent new national identities.

Nigerian artists, for example, played institutional and governmental roles, through personal commitment to national independence and the role of culture in ­establishing national identity. Ben Enwonwu and Uzo Egonu levelled criticism at Europe’s acquisition of their national imagery by displaying African masks and instruments. In Egypt Gazbia Sirry portrayed the martyrdom of the Egyptian people under British occupation, whereby he established a connection between the Egyptian conditions and the suppression of the African Americans (whose civil rights movement permeated the works of Jack Whitten and others and often assumed a nationalist coloration).

There was a struggle to define what was truly national in identity, for example, in the debate between those who advocated discarding cultural tradition in the effort to become both independent and modern, and those who saw indigenous identity as central to their new national identity. In Southeast Asia, the choice would be described as one of East versus West, with ‘the West’ representing Europe, the future, education, and technological p ­ rogress; and ‘the East’ representing indigenous knowledge, non-Western identity, the past, and tradition.

At its conclusion, “Postwar“ shifts the understanding of art engaged with mass culture away from the usual

f­ocus on consumer goods and the signs, symbols, and logos that advertised them, and instead toward the ­circulation, distribution, and communication of those signs via technology and broadcast networks. Communication, for example, also underlay the systems theories of cybernetics that appealed to an international array of artists rooted in a variety of aesthetic and political ­orientations. It had particular appeal for artists seeking affinities across national boundaries: the 1961 Belgrade “New ­Tendencies” exhibition featured works by 29 ­artists from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. This new optical and kinetic art, as demonstrated by Mohammed Melehi for example, sought to transmit information on a ­fundamental, physiological wavelength transcending the cultural specifics of language. Similarly, communication drew artists to new technologies. The British artists in the Independent Group, particularly John McHale, were oriented toward popular culture’s technological, even futuristic aspects, from transistors to robots. Fluxus and other artists such as Karl Otto Götz and Nam June Paik experimented with the new medium of broadcast ­television, aspiring to make art that not only took part in the latest electronic technologies, but could also communicate to an audience beyond the art galleries themselves. All these artists sought an art adequate to a world conceived as a single integrated system or organism.

The complete text with many examples of artists as well as a more detailed description of all eight sections of the exhibition can be found at www.postwar.hausderkunst.de.

Okwui Enwezor has been the director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich since October 2011. Katy Siegel teaches Modern American Art at Stony Brook University, New York. Ulrich Wilmes is the head ­curator at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

MONICA JUNEJA

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Beyond

building art museums – apart from a few exceptions – have proven more reluctant in this regard. The Centre Pompidou in Paris made important headway in this ­direction with the exhibition Modernités plurielles 1905– 1970 (October 2013 to January 2015) which was curated

by Catherine Grenier and was inspired by an inclusive, interconnected vision of artistic modernism. Despite boldly pushing the limits, the Parisian project quickly reached its own limits. An exhibition which solely relies on its own collection runs the risk of reproducing the historically defined relationships of power and asymmetries inherent in its collection history, especially if the exhibition concept fails to include the acquisition criteria of non-European objects during certain historical eras as part of its theoretical structure. The few choreographed moments of public encounter between yet ­unknown non-European artists with the Parisian art world ultimately reinforced the existing view of Paris as the centre of that world. Nonetheless, the experiment served as an important example of “critical curating”.

Another possibility would be to stage an exhibition with loaned works in order to discover the ways of an “eccentric” modernism. What might be frowned upon by science as “merely additive” could actually possess dynamic potential for exhibitions as a medium, i.e. positioning works next to each other which the stylistic canon has traditionally assigned to different geographical and ­cultural categories. Such a gesture of proximity and cross-referentiality could produce surprising results.

Shunning classifications of genre and style as well as conventional criteria of quality, which are themselves ­ideological vestiges of Western modernism, would be ­tantamount to breaking a taboo for many art museums.

A dialogue with curatorial and contemporary artistic practices could provide fresh impulses here – particularly when considering the declassification of a singular world in terms of colonialism and to grant artists living “masterpiece” in order to reposition it as part of a netunder colonial circumstances the ability to develop their work of relationships based on materiality, the serial and own autonomous artistic positions. In the field of art, the repetitive. the radical political, cultural and economic changes that Both art historians and museums are committed to have taken place since the end of the Cold War have rewritten cultural geographies; the result isn’t simply a bringing hidden or forgotten stories and traces to light, reversal of the former “centre vs. periphery model”, but and creating appropriate modes of design and a language represents a modified cartography based on common – be it theoretical or museological – that adequately characteristics, reciprocity and diversity. And ultimate- ­addresses the challenges of globalism. To achieve this, ly the perspective of global or transcultural modernism they must continue intensifying the mutual synergetic is based on the premise that modernism defines a state ­exchange which has only just begun. The rehabilitation of existence or a condition of life in which exceedingly of modern art in post-war Germany owes its success to disparate material elements and social agents are con- a large degree to the perseverance, vision and courage to stantly torn from their places of origin and brought in overstep boundaries, as curators and museum directors contact with one another in a growing network of trav- have exhibited in the past, such as Werner Schmalenbach, el and economic trade. This approach encourages us to for example. Perhaps the time has come to overstep investigate the important and increasingly ubiquitous boundaries once again. role that cross-border dialogue and its subsequent transcultural relations play in the history of modernism. It is Monica Juneja is a professor of Global Art Hisevident from such movements as primitivism and surtory at the University of Heidelberg. She studied in realism, fundamental processes like abstraction and New D ­ elhi, earned her doctorate in Paris and has montage, and pop cultural cross-genre experiments, worked as a visiting professor in Vienna, Atlanta and that cultural difference is not abnormal or something Zurich. Most recently she was invited as a fellow to unique, but rather it’s a structural, perhaps even northe ­Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. She remative characteristic of artistic production under the searches and writes on transculturalism, visual representation, and the history of material cultural and conditions of modernism as a global process.

the

Glass Wall Museums of Modern Art and the Challenge of Globalism

When the French art historian Serge Guilbaut claimed that the 1940s was the era “when New York stole the idea of modern art” (which he also titled his book from 1983), he alluded to a geography of modernism which has continued to shape art-historical discourse, and with it, the museological discourse of the art establishment to this day. After the war, the linear narrative of modern art, which had previously run along the Paris-Berlin-Vienna axis, extended away from war-torn Europe to New York. Where and how can we integrate the “outposts of modernism” in this narrative, for example, Shanghai, Bombay, São Paulo, Cairo, Mexico City, ­Tehran and Ljubljana, which recent research findings have gradually brought to light? Each of these places represented a laboratory of artistic experimentation which produced an abundance of modern subject ­positions and were involved in a growing network of cross-border and often wide-scale encounters. Art ­historiography has predominantly focused on creating genealogies of stylistic influences, and this has produced a narrative of modernism which describes Western centres exporting the accomplishments of civilisation to the absorbing “peripheries” of the world. The contrast between the place of origin, the hoard of originality, and the alleged imitation or late-comer variants of modernism is also echoed in the museum canon. One immediately notices the exclusion of non-European trends in the major collections of modern art – in contrast to the exceedingly visible contemporary artworks from countless regions of the world. Whether London, New York or Berlin, the departments of modern art and the avant-garde at such venues are enclosed by a kind of glass wall – not only is there no room inside for non-­ European art, but none for East European avant-garde either.

In the meantime, however, the discourse on art-historical modernism has been revised multiple times in order to critically address the universal claims and gender ideologies on which the common narrative of underlying teleological tendencies is based. Post-colonial studies have challenged the fundamental Eurocentrism by replacing the concepts of exports and derivatives with terms like “cultural translation” and “mimicry” in order to discuss the relations between different regions of the

What challenge does the shift of perspective in modern art and cultural history in the sense of the “global turn” pose for museum exhibition and collection praxis?

As nationally anchored institutions with the capability of shaping civil society, museums – like current ­nation states – are presented with the task of repositioning themselves in a globally interconnected world. In order to do justice to the transcultural past of the national construct as well as the increasing plurality of the present, it is imperative that we fundamentally ­reflect on the relationship between nation and culture. More concretely, museums and collections are called upon to develop innovative concepts which enable the public to perceive and experience cross-border connections between ­p­rotagonists, artistic trends and objects, while at the same time reflect on their own collection history. While a number of ethnological collections have already initiated a self-reflective process of reinvention, the canon-­

cultural heritage. She is currently working on a monograph titled Can Art History be Made Global? A Discipline in Transition, featuring the Heinrich Wölfflin ­Lectures which she held at the University of Zurich.

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museum global In recent years Western-dominated fine-arts discourse has shifted its attention to non-European contemporary art and modernist tendencies, a trend that will likely be influenced more strongly in the future by non-Western artists, curators and theorists. With its programme museum global, the Federal Cultural Foundation wishes to strengthen impulses for recasting and redefining collections from a non-Western perspective in the German museum sector. In a society shaped by globalisation, migration and transculturalism, it is essential that art museums participate in shaping these developments and enhancing the international focus of their collection, research and exhibition practices even more. Consequently, the Federal Cultural Foundation is funding projects by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the MMK Frankfurt, which examine the history of modern art from a global perspective. The purpose is not so much to reveal the shortcomings of the past, but rather to develop a new and complex profile of the respective collections and present a view of what the ­future of the museums might look like.

The results of over three years of work and research will culminate in new presentations of the collections starting in 2017 and will include the museums’ permanent and special exhibition areas to an equal degree. All three projects will highlight their respective collections and seek opportunities to incorporate non-Western artistic production.

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen: Eccentric Modernism 20–22 Jan. 2016: Conference “museum global? Multiple Perspectives on Art, 1904 to 1950” 18–20 Jan. 2017: Symposium “Whose museum is it?”

14 Apr.–12. Aug. 2017: Exhibition “Eccentric Modernism” Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: Global Resonances 2–3 Dec. 2016, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin: Conference “The Idea of the Global Museum” MMK Frankfurt am Main: Global Simultaneities November 2017–April 2018: Exhibition “Global Simultaneities. The MMK Frankfurt in dialogue with Latin ­American art of the 1960s and 1970s“ Summer/autumn 2018: Exhibition “Global Simultaneities” at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires ­(MAMBA)

Eccentric Modernism Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf MARION ACKERMANN Since the late 1990s, we have seen growing i­nterest in a global historical perspective on modernism, a term that mainly referred to the artistic tendencies emerging in the 20th century in Paris, Vienna and later New York. As a state art gallery which specialises in exactly this type of modernism, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen launched a three-year r­esearch project (2015–2017) titled ­museum global which aims to critically analyse and investigate the narratives of modernism that point beyond the ­Western canon. The central question here is: In a diverse society, how can we work with a self-contained collection of art that is based on Europe and North America? What other points of view, themes and questions – also with regard to our own collection – arise when we broaden our perspective to include other forms of modernism in South America, Africa or Asia? And what does this mean for our understanding of modernism as such?

One of the formative experiences in the life of Werner Schmalenbach, the first director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen from the year it opened in 1962 until 1990, was when he visited the exhibition and auction “Degenerate Art” at the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne as a 19-year-old in 1939.

Schmalenbach, born in Göttingen, was studying Art History in Basel at the time. For him, this ostracisation of artistic production was the “German disaster”.

He believed that if he took all of the works on display there, he could “establish a global museum of art of the 20th century with a single stroke”. It was exactly this “gap” in German art history, this art which had been banned and ostracised for twelve years that he attempted to acquire years later for the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen with every possible means.

His detachment from his home country only ­worsened with the experiences of World War II which ­finally moved him to take on Swiss citizenship: “Germany had become a foreign country to me since 1933. I felt at home in Paris which I had visited before the war and where I frequently travelled to. And I also felt at home with French art. Cubism, in particular, was closer to my heart than German Expressionism.” It was this attitude which showed itself in his exhibitions and purchases. In his very first year as director of the state art gallery, he had succeeded in acquiring key works of art by Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Joan Miró. Today the Kunstsammlung owns a wide range of eminent works of Classical Modernism by such prestigious painters as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Emil ­Nolde and Piet Mondrian. Of course, collection ­history is primarily defined by the pieces which the museum purchased or received as donations, but also by those which its curators showed no interest in ­collecting. Schmalenbach’s strategy in building the collection “was never about portraying history with as few gaps as possible, but rather creating the dens-

est and strongest collection of artistic potential possible. We do not keep a look out for missing artists or artistic trends, but rather works which result in strengthening this potential.” His goal was to put together “a state collection based on standards of a national collection” – a motto which has caused many to mistakenly think of the Kunstsammlung as a “secret national gallery”. Schmalenbach collected works by artists whom Europe considered masters or geniuses of their day. However, if we assess Schmalenbach’s purchases from today’s point of view, we find that very few works by female artists of Classical Modernism and non-Western artists ever found their way into the collection.

Against this background, we are compelled to evaluate the art historical canon which was decisive for the creation of our own collection. And we start – corresponding to the collection focus of the Kunstsammlung – with the era of Classical Modernism, a period which no other museum in Germany has yet (publicly) assessed as of the beginning of this research project. Approaching the subject of g­ lobalism from a geographical perspective appeared to be the obvious course of action for us. It allowed us to pursue certain issues, but only at the beginning of the project. Because of our self-imposed decision not to appraise our complex world in its entirety, our ­curators are no longer focusing on countries and ­regions, but are exploring locally specific and transregional micro-narratives. Indeed personal relationships ­between artists and dialogue in the form of correspondence, publications, trips and involvement in joint exhibitions furthered the development of the avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century around the world. Addressing local forms of modernism also demands a certain degree of caution, as such scrutiny of an existing canon has no intention whatsoever of establishing a new one. In order to meet these ­requirements, our curators and the colleagues from the education department are collaborating on implementing the project for it is often difficult to extricate artistic content from the perspective of the narrator.

The exhibition “Eccentric Modernism” aims to present artistic practices which developed outside Europe and North America through exchange with or even independently from Western modernism.

Processes of cultural interweave and feedback effects on both the construction of Western modernism and the art worlds of non-European countries play an important role in this regard.

The project museum global hopes to generate awareness of the fact that any form of definition must be critically examined against the background of current socio-political and cultural events. In this ­respect, the museum can assume a critical role in society and openly question current lines of ­discourse.

The result is that the museum also bears a stronger social function; it becomes a place of encounter, of mutual learning, of dialogue and the development of ideas. In order to integrate our visitors into the project at an early stage, we are developing educational formats and methods which address transcultural aspects and respond to the interests and orientations of a society that is changing due to immigration. Not only will the project affect how we present and work with our own collection – for example, the redesign of “Sammlung Online” – but it will also influence the purchasing strategy and thematic orientation of the museum in the long term. Whatever becomes visible in the planned exhibition will not be final word on the matter, but rather the starting point for a series of diverse follow-up projects.

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Global

Resonances.

Revision *working title

of a

Collection* Nationalgalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin UDO KITTELMANN WITH JENNY DIRKSEN, MELANIE ROUMIGUIÈRE, ANNA-CATHARINA GEBBERS, GABRIELE KNAPSTEIN, DANIELA BYSTRON Our museum global project begins with and centres on the collection of the Nationalgalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin. This might seem unsuitable at first thought. The idea of national representation was the impulse for its establishment and is reflected in its name; its holdings clearly portray the historical outlines of National Socialism, the Second World War, the division of East and West Germany. The collection sought international ties primarily in post-war Western Europe and North America. Yet there are some exceptions. We were already aware of some of these, e.g. the painting by the Turkish artist and archaeologist Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910) and the Cuban-born artist Wilfred Lam (1902–1982). Thanks to our research efforts for this project, our attention has now been drawn to other works, such as sculptures by the Bolivian artist Marina Nuñez del Prado (1908– 1995) and the Croatian artist Olga Jevrič (1922–2014).

Yet even beyond these exceptions, the works of the collection, the artistic interests and careers to which they are linked, have proven resistant to a collection narrative that ignores their international and transcultural relationships. Our goal now is to examine, illustrate and explore these relationships, these global resonances, whose effects are never one-sided.

This project has shown us once again that collection work is never finished. The questions we ask of a collection are profoundly linked to time. Even the concept of a “global museum” is based on the heightened connectivity of our present time in an increasingly globalised world. This “global turn” has arisen from a paradigmatic shift in the humanities and the international exhibition scene which has revealed a number of blind spots in earlier historiography. It

challenges museums to reposition their collections, which we in this project have formulated as an “experiment”. This experiment is directly connected to the planned reorganisation and presentation of the Nationalgalerie in the coming years following renovation of the Neue Nationalgalerie and the planned construction of a new museum at the Kulturforum. In re-contextualising modern art in our collection, the exhibition, which will open in November 2017, represents an essential and necessary step on the path to becoming a Museum of the 20th Century.

At the same time, this exhibition project makes reference to past reflections on the collection ­holdings of the Nationalgalerie, most recently the exhibition “The Black Years. History of a Collection. 1933–1945” (2015/16) which examined art, politics and the museum’s history during the years of National Socialism.

The common purpose of this and other presentations at the Alte and Neue Nationalgalerie and the Hamburger Bahnhof was to present a new perspective of the collection’s expanding holdings and art in general from today’s point of view, while critically examining the corresponding art canon. This approach has been strongly influenced by our experiences with exhibitions of individual artists. These include, for example, “Intolerance” by Willem de Rooij in 2010/11 at the Neue Nationalgalerie which reflected on institutional working methods and exhibition practices, and visually investigated the three-way relationship between early global trade, intercultural conflicts and mutual attraction. A further point of reference for our current project is the exhibition “Parergon” by Mariana ­Castillo Deball in 2014/15 at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Using various objects, the exhibition connected historical events and coincidental occurrences by association, creating a web of narratives which had never been told before, thereby highlighting the role of the imagination in the writing of history.

It is important to continue reflecting on such issues and expand them in an exhibition which regards the collection of the Nationalgalerie as a whole, irrespective of the particular locations and connections between the Alte Nationalgalerie, Neue Nationalgalerie, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, Museum Berggruen and the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection. Practically the entire exhibition area at the Hamburger Bahnhof is programmatic in this respect; we are talking about an experimental design of an entire museum which, based on a critical examination of its own collection, takes issue with and explicitly emphasises certain contexts that exist in the collection but have not yet been addressed in its historiography. This project offers us the chance to collaborate intensively as a team and revise our views of the collection from within by incorporating the view of outside researchers and curators. It is the challenge of becoming aware of one’s own understanding of art which – albeit based on a contemporary notion of globalism – is nonetheless locally defined and can perhaps best be described as occidental. Last but not least, it encourages us to ask questions. One such question is: What approaches can we develop to tap the ideas contained within a collection and make them visible, to point us beyond the supposedly familiar and allow us to see it in a new way?

In this sense, museum global is an interrogative process with a substantially destabilising function. This is something we very much welcome.

Global

Simul­ taneities MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main SUSANNE GAENSHEIMER AND KLAUS GÖRNER During the last couple of years the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main has been working to open and expand its exhibition programme and collecting policies to non-Western positions of international contemporary art and to critically investigate the changing social, political and economic conditions in a globalised world. Major exhibitions like “The Divine Comedy. Heaven, Hell, Purgatory from the Perspective of Contemporary African Artists”, the exhibition overview of Hélio Oiticica in “The Great Labyrinth” and the current exhibition of Kader Attia in “Sacrifice and Harmony” are just a few examples.

Contemporary art – especially that of non-Western art traditions – is created on a broadened horizon and is also likewise received. Our collection, however, was established in the 1960s and 70s; it developed in a purely Western context, and to this day, has been viewed from a Western perspective. Our intention, therefore, is to position our “old holdings” in an expanded context in order to develop ways to understand it from a global perspective. In so doing, we hope – in view of its reception – to achieve a certain degree of balance that links the beginning of the collection to its continuation in the future.

The Ströher Collection added outstanding works of American Pop Art and Minimal Art to the early holdings of the MMK, along with masterpieces of mainly German artists. Prior to the opening of the museum in 1991, the collection focused on works from these regions which dated back to a time before “Global Art” was an established term. The Western focus of the collection – and that of the exhibitions later on – continues to influence the reception of these works.

The idea and goal of our exhibition project with the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMBA) is to position central works from our collection in an in-depth and fruitful dialogue with key works from Latin America of the same period.

Although European and North American art scenes have shown increasing interest in art from Latin America in recent years, their occupation with its history is still a desideratum – at least where European institutions are concerned. Latin American artists are only sporadically invited to the important exhibitions and biennales, and in many cases, are isolated from the rest. The result is that Latin America’s contribution to artistic development in the post-war period is relatively unknown and has played a far too

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New

minimal role in the art historical discourses in Europe and also the United States to some degree. This is all the more surprising in view of the fact that Latin American artists have frequently created their works in response to trends in Europe and North America.

Because of this interconnection, Latin American art appears particularly suited for our project. Using the example of Lucio Fontana, who will be playing a central role in the project, we wish to illustrate both the closeness and distance of this relationship. Born the son of Italian parents in Argentina, he was a denizen of Europe and Argentina throughout his life. He was part of both art worlds and impacted their development considerably. Against very different political, economic and historical backgrounds, we wish to investigate the lines of development in how they parallel, intersect and counterpose each other.

The curatorial collaboration between both museums is essential in that we have no interest in broadening the horizon from an exclusively European point of view. The MMK and MAMBA wish to initiate a critical dialogue which would undergo revision based on our corresponding perspectives and allow our narratives to consider other authorships. It is evident that the mutual perspective from two continents and cultural circles is already changing our perception. Placing artworks in an expanded and unusual context promises to provide us with new insights into the individual pieces. We see this as a benefit for museum-goers as well. Not only will the exhibitions introduce their respective audiences to unknown works, but the unconventional dialogic situations will influence what they know about and how they view the works they are familiar with. By presenting comparable pieces from different contexts, we expect to bring about significant shifts in perception. The intersecting “outside” views on the collection and exhibition policies of the other’s cultural sphere also change how we view the beginnings of our own art histories and institutions. Consequently, we hope the project produces an array of ideas and guidelines which will modify the self-image of the MMK and its praxis in the long term.

Projects Hybrid Layers Branding, network identity, ­innovative materials and new forms of presentation

For the digitally socialised generation of young artists, the Internet is an established feature of everyday life and artistic practice. It serves as an inexhaustible source of material, as does the highly aestheticised world of advertising and corporate design. These young artists are completely comfortable with using the latest software and cutting-edge devices like 3D printers to create photos, videos and sculptures. Data sets become objects and vice versa.

What art forms have developed in recent years as a result of the ubiquity of digital technologies and virtual interfaces? The exhibition “Hybrid Layers” presents the positions of so-called “post-Internet art” which reflects the rapid advances in digital technology, branding and network identity. Young international artists like Katja Novitskova, Daniel Keller and the artist collective GCC investigate what effects new media is having on our aesthetic categories and everyday perception.

The exhibition will take place during the innovation trade fair “CODE_n”, featuring technology start-ups and creative digital enterprises at the ZKM (Centre for Art and Media Technology Karlsruhe). Six of the invited artists will also participate in discussions at the fair and immediately respond to what they learn in works, performances and ­actions.

In this way, “Hybrid Layers” will serve as both an experimental workshop and a think-tank at the interface of e­ conomics and technology, art and consumption.

Artistic director: Peter Weibel Curators: Giulia Bini (IT), Sabiha Keyif, Daria Mille (RU), Philipp Ziegler Artists (selection): Ricardo Benassi (IT), Enrico Boccioletti (IT), GCC (collective/Gulf states), Delia Jürgens, Daniel Keller (US), Katja Novitskova

The World Without Us Narratives of the Non-Numan Era

The question at the centre of this exhibition is what a world without humans might look like. In this case, however, the exhibition does not present futuristic scenarios of a post-apocalyptic world, but rather suggests that a post-human age has already begun, unnoticed by most. The instruments of a “world ­without us” are already in place: the first driverless cars are navigating the streets, algorithms produce newspaper articles, and machines translate texts. Even today, human-technological hybrid constellations are not only the subject of numerous Hollywood films, but also contemporary media art. The international artists invited by the Hartware MedienKunstVerein examine a post-human ecology, a post-Anthropocene age when non-human agents have assumed control of the world. These alternative “life” forms – genetically engineered microorganisms or monstrous-looking plants, algorithms and artificially intelligent beings – can more easily adapt to changing circumstances and are thus superior to humans.

The exhibition is designed in such a way that visitors feel that they are walking through a greenhouse, filled with clusters of strange-looking plants. The artistic works will be accompanied by cultural-historical and pop-cultural artefacts and films on post-humanism.

Following its initial presentation at the Dortmunder U, the exhibition will be shown in Ljubljana.

Artistic director: Inke Arns Artists: Morehshin Allahyari (IR), LaTurbo Avedon (US), Will Benedict (US/FR), David Claerbout (BE), Harun Farocki (DE), Wanuri Kahiu (KE), Ignas Krunglevicius (LT) and others

ZKM Karlsruhe: 2 Jun. 2017 (opening)

HMKV im Dortmunder U: 22 Oct. 2016 – 5 Mar. 2017; Aksioma, Ljubljana: summer 2017

↗ www.zkm.de

↗ www.hmkv.de

33 The Moving Museum

Photo: Thomas Dashuber

Arrivals and departures

The process of moving the collections of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art into the Humboldt Forum at the future Berlin Castle is possibly one of the city’s largest museum-related undertakings in recent decades. The video artist Theo Eshetu will document and artistically accompany the moving process. Eshetu regards movement as a ritual and associates it with the “moving” (compelling) history of the museum and its specimens. The video essay “The Moving Museum” presents various aspects of the moving project from multiple perspectives. In addition to art, politics and architecture, these include images of national identity which have been evoked by or reflected in the reconstruction of the Berlin Castle. What is the significance of reconstructing a building from Germany’s monarchical past to serve as a repository for objects of colonial origin? On one hand, “The Moving Museum” offers insights into the new architecture of the museum, and on the other, searches for the construct of ideas which comprises Germany’s cultural identity in the 21st century. It reflects the role of ethnological museums and their relationship to art, which has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years because of their alleged “Eurocentric canon”. Theo Eshetu merges interviews, anecdotes, ideas and documentary images together to form a multi-perspective collage which is bound by the central question: What does the Humboldt Forum project reveal about the future of our globalised world?

Artistic director: Theo Eshetu (GB) Project director: Bettina Probst Berlin: 11 Jun. 2016 – 31 Dec. 2019 ↗ www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de

TECHNE Production platform for live art and media art

Together with the Theater Rampe, the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart has launched “TECHNE”, a public platform for live art and media art productions. Following an international call for proposals, the organisers awarded visiting grants to ­ eight artists/collectives to produce and present their projects to the public. The theme is “techne”, an ancient Greek term which has a broader meaning than our restricted definition of “technology” that we use today: “techne” represents art and technology as a unit and can be translated as “craftsmanship” or “artistic study”.

“TECHNE” wishes to present current artistic positions which examine this conceptual field from an alternative and critical perspective. The artists are called upon to uncover new aspects of technology and present them in original and ­potentially utopian contexts with regard

to social, environmental or ethical views.

Each project will initiate targeted collaboration with one or more of the many high-tech companies and research institutes situated in the greater Stuttgart region. The interdisciplinary production platform will bring theatre and art in contact with technology and research.

All the resulting works will be included in the regular programmes of the Theater Rampe and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and presented during a several-day fes-

Cage, Maierhof, Radigue @ klub katarakt 2017 World premieres and debuts in Hamburg

The Hamburg artists’ festival klub katarakt has presented German and world premieres of experimental music at Kampnagel every year since 2005. Due to its surging popularity, the music festival has frequently reached capacity in

too, has been commissioned to produce a new piece for the 2017 edition of the festival. The piece will be introduced by the composer himself in a lecture and performed for the first time by the Nadar Ensemble.

The three upcoming concert premieres represent a continuation of klub katarakt’s work and provide the festival with much larger formats without sacrificing its genuine experimental character.

↘ Nico and the Navigators: Julla von Landsberg (soprano) and Michael Shapira (dance)

tival, accompanied by international guest performances, discussions, concerts and excursions.

Artistic director: Jan-Philipp Possmann Curators: Fatima Hellberg, Bureau Baubotanik, Martina Grohmann, Marie Bues Artists: Geumhyung Jeong (KR), Ant Hampton (BE), Christophe Meierhans (BE), KairUs (AT/FI) and others Artist-in-Residence projects: 1 Sep. 2016 – 31 Dec. 2017; exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart: 1 Nov. – 22 Dec. 2017; festival at the Theater Rampe, Stuttgart: 1 – 5 Nov. 2017 ↗ www.theaterrampe.de

recent years, and therefore aims to ­expand its format and secure more space for staging the productions. In 2017, the festival will feature two world premieres

by Michael Maierhof and Eliane Radigue, and a new production of John Cage’s “103” with its corresponding film “One”.

In this late major work, John Cage allows all 103 members of the orchestra to decide – up to a certain point – when exactly and how long they wish to play the notes. There is neither a conductor nor concertmaster – each musician ­interprets his/her own part and takes responsibility for contributing to a ­ well-balanced, mutually produced overall sound.

The pieces by Eliane Radigue are ­always developed in close collaboration with the performers of the world premiere. The specific interaction of each musician with his/her instrument significantly shapes the composition, which, in turn, engages in a close relationship with the corresponding venue. In 2017, the festival will present a new piece by Radigue, commissioned by klub katarakt.

The Hamburg composer Michael Maierhof is known for augmenting the conventional instrumental range of the orchestra with everyday objects, thereby anchoring his art in acoustic reality. He,

Artistic directors: Jan Feddersen, Robert Engelbrecht Organisational director: Ernst Bechert Composers: John Cage (US), Michael Maierhof, Eliane Radigue (FR) Artists and performers: Carol Robinson (FR), Julia Eckhardt (BE), Rhodri Davies (GB), Junge Symphoniker Hamburg, Nadar Ensemble (BE) Kampnagel, Hamburg: 18–21 Jan. 2017 ↗ www.klubkatarakt.net

Silent Songs into the Wild Franz Schubert – Staged concert

Many of Franz Schubert’s songs are about roaming and departing, always being far from home and lonely. How does one sing his works in the 21st century and how do they sound in times of massive migration? The Berlin-based theatre ensemble Nico and the Navigators interweaves songs from Schubert’s cycles “Schwanengesang” (Swan Song), “Winterreise” (Winter Journey) and “Die schöne Müllerin” (The Beautiful Miller Woman) to create an entirely new com-

Nadia International theatre project highlighting the reasons for fleeing

↓ Still from the 3-channel video installation “Poem of a Cell”

Artistic directors: Nicola Hümpel, Oliver Proske Musicians: Tobias Weber, Matan Porat, Novus String Quartett Featuring: Nikolay Borchev (BY), Julla von Landsberg, Ted Schmitz (US), Yui Kawaguchi (JP), Anna-Luise Recke, Michael Shapira (IL) World premiere: Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels: 7 Feb. 2017; Niedersächsische Musiktage, 2 – 10 Sep. 2017; Konzert­ haus Berlin: 25 Sep. 2017; Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg: spring 2018; Radialsystem V, Berlin: spring 2018 ↗ www.navigators.de

Poem of a Cell Triptych of love and ecstasy

With his “Poem of a Cell”, the composer and music producer Stefan Winter has created a sound installation that combines elements of Jewish, Christian and Islamic music and poetry. It draws on texts from the Old Testament, as well as Christian and Islamic mysticism: “The Song of Songs” (300 BC) from the Old Testament, “The Flowing Light of the

Godhead” (13th century) by Mechthild von Magdeburg and “The Divine Unity” (8th century) by the Islamic female ­mystic Rabi’a al-Basri. Each of the texts addresses themes which the three world religions – Judaism, Christianity and ­Islam – have in common despite their many differences: love, ecstasy and the desire for the divine. Based on these ­selected passages, Stefan Winter has composed and arranged a sound and video installation which combines noises and voices, and contemporary and traditional music. The planned concerts will feature the work together with live music and improvisation. The project not only creates ties to various musical traditions like New Music and improvisation, traditional music and art songs, but also brings outstanding international musicians and performers of live music in contact with digital audio art. It is also a chance for audiences to listen to the classical Oriental string instrument Qanun, played by Rajab Suleiman, alongside cello improvisations by Ernst Reijseger and Jewish sounds by Alan Bern and Uri Caine. Concerts will take place at numerous locations, including Munich, Haifa and Istanbul.

Artistic director: Paulien Geerlings (NL) International project conception and direction: Heidi Wiley Author: Daniël van Klaveren (NL) Directors: Juliane Kann, Peer Perez Øian (NO), Isabelle Gyselinx (BE), Giacomo Giuntini (IT) Performances: Det Norske Teatret, Oslo: 1 Oct. – 24 Dec. 2017; Fondazione Teatro Due, Parma: 1 Feb. – 30 Nov. 2017; Staatstheater Braunschweig: 1 Apr. – 21 Jun. 2017; De Toneelmakerij, Amsterdam: ­4 Feb. – 17 Mar. 2017; Théâtre de Liège: 1 Oct. – 30 Nov. 2017; Premiere at the Theatre De Krakeling, Amsterdam: 4 Feb. 2017; ETC international theatre conference: Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe: 13 – 16 Apr. 2017; Project seminar: ETC/Deutsches Theater Berlin: 13 – 16 Jun. 2017

↗ www.etc-cte.org

Creator/director/sound and effect composer/artistic director: Stefan Winter in collaboration with Mariko Takahashi (JP) Composers: Alan Bern, Uri Caine (US), Fabio Nieder, Rajab Suleiman (TZ), Fumio Yasuda (JP) Musicians: Mtendeni Maulid Ensemble (TZ), Ernst Reijseger (NL), Vokalensemble Exaudi (GB), Barockensemble Forma Antiqva and others Plaza Zuloaga, San Sebastian: 20 – 21 Jul. 2017; School of Arts, Haifa: 16 – 25 Oct. 2017; Kunsthalle Rathausgalerie, Munich: 10 – 25 Nov. 2017; Le Rocher de Palmer, Bordeaux: 2017; Bahcesehir University, Istanbul: 2017 ↗ www.winterandwinter.com

© Sarah Jonker

position. The artists develop distinctive acoustic forms of interpretation to gain a new understanding of Schubert’s work.

Singers and performers from six different nations interpret the works from a contemporary perspective as they venture on a roller-coaster of strong and conflicting emotions, ranging from pain and loss to desire and love, to anger and hope.

Under the artistic direction of Nicola Hümpel, the performance evokes musical associations between the various pieces which allude to the social issues of today.

The “staged concert” blurs the boundaries between concert performance and singing, dance and drama, high culture and everyday reality, and asks: What effect and impact do Schubert’s song cycles evoke after some 200 years? How do they reflect contemporary attitudes and views of the world today? The organisers also plan to produce a documentation of the formation process of this experiment.

“Nadia” is an international theatre project, in which five renowned European theatres will stage their own productions simultaneously: the Théâtre de Liège in Belgium, the Fondazione TeatroDuo in Italy, the Kompanie De Toneelmakerij of Amsterdam, Norway’s largest theatre Det Norske Teatret and the Staatstheater Braunschweig.

All five productions are based on the same exact text which was written in collaboration with the author Daniël van Klaveren and deals with religious radicalisation of our societies in an international context. The project starts by asking why a young girl from Western Europe would leave her family to join the “Islamic State”. The focus is not so much on ISIS’s recruitment strategy, but rather on aspects of our society: How do young people in Western Europe gain orientation in an environment which offers no perspective on one hand, and a system of values which is becoming more complex on the other? What makes extreme, radical positions so attractive to young people in Western Europe?

The young directors at the five participating theatres will adapt the text to correspond to the circumstances on location, and stage their own productions.

During the production phase, the ensembles will maintain mutual contact and later, during the actual performances, communicate via chatrooms and convey the events on stage in virtual space. The dialogue directed at the audience will also be accessible via an open-source platform which will encourage further discussion of the subject on a global scale.

Following the five premieres, the productions will guest perform in the participating countries. The final event of the project will take place during the 2017 ­International Writers’ Conference, at which the participating creative teams and experts on the “radicalisation of ­society” will be invited to watch a selection of the productions at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. The concept and ­development of “Nadia” is being supervised under the auspices of the European Theatre Convention, a European network of public city and state theatres. It will present the project at conferences, artistic and cultural political forums ­ throughout Europe as an example of a best-practice project.

©Winter&Winter

34

↑ Nadia. An international theatre project by the European Theatre Convention

35 PLAY!

Photo: Hamze Bytyci

zeitkratzer plays She She Pop

zeitkratzer is a multiple award-winning European soloist ensemble known for its distinctive programmes and ­unconventional collaborations. Its repertory includes works by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Nam June Paik and Philip Glass, as well as joint projects by renowned musicians such as Lou Reed, Carsten Nicolai and Elliott Sharp.

Their past performances have included interdisciplinary cooperative projects with choreographers and dancers such as Sasha Waltz and Rubato, fashion designers like Lisa D and video artists like Lillevan. zeitkratzer is now developing the concert performance “Play!” in collaboration with She She Pop, a performance collective which specialises in the art of self-exposure and the public treatment of taboos.

In this production, She She Pop highlights the hidden rituals and normal routines of musicians, and attempts to “alienate” them from their instruments in an artistically productive manner.

What aspects of a performance situation are suppressed or concealed? And what happens when they are no longer restrained and suddenly force their way onto the stage? In this way, She She Pop deconstructs the ceremonial ritual of the concert performance and thus musically and intellectually challenges both the musicians and the audience. “Play!” will demonstrate whether and at what lengths musicians will defend the dignity of their music.

Artistic directors: Reinhold Friedl, Lisa Lucassen, Sebastian Bark Artists: Nora Krahl, Frank Gratkowski, Verena Grimm (MX), Hilary Jeffery, Maurice de Martin, Ilia Papatheodorou, Hild Sofie Tafjord (NO), Martin ­Wurmnest HAU, Berlin: October 2017; ­Kammerspiele, Munich: October 2017; ­Roma­Europa Festival, Rome: 18 –19 Nov. 2017 ↗ www.zeitkratzer.de ↗ www.sheshepop.de

¡Adelante!

Iberian-Latin American theatre festival at the Theater und ­Orchester Heidelberg

The festival ¡Adelante! is devoted to Iberian-Latin American contemporary theatre, i.e. from theatre productions from Portugal, Spain and the nations of Latin America. The Theater Heidelberg is organising this festival in hopes of ­encouraging dialogue on thematic and aesthetic issues, and initiating long-term partnerships between Latin America and Europe. In addition to twelve selected guest performances and an accompanying programme with numerous participative formats, the festival will also feature a German-Chilean coproduction. The artists from the Theater Heidelberg will collaborate with the Chilean theatre group Colectivo Zoológico on a production

which illuminates the mechanisms of ­segregation and exclusion as a global ­phenomenon of NIMBY (Not in My Backyard). This attitude is just as prevalent in Chile as it is in Germany: “Social housing projects, yes, but not in my backyard”, or “wind power, yes, but not in my backyard”.

Among the invited productions is Pablo Manzi’s world premiere “Donde

Gypsies An international theatre project about the Roma in Europe

Europe‘s largest minority is comprised of millions of Sinti and Roma, yet despite their numbers and diversity, they are noticeably excluded from mainstream

↗ #Carmen: A Serbian Romni sells a painting by the the German painter Torino at a local market,

Belgrade 2016

viven los Barbaros” (Where the Barbarians Live), whose fast-paced dialogues reveal the traces of xenophobia in society. Mexican director David Gaitán’s adaptation of “Antigone”, packaged in a reality TV format, addresses the disparity between official political discourse and the self-interests of the political elite. The Chilean group La Re-Sentida will present its latest production which created quite a stir for transporting the historical figure of President Salvador Allende and his promise of a better and more socially equitable future to the present day. The Cuban director Sandra Ramy presents a production which combines theatre, dance, video art and poetry, and closely scrutinises the media-based and economic dynamics of the fashion industry. And finally, the Colombian theatre group Mapa Tetro will present the world premiere of the final part of its triptych “Los Incontados” (The Uncounted) in Heidelberg, highlighting the intimate relationship between celebration and violence in Colombian society.

Artistic directors: Holger Schultze, Lene Grösch Production manager: Florian ­Werkmeister Curators: Ilona Goyeneche (MX), Jürgen Berger Stage directors: Rolf Abderhalden Cortés (CO), Nicolás Espinoza (CL), Marco Layera (CL), Pablo Manzi (CL), José Ramón Hernández Suarez (CU), David Gaitán (MX), Felipe Hirsch (BR), Sergio Blanco (UY), Chela de Ferrari (PE), Àlex Serrano (ES), Sandra Ramy (CU) and others Ensembles: Mapa Tetro (CO), Colectivo Zoológico (CL), La Re-Sentida (CL), Bonobo (CL), Persona (CU), Osikán (CU), SEÑOR SERRANO (ES) and others

culture. Their image is influenced by stubborn clichés and prejudices. In light of a continued, discriminating narrative of “gypsies”, “travelling swindlers”, and “gypsy romances”, the research project “Gypsies” reverses the perspective by asking: How do various groups of Roma perceive their life in Europe? How do they view Europe and what role do national borders and national identities play? Has being excluded by the respective national majorities forced them to count themselves as part of a different community?

The goal of the project is to examine the difference between the self-perception and external labelling of the Sinti and Roma in Germany, Romania and France.

Together with the participating actors, three project teams will each spend a week with a Roma family. There they will conduct detailed interviews which, once transcribed, will serve as the basis for a multilingual play adaptation. The teams will also collect songs, music and sounds on location as source material for new compositions. The play “Gypsies” is a coproduction between werkgruppe2, the Staatstheater Braunschweig, the Théâtre de la Manufacture in Nancy and the National ­Theatre Timișoara. The performances at all three venues will be accompanied by ­audience discussions.

Artistic directors: werkgruppe2, Hamze Bytyci (RS), Joachim Klement, Ada Hausvater (RO), Michel Didym (FR) Stage director: Julia Roesler Musical director: Insa Rudolph Dramaturges: Silke Merzhäuser, Christine Besier

Festival at the Theater und Orchester Heidelberg: 11–18 Feb. 2017

Staatstheater Braunschweig: 23 Feb.–6 Apr. 2017;National Theatre Temeswar: 18-22 May 2017, Théâtre de la Manufacture, Nancy: 20-25 Nov. 2017

↗ www.theaterheidelberg.de

↗ www.werkgruppe2.de

africologneFESTIVAL 2017 An artistic platform for transnational exchange

The africologne Festival was initiated in 2011 as a biennial festival at the Bauturm in Cologne. In 2017 it will be taking place for the fourth time and significantly expanding its international contacts.

For the first time in 2017, africologne will collaborate with satellite venues and partners in Paris and Düsseldorf, as well as co-production partners in other ­European and African countries, including the Tanzhaus NRW in Düsseldorf, the Festival de Marseille, the Festival Récréâtrales in Burkina Faso and the Tarmac des Auteurs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The upcoming edition will particularly focus on African theatre ­traditions and current artistic developments on the African continent.

In addition to theatre, dance and performance, the festival will present music, fine art, film and literature. The programme will be supplemented by workshops, working sessions and innovative discussion ­formats aimed to foster contacts among artists in Africa and strengthen networking between African and European artists. A forum of d­ ialogue based on the topic “Democratisation in Africa – All Just a Show?” will take place in Cologne, Paris and Hamburg.

Artistic director: Gerhardt Haag Project director and curator: Kerstin Ortmeier Artists: Laetitia Ajanohun (BE), P ­ anaibra Gabriel Canda (MZ), Serge Aimé Coulibaly/Faso Danse Theatre (BF), Edoxi L. Gnoula (BF), ­Jan-­Christoph Gockel, Laurenz Leky, Philipp Löhle, Etienne Minoungou/ Compagnie Falinga (BF), Nicole Nagel, Criss Niangouna (CG) and others Tanzhaus NRW and other venues, Cologne: 14 –24 Jun. 2017 ↗ www.africologne.de

36 Eight artists. Eight international statements

The theatre project Eurotopia aims to break with the typical narratives about Europe and focus instead on taboos and what is left unsaid as the starting point of a radical utopia, unfettered by bureaucratic constraints. The goal is to use artistic means to strengthen the collective power of imagination across nations and local scenes. At a time when wars are pushing Europe to its limits and generating heated debate about what the European promise means, Eurotopia poses the very relevant questions: Can foreignness become a constitutive element of inner co-

including Navid Kermani and Slavoj Žižek, have been invited. In addition, the Theater Freiburg will also offer introductions and translations in English and Arabic.

Artistic directors: Viola Hasselberg, Ivo Kuyl (BE) Artists: Memet Ali Alabora (TR), ­Thomas Bellinck (BE), Felicitas Brucker, Ruud Gielens (BE), Emre Koyuncuoglu (TR), Faustin Linyekula (CD), Jarg Pataki (CH), Milo Rau (CH), ORTREPORT & Meier/Franz (DE/AT/ CH) Theater Freiburg, Freiburg: 4 Mar. – 15 Jul. 2017; Kaaitheater, Brussels: 1 Apr. – 30 Jun. 2017 ↗ www.theater.freiburg.de

tistic positions from nine different countries. The selected artworks include, for example, the “Maps of Common Property” created by the Spanish-Greek collective Hackitectura, and the cinematic works by the artist Eleni Kammas which reflect on the Gezi Park protests and the power of the freedom of expression. Other works include a talking monument of guilt, developed by the Kurdish artist Ahmet Ögüt, and pieces by the choreographer and anthropologist Panayiotou, who examines archival practices portraying his home country of Cyprus as a postcolonial patchwork object.

The exhibition will be shown in Leipzig, Nicosia (Cyprus) as part of the European Capital of Culture programme, and in Petach Tikva (Israel). It marks the first

↘ Mona Marzouk: Trayvon, 2016

hesion? What kind of home do we want to build for ourselves? What can Europe be?

The Theater Freiburg has invited international artists, e.g. from Turkey, the Congo, Belgium and Germany, to respond to these questions in an artistic experiment. To this end, Milo Rau, Memet Ali Alabora, Faustin Linyekula, Felicitas Brucker and others have embarked on research trips for which they must venture beyond the boundaries of their own artistic practice. Based on their experiences, they will develop eight controversial statements, all of which refer to one another. The research findings will be compiled during a joint rehearsal phase at the Theater Freiburg and the statements will be presented on stage at that time. Prior to the premiere, the “European Backroom” will open its doors to encourage dialogue between the artists and viewers in public rehearsals and political salons.

Eurotopia will be shown on four separate weekends with varying thematic focuses, to which a number of renowned guests,

Terra Mediterranea: ­ In Action German-Cypriot cooperation project

The focus of this German-Cypriot cooperative project is the Mediterranean region, or “Terra Mediterranea”, geographically comprised of countries in Southern Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa. What distinguishes this region, which now finds itself at the centre of global political wrangling with regard to its role as a place of transit for refugees?

What ties are being formed by the “liquid continent”, situated between Africa, Asia and Europe?

In cooperation with the Nicosia Municipal Arts Center in Cyprus, Halle 14 in Leipzig is developing an exhibition to address these questions. The exhibition aims to examine the present and future of the Mediterranean region based on 18 ar-

time that a production organised by Halle 14 will be presented at other international art centres in Europe and Israel, strengthening ties between cultural producers from the Mediterranean region and Germany.

In addition to events, workshops and discussions, the exhibition will be supplemented by the long-term participative project “The Stories of Things” which will document the experiences of the visitors.

Curators: Michael Arzt & Yiannis Toumazis (CY) Artists: Ana Adamović (RS), Sofia Bempeza (GR), Banu Cennetoglu (TR), Marianna Christofides (CY), Tom Dale (GB), Hackitectura (ES), Elizabeth Hoak-Doering (US), Eleni Kamma (GR), Mona Marzouk (EG), Christodoulos Panayiotou (CY) and others Exhibition: HALLE 14 – Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig: 17 Sep. –20 Nov. 2016; Art education

project “Die Geschichten der Dinge/ The Stories of Things”, HALLE 14 – Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig: 17 Sep. – 31 Oct. 2016; Continued exhibition: Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre: 1 Jan. – 31 Dec. 2017; Museum of Art, Petach Tikva: 2018 ↗ www.halle14.org

The Self-Made ­Aristocracy A communitarian theatre and dance project by La Fleur

La Fleur is an international group, still in the process of forming, which aims to develop a new type of theatre.

Many of its members come from the banlieues of Paris and the socially underprivileged quarters of Hamburg. But on stage and in life, these artists constantly negate the clichés and labels that people often attach to them. As members of a “self-made aristocracy”, they take on different roles and change their status at will. Following the principle “Decide who you want to be!”, their group is all about self-assertion and the anarchic pleasure of acting. This theatre and dance piece starts with Honoré de Balzac’s novels The Girl with the Golden Eyes and A Harlot High and Low. Meeting together in Hamburg and Paris, the group is developing roles, texts and narratives which cross-reference Balzac’s motifs in his novels and contemporary phenomena. Many of Balzac’s characters possess direct parallels with members of La Fleur. Similar to the dandies, courtesans and strategists of the 19th century, today’s dancers, DJs and actors represent a kind of defiant aristocracy from below. They explore gender identities and social advancement in their urban scenes and dances. The tighter the circumstances, the harder it is to pursue one’s passion at whatever cost and flaunt a seemingly aristocratic behaviour. With richness, physicality and sensuality, “The Self-Made Aristocracy” puts the Hanseatic tradition of self-restraint and thrift to the test. The participants reject the wretchedness of their circumstances and assume the identity that they themselves have chosen.

Artistic directors: Monika Gintersdorfer, Franck Edmond Yao (CI) Artists: Alex Cephus (US), Jean-Claude Dagbo (FR/CI), Elise Graton (FR), Christian Jäger, Boro Sangui (FR/CI), Madou Sanguin (FR/CI), Marion Siefert (FR), Magne Karel Audrey Tendjou (CI) and others Performances: Paris: 26 – 31 Oct. 2017; Vienna: 2 – 4 Jun. 2017; Hamburg: 12 – 14 Oct. 2017; Berlin: 18 – 20 Oct. 2017; Düsseldorf: 21 – 22 Oct. 2017 ↗ www.lafleur-international.tumblr.com

Photo: Walther Le Kon, 2016

Eurotopia

37 Transit Europa

© Verena Jaekel

An international cultural project

Several theatres and the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts are currently working together to bring the Afghan theatre group “Azdar” / “Parwaz” to Germany for ten months and help them forge contacts with European artists. Azdar aims to convey and preserve Afghanistan’s culture through the methods of theatre. The members of Azdar also perform in what they call the “Parwaz Puppet Theatre”. They have been threatened by the Taliban multiple times in the past.

“Transit Europa” is comprised of four projects which form a connection between Azdar and various artists and institutions. In the project “Kula – To Europe”, the group will collaborate with actors from German and French the­ atres to produce a multilingual performance. “Kula” is a system of trade used by natives of various islands in New Guinea. The islanders exchange “precious” items which have no measurable economic value, but possess an inherent social and cultural significance – representative of the kind of cultural exchange the project wishes to practise.

Each group arrives with a story which is inherent to its culture, and exchanges it for other stories according to the “Kula principle”. At the Theater Freiburg, Azdar will present its puppet theatre adaptation of the play “Story of a Tigress” by Dario Fo and confront Freiburg’s audience with a contemporary Persian view of a European text. The project by the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts plans to organise several joint workshops and stage a play by the Persian poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī. For the project “Germany-Knigge”, the directing student Max Martens will be working with Azdar to produce a mobile theatre format for Persian-speaking refugees which highlights European cultural worlds as well as the conflicts which arise when cultures clash.

Artistic director: Robert Schuster Stage directors: Max Martens, Ahmad Nasir Formuli (AF), Arash Absalan Choreography: Martin Gruber Set design: Eva-Maria Van Acker (BE) Dramaturge: Julie Paucker (CH) Featuring ensembles from: Azdar Theatre/Parwaz Puppet Theatre (AF), AZA (F), Theater Freiburg and Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar Performances: Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar: 1 – 11 Sep. 2016; Schauspielhaus Bochum: 7 – 9 Oct. 2016; La Filature Scène Nationale, Mulhouse: 12 – 13 Oct. 2016; Kurtheater Baden: 27 Oct. 2016; Theater Chur: 29 Oct. 2016; Theater Freiburg: 10 – 13 Dec. 2016 ↗ www.kunstfest-weimar.de ↗ www.nationaltheater-weimar.de

↓ Verena Jaekel: San Francisco, 23.4.2006, from the series „Neue Familienportraits – New

Family Portraits“

Thicker Than Water Familial concepts in contemporary art

The family has always been the focus of social debates and has served time and again as a projection surface for the values and conflicts of every generation.

Since the 68er movement, entire generations have fought against outdated traditions and inflexible role models, and have strived to establish new models of coexistence.

The exhibition at the Kunstpalais Erlangen highlights the numerous forms of familial life and takes a look at what its future might hold: How important is family today in view of globalised working conditions and pluralised lifestyles? How are medical and technical possibilities of surrogate motherhood and reproductive medicine, for example, changing our traditional understanding of the family?

Artists and researchers from a broad range of disciplines, e.g. art history, philosophy, sociology and gender studies, have been invited to investigate the family and family models with a focus on the concept of “Doing Family”. Nina Katchadourian's video work “Accent Elimination” explores the linguistic history of her own family, and Johannes Paul Raether develops performances which address the future of human propagation.

The exhibition will be supplemented by an extensive educational programme, numerous joint projects developed in cooperation with schools and organisations of Erlangen, and a research conference on the topic of “family”.

Artistic directors: Amely Deiss, Ina Neddermeyer Artists: Simon Fujiwara (GB), Badr el Hammami (MA), Verena Jaekel, Haejun Jo (KR), Fadma Kaddouri (MA), Nina Katchadourian (US), Ragnar Kjartansson (IS), Johannes Paul Raether and others Kunstpalais Erlangen: 24 Sep.–27 Nov. 2016 ↗ www.kunstpalais.de

Exil Ensemble An ensemble of refugees at the Maxim Gorki Theater

The subject of escape and the engagement for refugees are increasingly leaving their mark on the daily operations of theatres in Germany. Not only are theatres opening their doors to immigrants, but they’re also trying to present the current social upheavals dramatically on stage.

How can theatres sustainably integrate refugee artists into German ensembles? What kind of bureaucratic hurdles and language barriers exist and how can they be overcome? How can integration be achieved in this special world of municipal theatre? These are the questions the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin will address in the “Exil Ensemble Project”. The theatre has developed an extensive, two-year model project based on the theme of integration.

The aim is to create a model of artistic production with refugees which can be

adapted to other theatres. The project will establish a professional ensemble of seven refugees, who will work fulltime at the Maxim Gorki Theatre for a period of two years. Receiving dramaturgical support, the members of the Exil Ensemble will develop one pro­ duction per season which can be taken on tour to other cooperating theatres.

The members of the Exil Ensemble will also perform in other productions at the Gorki, as well as develop their own individual performances and lectures. As part of the project, the refugees will have the chance to receive further training, support from actors of the Gorki Theater in a mentoring programme, and the opportunity to participate in master classes under such renowned directors as René Pollesch, Sebastian Baumgarten, Helgard Haug and Falk Richter. For their part, the refugees will be invited to share their own experience and knowledge in the educational programme of the Maxim Gorki Theater.

Three members of the Exil Ensemble have already been chosen, and another four will be selected in an open call competition.

The Maxim Gorki Theater is predestined to take on such a model project at a German city theatre. Since Shermin Langhoff assumed the position of General Theatre Director, the topics of escape and migration have become central points of reference in the theatre’s artistic activities. The theatre has since received numerous inquiries from other institutions which are interested in learning more about the results of these projects.

Artistic directors: Shermin Langhoff, Yael Ronen (IL), Sebastian Nübling Artists: Ayham Majid Agha (SY), Maryam Abu Khaled, Karim Daoud (PS), Aleksandar Radenković (CS), Dimitrij Schaad (KZ), René Pollesch, Sebastian Baumgarten, Helgard Haug, Falk Richter and others Berlin: workshops/master classes, studio production, stage productions: 1 Jun. – 31 Dec. 2017; Stage p ­ roduction tour with workshops: 1 Jan. – 31 Jul. 2018 ↗ www.gorki.de

38 THE MAGAZINE If you would like to receive this Magazine on a regular basis, you may sign up for a free ­subscription (German edition) on our website ↗ www.kulturstiftung-bund.de/­ magazinbestellung If you do not have Internet access, you may also call us at: +49 (0) 345 2997 131. ­ We would be happy to place you on our mailing list!

THE WEBSITE The Federal Cultural Foundation maintains an extensive, bilingual website where you can find detailed information about the Foundation’s activities, responsibilities, funded projects, ­programmes and much more. Visit us at: ↗ www.kulturstiftung-bund.de ↗ facebook.com/kulturstiftung ↗ twitter.com/kulturstiftung

IMPRINT Publisher Kulturstiftung des Bundes / Franckeplatz 2 / 06110 Halle an der Saale / T +49 (0)345 2997 0 / F +49 (0)345 2997 333 / info@kulturstiftung-­ bund.de / www.kulturstiftung-bund.de Executive Board Hortensia Völckers / Alexander Farenholtz responsible for the content Editor-in-chief Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel Editorial advisor Tobias Asmuth Final editing Therese Teutsch Translations Robert Brambeer Design Neue Gestaltung, Berlin Picture credit Akinbode Akinbiyi (courtesy of the artist) Copy date 22 Aug. 2016 Print run 26,000 (German edition) By-lined contributions do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editor. © Kulturstiftung des Bundes – All rights reserved. Reproduction in part or whole without prior written consent from the German Federal Cultural Foundation is strictly prohibited.

The German Federal Cultural Foundation is financed by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media by resolution of the German Bundestag. the German Bundestag.

COMMITTEES OF ­ THE GERMAN ­FEDERAL CULTURAL FOUNDATION BOARD OF TRUSTEES The Board of Trustees is responsible for making final decisions concerning the general focus of the Foundation’s activities, its funding priorities and organisational structure. The 14-member board reflects the political levels which were integral to the Foundation’s establishment.

Trustees are appointed for a five-year term.

Chairwoman of the Board Prof. Monika Grütters Minister of State in the Federal Chancellery and Commissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs Representing the Federal Foreign Office Prof. Dr. Maria Böhmer Minister of State Representing the Federal Ministry of Finance Jens Spahn Parliamentary State Secretary Representing the German Bundestag Prof. Dr. Norbert Lammert President of the German Bundestag Dr. h.c. Wolfgang Thierse Former President of the German Bundestag Dr. h.c. Hans-Joachim Otto Former Parliamentary State Secretary Representing the German Länder Boris Rhein Hessian State Minister for Higher Education, Research and the Arts Dr. Eva-Maria Stange State Minister of Science and the Arts in Saxony Representing the German Municipalities Klaus Hebborn Councillor, Association of German Cities Uwe Lübking Councillor, Association of German Towns and Municipalities Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Cultural Foundation of German States Erwin Sellering Minister-President of the Federal State of Mecklen­ burg-Vorpommern Representing the fields of art and culture Prof. Dr. Bénédicte Savoy Professor of Art History Durs Grünbein Author Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolf Lepenies Sociologist

ADVISORY ­COMMITTEE The Advisory Committee makes recommendations on the thematic focus of the Foundation’s activities. The committee is comprised of leading figures in the arts, culture, business, academics and politics.

Prof. Dr. h.c. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann President of the Goethe-Institut, Chairman of the Advisory Committee Dr. Dorothea Rüland Secretary General of the DAAD, Vice ­Chairwoman of the Advisory Committee Prof. Dr. Clemens Börsig Chairman of the board of the Deutsche Bank Stiftung Jens Cording Commissioner of the Gesellschaft für Neue Musik

Prof. Martin Maria Krüger President of the German Music Council Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen Secretary General of the Cultural Foundation of German States Dr. Volker Rodekamp Director of the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig Prof. Dr. Oliver Scheytt President of the Cultural Policy Society Johano Strasser German P.E.N. Center Frank Werneke Deputy Chairman of the ver.di labour union Prof. Klaus Zehelein Former President of the German Theatre Association Olaf Zimmermann Managing Director of the German Cultural Council

JURIES AND CURATORIAL PANELS The Federal Cultural Foundation draws on the scientific and artistic expertise of about 50 jury and curatorial panel members who advise the Foundation on thematic and project-specific matters. For more information about these committees, please visit the corresponding projects posted on our website ↗ www.kulturstiftung-­bund.de

THE FOUNDATION Executive Board Hortensia Völckers Artistic Director Alexander Farenholtz Administrative Director Secretarial offices Beatrix Kluge / Beate Ollesch (Berlin office) / Christine Werner Assistant to the Executive Board Dr. Lutz Nitsche Contract Department Christian Plodeck (legal advisor) / Katrin Gayda / Stefanie Jage / Anja Petzold Press and Public Relations Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel (dept. head) / Tinatin Eppmann / Juliane Köber / Julia Mai / Christoph Sauerbrey / Arite Studier / Therese Teutsch Programme Department Kirsten Haß (dept. head) / Torsten Maß (dept. head General Project Funding) / Sebastian Brünger / Teresa Darian / Anke Engemann / Anne Fleckstein / Dr. Marie Cathleen Haff / Markus Huber / Antonia Lahmé / Carl Philipp Nies / Uta Schnell / Karoline Weber / Friederike Zobel Programme Management and Evaluation Ursula Bongaerts (dept. head) / Marius Bunk / Kristin Dögel / Marcel Gärtner / Bärbel Hejkal / Steffi Khazhueva / Anja Lehmann / Frank Lehmann / Dörte Mocbeichel / Nadine Planert / Ilka Schattschneider / Anne-Kathrin Szabó / Alexandré Vetters Project Controlling Steffen Schille (dept. head) / Franziska Gollub / Fabian Märtin / Lina Schaper / Saskia Seidel / Antje Wagner Administration Andreas Heimann (dept. head) / Margit Ducke / Maik Jacob / Steffen Rothe

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