MORE WALLBREAKERS COMING SOON All the info you need on upcoming WallBreakers Events, Artists and Initiatives are available at the festival site:
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And the Wall came tumbling down ‌ Some walls go up to keep people in. Others are constructed to keep people out. Over, under and through, people are constantly finding creative ways to overcome obstacles, which may be metaphoric or actual thick slabs of concrete. The WALLBREAKERS Festival found ways to denounce any borders between art and entertainment by bringing together solid impressions for the ears and eyes, a coupling which results not in sex (well, everybody would have to tell their own story there I guess), but surely in celebration. In this second limited run event MINI Modart Magazine, you’ll get a glimpse of what went down and what is coming up for Art WALLBREAKERS.
WALLBREAKERS at Rock am Ring
Rock am Ring is Germany’s largest open air festival, and Lichtfaktor were on hand to inject some visual narratives into the rock n´ roll mix. As band after band took stage, WALLBREAKER´S guests were invited to enter the Graffiti stained world of JIAR’s unique character universe, while Lichtfaktor dazzled them with innovative and often ironic short films that demonstrate the possibilities light writing has as an element of moving images.
When the sweat had been mopped off the stage, things got heavier at the Backstage After Show party and the Lichtfaktor crew didn’t stop. Instead they played with the writing on the wall and helped set a mood that kept the place bouncing until the sun came up. Theirs is a very interactive sort of performance, which drags an audience in through its elegance and then gives them the chance to play and produce for themselves. 20 years after the Berlin Wall fell, Little Brother has grown up to be a producer and Lichtfaktor proved that we are all content creators. Your creation = your responsibility. www.artwallbreakers.com/shows/shows-rock-am-ring
WALLBREAKERS and the ART BAZZLE Exhibition/Party
From the former Formula 1 track near Cologne, WALLBREAKERS crossed the Swiss border and hustled over to the orgy that is ART BASEL. As people speculated on the value of art, and were overwhelmed by sensory input or may have been confused by the elitist language often spoken, at the fairs, the WALLBREAKERS party combined engaging art with feet-moving music.
Ruedione and Smash137 created an installation that spoke of East and West, past and present, all the while talking to each other from across the room. The value of art here was not market based, it was all about people thinking, sharing and having a good time. And thanks to a DJ set by the Stereo MC’s, people were having a very very good time. The pictures say it better. www.artwallbreakers.com/shows/shows-art-bazzle-party
At Urban Affairs, Art WALLBREAKERS is pleased to present 5 extraordinary talents and a very diverse body of work, medium and personal risk: PETER FUSS (PL)
WALLBREAKERS festival meets URBAN AFFAIRS
Nils M端ller (DE) Roa (BE) Nomad (DE) Abner Preis (USA)
Stadtbad Gerichtsstr.65 13347 Berlin www.urbanaffairs.de July 1th - 31th 2009 OPEN: Tue - Sat 14 -20h
PETER FUSS
From the destruction of his show in Prague, back to the painful pre-election question of who would kill the next set of political idealism around the planet, Peter Fuss often works in taboo areas, but his interest never appears to be shock or awe. He’s provoking things, not for the sake of provocation, but at least from our perspective, for bringing them to the surface where they can be seen, dealt with, and time to time, well yeah, destroyed.
His work is diverse enough not to waste time by making lumps of it, but it does seem like the material has a large say in which direction this artist takes it as he tends to focus on the statement of the work before understanding or outlining the form it might take.
»As a young boy I lived in a country that was not independent. You couldn’t travel abroad, I even remember the period when it was not possible to travel freely between cities – to do that, you needed a special permit, which was checked by the military and the police. The state-controlled television had only two channels, the press was censored and before playing a concert, every band had to have their lyrics approved by institutions which made sure that no dissent was voiced. It was not a free country. You could go to jail for criticizing those in power. You would see “graffiti” saying people wanted freedom, that those in power cheated, that TV lied. The
form was unimportant – it was the message that mattered. Those people expressed their need of freedom, they fought the system by writing politically involved slogans. It was their way to manifest their views and express their dissent against the regime. And they really risked prison.« www.peterfuss.com Quote taken from an interview on the outstanding blog: Groundswellcollective.com
There are several photographers that have caught our eye in the last few years, in Germany alone there has been Ruedione, Just, and more recently, we’ve been blown away by the work of Nils Müller. In the preface to the excellent book “Blütezeit” that Nils has just published, there is a line we find vital to all this ‘street art’ talk. Vital and often overlooked by those who would discuss instead of document such practices, Nils spoke of community. Modart highly recommends both the artist and the book.
»Pure urbanity. Locations all over the world. Rediscover the World, get to know people and their cultures. A Network developes. The clashing of different styles. Means of conveyance, trains. The league of champions. Crime and identity as an elemental part of graffiti-art. Fame. The crew, a second family. This is what drives me. The scope and the controversial aspects of this lifestyle. So many individuals. So much hate. So much love. So much passion. So much anonymity combined with so much talkativeness. Adventures
more gripping than Indiana Jones’s. Bonds stronger than the A-Team’s. Taking hour-long trips, only to press down on the cap for a few minutes. In the freezing cold or boiling heat. Thornbushes and barbed wire fences. Risking incarceration and hospital visits. All that for a few letters on rolling steel..« www.nilsmuellerphotography.com BLÜTEZEIT - European publishing by COLORTRIP
ROA
Outdoors, organic and in love with the process and pure pleasure of painting, Roa is an artist who tends not to hold on too tightly. His lines are clear, but between them we can read ambiguity; the common denominator being a fascination for the texture of trashed facades and neglected spaces. Invading the abandoned, he brings
animals to life only to leave them dead on the wall for your consideration. While there is generally a relationship between dead organisms and dead space, it isn’t always clear what he wishes to reveal in the rot. That things are rotting however, cannot be avoided.
»Happy Ever After« – Urban Love Story In this one, every wall will be broken one way or the other.
These animals appear to represent their own fate and speak of a contemporary situation where nature is no longer natural and many of us cannot help but be estranged from our origins. While he started with prehistoric monsters and the fragility of evolution (even for the giants), this body has evolved into a more timeless inquiry as living creatures like birds and pigs begun to appear repeatedly in his work.
That these works are often black and white is not a question of mere facility, but a choice, which allows him to spray in a fashion that is faithful to how he sketches. Trugh this viewer’s eyes, the shadows, etchings and hatched lines sometimes seem more like charcoal than spray paint. Both technically and poetically, his pieces are striking, thoughtful and faster than the tale they tell. www.roaweb.org
A unique WALLBREAKERS collaboration between the acclaimed Urban Affairs Exhibition, Modart, Berlin’s Brot und Spiele Gallery and two fiercely independent artists (Nomad (DE) and Abner Preis (USA), “ Happy Ever After,” will lead guided tours between the gallery and Urban Affairs, narrating love stories, which have been marked by and on the streets they will travel. Like love, and much of the ethos employed by so-called Street Art, it focuses on discovery, possibility and the rejection of fear, considering value an estimation only of subjective emotional engagement. “Happy Ever After”, is an installation that brings guests into the actual experience, intertwining object art, drawings, photo and video into its narrative. It is a full blown collaboration between artists, audience and every person or thing that contributes to the environment they walk through.
We can best describe this as a thoughtful and brazen presentation of the wonderful world around us, which we are often too distracted or conditioned to notice. July 24th – 30th tour times to be announced on www.artwallbreakers.com www.brot.undspiele.com www.nonewenemies.net
Next Stop on the Art WALLBREAKERS Tour! El Bocho is back at it and brings WALLBREAKERS to Cologne, where he’ll make things sticky in Cologne’s hottest young gallery. A Berlin based artist who has been working at street level for more than a decade, El Bocho compiles references of urban life and concentrates on communicating them. He is an artist who remains highly focused on touching the general public and not excluding any potential audience by working within any potential walls. This time however, he’s going between the walls. ARTYFARTY GALLERY Maastrichter Str. 49 50672 Köln www.artyfarty-gallery.com August 15th – September 26th 2009 open: Mon – Fri 10 – 18 h / Sat 12 – 16h
Modart Issue 20 / The Best of Modart / Coming Out Summer 2009