Guided tour of the exhibition Chris Korda Artist’s Con(tra)ception with Ani Schulze, artist. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free, registration is not required.

Führung durch die Ausstellung Chris Korda Artist’s Con(tra)ception mit Ani Schulze, Künstlerin. Der Eintritt zu den Ausstellungen, Veranstaltungen und Führungen ist frei, eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich.

Guided tour of Marie Angeletti’s exhibition “ram spin cram” with Anna Heldmann, curatorial assistant. Admission to the exhibitions, events and guided tours is free. (in German)

Führung durch Marie Angelettis Ausstellung „ram spin cram“ mit Anna Heldmann, kuratorische Assistenz. Der Eintritt zu den Ausstellungen, Veranstaltungen und Führungen ist frei.

Bolling, Woolf, Ohanyan & Nisic Beatboxing ist die Kunst, mit der Nerses Ohanyan seine Zuhörer verblüfft. Der Hip-Hop hat diese uralte Perkussionstechnik neu erfunden. Nerses macht das eigentlich unmöglich wahr: eine Rhythmusmaschine mit Mund, Nase, Lippen und Kehle zu imitieren und so selbstbestimmt zu trommeln, während er dabei hochvirtuos Flöte spielt. Im Duo Nerses hat er sich mit dem Akkordeonisten Miroslav Nisić zusammengefunden, einem der beeindruckendsten Virtuosen seines Instruments. Miroslav ist auch Mitglied im Quartett Uwaga und hat damit 2021 die Zuhörer bei den Kammerkonzerten im Kunstverein in seinen Bann gezogen und zu Standing Ovations hingerissen. Die Zuhörer erwartet ein atemberaubend virtuoses Konzert, das absolut keine Grenzen der Genres kennt und meisterhaft seine ganz eigene Ausdrucksform findet. Neben großartigen Jazz-Werken wie Claude Bollings Suite und dem Concerto von Randall Woolf werden auch berühmte klassische Melodien und sogar ein AC/DC-Klassiker wie Thunderstruck höchst anspruchsvoll und unterhaltsam in Szene gesetzt. Karten sind auf KölnTicket erhältlich: www.koelnticket.de Aktuelle Infos & Link zum VVK unter: www.koelner-klassik-ensemble.de

We cordially invite you to the exhibition opening of Marie Angeletti – ram spin cram on Friday, March 31, 2023 at 7 pm.

Führung durch die Ausstellung “Game of No Games. Anleitung zu beschwingtem Gehen” mit Ani Schulze. Der Eintritt zu den Ausstellungen, Veranstaltungen und Führungen ist frei.

Fukio Saxophon-Quartett & Inna Firsova Seit seinen Anfängen im Jahr 2008 hat sich Fukio auf die Interpretation von Musik für Saxophon-Quartett und der Erarbeitung eines neuen Repertoires konzentriert. Das in Köln beheimatete Quartett hat sich an der HfMT Köln auf Neue Musik sowie am CNSMD in Paris auf Kammermusik spezialisiert und hat mit renommierten Komponisten wie Georges Aperghis, Fabien Lévy und Georg Friedrich Haas zusammengearbeitet. Bei den Kammerkonzerten werden sie zum ersten Mal ihr neues Programm als Quintett mit der Pianistin Inna Firsova präsentieren. Besetzung: Sopransaxophon: Joaquín Sáez Belmonte Altsaxophon: Xavier Larsson Páez Tenorsaxophon: José Manuel Bañuls Marcos Baritonsaxophon: Xabier Casal Ares Klavier: Inna Firsova Programm: Maurice Ravel: La valse, poème chorégraphique pour orchestre (Arr.: Alejandro Lidón) Leonard Bernstein: „Candide“ (Arr.: Alejandro Lidón) William Albright (1944-1998): Fantasy Etudes Ausführliche Informationen zum Ensemble: https://fukioquartet.com Preise: 19,50 Euro inkl. VVK Gebühr, ermäßigt (Schüler, Studenten, KölnPass-Inhaber) 12,- Euro inkl. VVK Gebühr, Kinder bis 14 Jahre haben freien Eintritt. Der Vorverkauf startet zur Zeit jeweils drei Wochen vor den jeweiligen Konzertterminen. Veranstalter / Aktuelle Infos: Kölner Klassik Ensemble Tickets kaufen Über die Konzertreihe: Die Musikmetropole am Rhein ist Heimatort zahlreicher international anerkannter Musikerinnen und Musiker. Mit ihrer Vielfalt und Qualität hat sich dabei die freie Kölner Kammermusikszene weltweit höchstes Ansehen erspielt. Die Kammerkonzerte im Kunstverein geben diesen Spitzenensembles aus Köln und NRW nun ein festes Schaufenster in ihrer Heimatstadt. Ab 2020 finden jährlich sechs Konzerte, jeweils Samstag Abends um 18 Uhr, im Riphahnsaal des Kölnischen Kunstvereins statt. Zentral am Neumarkt bietet der Riphahnsaal mit seiner offenen, schönen Architektur eine hervorragende Akustik für Kammermusik der internationalen Spitzenklasse. Die Verbindung von zeitgenössischer, bildender Kunst und der epochenübergreifenden Kammermusik setzt ein Symbol für die Einheit von Kunst, ihrer Vielfältigkeit und Aktualität und verspricht ein einzigartiges Ambiente.

Ort: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Hahnenstraße 6 Eintritt: 12,- / 10, – € Mitglieder: 8, – €

Tickets kaufen

Guided tour through the exhibitions of John Russell and José Montealegre with Ani Schulze Free admission to the exhibitions, events, and guided tours.

Führung durch die Ausstellungen von John Russell und José Montealegre mit Ani Schulze Der Eintritt zu den Ausstellungen, Veranstaltungen und Führungen ist frei.

A reading on the occasion of the exhibition by José Montealegre Nervous System in the context of DC Open

With texts by José Montealegre, Nat Marcus and Mikhail Wassmer, Narrator: Mark von Schlegell 

There once was a young man, not aged even fifteen, who roamed the countryside in search of stories. His name was Hilario Martinez, and when he came across older folk, with creased eyes and leather skin that could point him in the way of some good old-fashioned stories, they batted him off like a summer fly. “Why you’re not even fifteen” they would say “run-off, go-along, back to your mother you go.” This made Hilario very disappointed, but still, he found the will to continue walking. 
One day, as Hilario walked along a wooded path eating gooseberries from a gooseberry tree not far down the road he came across a tiny witch that had gotten stuck inside a plastic bottle. She clawed and clawed at the sides trying to pinch the plastic in order to bite it off and tear a hole so she could escape, but the plastic would not budge. He said to the witch picking up the bottle “Witch, you have gotten yourself stuck in a bottle”. The witch sighed and plopped herself on her ass in the bottom. “Well…” the witch said looking at the big eyes of Hilario as he held her encasement like a fireflies’ “are you gonna let me out or what?”
Hilario was not ready for that question, and wondered thinking of something witty to say.
“How can I let you out witch,” said he “for I know not, who put you there, perhaps you’re a deranged witch and as soon as I open the bottle you smite me a fool”.
“You already seem like a fool” sighed the witch as she flew up to the bottle’s neck.
“Or perhaps you’re the slave witch of a giant who will flick me a smudge on the ground when he finds out I liberated his fairy.”
“Well that’s a good story” said the witch as she hovered inside the suffocating throat of the teardrop shaped bottle, “but…..” she continued yet was interrupted by the deranged face that stared at her from the outside. Hilario’s eyes were fixed on her, like two crescent moons rising over the horizon. “Stoooooooriesss” Hilaro drooled “give me the stooooooriessss” he repeated transfixed by the witch’s hands that had by now understood the weakness of the foraging idiot.

Text: José Montealegre

Nat Marcus is a poet, vocalist and designer. Along with Zoe Darsee, she is co-editor of TABLOID Press, an imprint for poetry and art-books founded in Berlin in 2014. The publishing house maintains a focus on the public space of a poem and the poetics of a social body. Marcus’ poetry, art criticism and lyric journalism have also appeared in Arts of the Working Class, The Ransom Note, Edit, and Berlin Art Link.

Mikhail Wassmer (*1986 in South Surrey, B.C., Canada) studied photography at the Zurich University of the Arts and the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, and fine arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He has recently exhibited works in solo shows at RESPONSIBILITY (2020) and Harmony 100 (2022) in Basel. He self-published his poetry in Agitated Dairy (2020) and the end… (2021). He recited from the two pamphlets at RESPONSIBILITY in Basel, KOBO in Zurich, Harmony 100 in Basel, and Hopscotch in Berlin.

 

Guided tour through the exhibitions of Loretta Fahrenholz and Dala Nasser with Miriam Bettin, Assistant Curator

Guided tour through the exhibitions of Loretta Fahrenholz and Dala Nasser with Nikola Dietrich, Director

Children’s workshop Traces of Purple in the context of the exhibitions of Loretta Fahrenholz and Dala Nasser with artist Ani Schulze from 6 years (optional in presence of parents), max. 10 children, participation fee 10 EUR In the children’s workshop with artist Ani Schulze, we explore the current exhibitions at the Kunstverein and make large collage paintings with many different materials, such as fabrics, chalk, adhesive tapes, paper, and silver foils. In the process, we explore what traces and patterns different things (stones, leaves, everyday objects) can leave behind.  

Children’s workshop Traces of Purple in the context of the exhibitions of Loretta Fahrenholz and Dala Nasser with artist Ani Schulze from 6 years (optional in presence of parents), max. 10 children, participation fee 10 EUR In the children’s workshop with artist Ani Schulze, we explore the current exhibitions at the Kunstverein and make large collage paintings with many different materials, such as fabrics, chalk, adhesive tapes, paper, and silver foils. In the process, we explore what traces and patterns different things (stones, leaves, everyday objects) can leave behind.  

Guided tour through the exhibitions of Loretta Fahrenholz and Dala Nasser on international museum day with Ani Schulze, Artist

Asynchronicity. A symposium-like gathering, hosted by Cally Spooner. 

With Paul Abbott & Will Holder, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Taina Bucher, Elizabeth Freeman, Hendrik Folkerts, Irena Haiduk, Dana Luciano, Martina Roß-Nickoll, Cally Spooner with Sanna Blennow and Melody Giron, Mark von Schlegell, Jesper List Thomsen, Jackie Wang and films by Pierre Bal-Blanc and Frances Scholz. 

Saturday, May 7, 2022, 8.59 am – 6.50 pm 
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne
Free Admission, no registration required

Sunday, May 8, 2022, 11 am – 8 pm
Ludwig Forum, Aachen
Free Admission, no registration required

All contributions are in English. In Aachen, simultaneous translation into German is provided.

Asynchronicity is a symposium-like gathering of choreographies, lectures, sounds, screenings, and discussions assembled by artist Cally Spooner with reboot: responsiveness at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum, Aachen.

Asynchronicity takes as its backdrop the neoliberal paradigm of an always measurable performance. In this climate performance manifests at once as a regime of disciplinary power and a condition of everyday life, in which subjects constantly quantify, manage and stratify themselves until the social imagination and desire is deadened. Asynchronicity probes how such draining quests can be subverted by collectively fostering a resistance towards chrononormativity. Coined in 2010 by queer studies scholar Elizabeth Freeman (one of the gathering’s contributors), the term chrononormativity describes the prevalent use of time to organize human bodies toward maximum productivity.

Asynchronicity responds by unravelling the resistant potentials of becoming or remaining asynchronous. Over the course of two days, collaborators – artists, performers, musicians, theoreticians, dancers, curators and designers – are invited to unfold a diverse set of propositions for alternative, fugitive temporalities, affects and bodily practices that bend and subvert familiarity and which deliberately, or naturally, remain out of sync. Jointly introducing the notion of asynchronicity as an alternative, non-sequential mode of time, texts, movements, encounters and thoughts will collide across the partnering institutions in Aachen and Cologne.

Asynchronicity is part of Cally Spooners longterm research project Deadtime (since 2018) in which she finds and handles temporal structures beyond the Clock-Time standardizations that force labour, bodies, nervous systems, and digital technologies into a completely metric-orientated future. Conceived as the first of five assemblies hosted by the artist, that challenge the chrononormative order and the performance imperative implied.

While you may enter the symposium-like gathering in your own time – any moment or time span of preference – we suggest you experience its choreography in its entirety and in both cities, if possible.


Saturday, May 7, 2022, 8.59 am – 6.50 pm
Doors open from 8.30 am
Kölnischer Kunstverein
Hahnenstraße 6, 50667 Cologne

I GOT UP AT 8:59 AM OCT. 19 2021 by Pierre Bal-Blanc, adapted from I GOT UP AT 8:59 AM OCT. 19 1968 by On Kawara addressed to Dan Graham, is screened. Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle is read by Will Holder (vocals) and Paul Abbott (drums). Each reading comprises three fifteen-minute readings of three verses, to a maximum of six people. Deadtime, an opera in progress, is presented by Cally Spooner (lecture), Sanna Blennow (dance) and Melody Giron (cello) . Elizabeth Freeman introduces the audience to the concept of chrononormativity, with a historical frame. Mark von Schlegell reflects on his science fiction experiences with time travel. Taina Bucher engages in conversation on techno-dystopias, and ‘right time newsfeeds’. Jackie Wang examines how time is used as a technology of punishment inside prisons, then ends with a meditation on Black Quantum Futurism’s use of Afro-futurist sci-fi to create new political openings. Dana Luciano presents James McCune Smith, the 19th century physician, activist, who positioned geology as a site for the production of pleasure. Jesper List Thomsen reads FREEEee, a part lecture part folk song on dismantling representation. We conclude with Introduction To Feelings, Studio Feelings where Irena Haiduk casts from the year 2135 for 32 mins.

Timetable
08.59 am I GOT UP AT 8:59 AM OCT. 19 2021, Pierre Bal-Blanc
10.00 am Dead Time, Cally Spooner, Melody Giron, Sanna Blennow and Jesper List Thomsen
11.00 am On Chrononormativity: Histories and Possibilities, Elizabeth Freeman
12.00 pm Carceral Temporalities and the Politics of Dreaming, Jackie Wang
1.00 pm Rosmarie Waldrop: “Lawn of Excluded Middle”, Will Holder and Paul Abbott
—  Lunch Break
2.00 pm Algorithmic “right time” and Deadtime, Taina Bucher and Cally Spooner
2.30 pm Choromonautics, Then and now, Mark von Schlegell
3.30 pm FREEEee, Jesper List Thomsen
—  Break
4.15 pm Freedom’s Ammonite: Blackness, Geomorphology, Worldmaking, Dana Luciano
5.00 pm Introduction To Feelings, Studio Feelings, Irena Haiduk
5.30 pm (A rehearsal for) Unending love, or love dies, on repeat like it’s endless, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins
6.00 pm Rosmarie Waldrop: “Lawn of Excluded Middle”, Will Holder and Paul Abbott
6.50 pm End


Sunday, May 8, 2022, 11 am – 8 pm
Ludwig Forum, Aachen
Jülicher Straße 97-109, 52070 Aachen

Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle is read by Will Holder (vocals) and Paul Abbott (drums). Each reading comprises three fifteen-minute readings of three verses, to a maximum of six people. Mark von Schlegell screens Frances Scholz’s YEAR OF THE WRITER, a time-capsule/fragmentary portrait of a sci-fi writer and the musical environment surrounding, in Los Angeles, 2004. Hendrik Folkerts presents the prologue to a symposium-like gathering on Duration in the spring of 2023, and an asynchronous lapse in this gathering. Jackie Wang analyzes the relationship between listening and power by examining the history of voice surveillance and voice printing technology. Elizabeth Freeman talks about chrononormativity and the asynchrony of personhood and collectivity during illness in the present day—COVID, and her own. Dana Luciano introduces Ellen Gallagher’s alignment with oceanic time, via ecologies formed from the corpses of whales—that might help us to imagine life anew. Biologist Martina Roß-Nickoll explains biodiversity and the temporality of meadows (lecture in German, simultaneous translation into English will be provided.) Irena Haiduk asks things to teach us how to live. Alex Baczynski-Jenkins presents a processual choreography that reflects on the relations of desire, dance, fragmentation, love (as communality) and time.

Timetable
11.00 am DURATION symposium in the spring of 2023; an asynchronous lapse, Hendrik Folkerts
12.00 pm Crip Asynchronies: COVID, Cancer, Climate, Elizabeth Freeman
1.00 pm Captured Voices: Prisoner Voiceprints and the Carceral Laboratory, Jackie Wang
2.00 pm Rosmarie Waldrop: “Lawn of Excluded Middle”, Will Holder and Paul Abbott
— Lunch break
3.00 pm Oceanic Time and Black Feminist Futures, Dana Luciano
4.00 pm A conversation on Meadows, Prof. Martina Roß-Nickoll
4.00 pm Rosmarie Waldrop: “Lawn of Excluded Middle”, Will Holder and Paul Abbott
4.30 pm Introduction to YEAR OF THE WRITER, by Frances Scholz, 2004, Mark von Schlegell
— Drink break
5.10 pm Prop Positions, Irena Haiduk
6.00 pm (A rehearsal for) Unending love, or love dies, on repeat like it’s endless, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins
8.00 pm End


reboot: responsiveness is the first cycle of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices, jointly presented by Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum für internationale Kunst, Aachen.

reboot:
Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann
Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia
Graphic design by Sean Yendrys


reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of:

reboot: responsiveness is supported by:

Guided tour through the exhibition of Loretta Fahrenholz with Ani Schulze, Artist

Film screening Loretta Fahrenholz Two A.M., 2019, 79 min (original English version) and a conversation with the artist (in German) Two A.M. Color, 79 min, 2019 With: Theadora Davies, Emile Clarke, Jim Fletcher, Sophie Fives, Annika Glass, Andrew Kerton, Paula Knüpling, Ilya Lipkin, Mira, Partecke, Emily Sundblad, Yuko Torihara, Helga Wretman and Michael Bornhütter, Klaus Kamptner, Leonie Kossi, Gerda Martin, Liv Moritz, Liana Saito, Julian Wadsworth, Jürgen Wolf, Min Yoon, Tate Zirner, et al. Cinematography: Till Megerle, Loretta Fahrenholz, Jan Mammey; Editing: Michael Fandel, Loretta Fahrenholz; Sound Design: Steffen Martin, Anders Ehlin; Assistant Directors: Angela Stiegler, Yulia Lokshina; Script: Jegg Nagy, Loretta Fahrenholz; Production Management: Sarah Schipschack; Producer: Loretta Fahrenholz; Executive Producer: Sarah Schipschack & Leif Magne Tangen, vitakuben; Sound: Simon Konrad; Costumes, Make-up: Marianna Serwa; Stunt Choreography: Michael Bornhütter; Colorist: Jorge Piquer Rodríguez; Music: Steffen Martin, Christian Naujoks, Anders Ehlin, Stephan Gschwendtner, Ivan Sobolew, Timo Ellis, Christoph Reiserer; Titles: HIT Two A.M. (2019) is a hallucinatory tale of coercion, control, and peer-to-peer surveillance on the fringes of present-day Berlin. Fahrenholz draws on Irmgard Keun’s 1937 novel, After Midnight, for her protagonist, Sanna. Where Keun’s young narrator turned a septic eye on the rise of the Nazis in prewar Germany, Fahrenholz’s Sanna is pitted against her own overbearing family of mind-reading ‘Watchers’, who use their powers to monitor the thoughts and feelings of their human counterparts. As a police state tightens its grip in the face of increasing social unrest, Sanna goes on the run from her volatile Watcher aunt and reconnects with her sister Algin, a blacklisted pop star. But when an escape from her claustrophobic past seems just within reach, events conspire against Sanna and her allies, in an unpredictable fever dream of desire, voyeurism, and political chaos.

Guided tour through the exhibition of Loretta Fahrenholz with Miriam Bettin, Assistant Curator

Schubert, Fauré & Blomenkamp Dekoriert mit den höchsten Preisen und Auszeichnungen (Wien, Melbourne, ARD, KLRITA) ist das Mor­genstern Trio auf den wichtigsten Podien der Welt zu Hause. Dazu zählen: Carnegie Hall New York, Kennedy Center Washington DC, Musikverein und Konzerthaus Wien, Kölner Philharmonie, Berliner Philharmonie, Concertgebouw Amsterdam und andere. Publikum und Presse feiern das Morgenstern Trio für höchsten kammermusikalischen und technischen Anspruch: Seine lange gereiften Interpretationen faszinieren in der Ausarbeitung feinster Nuancen. Bei den Kammerkonzerten im Kunstverein kann das Morgenstern Trio ganz seine kammermusikalischen Fähigkeiten ausspielen und präsentiert ein besonderes und abwechselungsreiches Programm. Neben Klaviertrios von Franz Schubert und Gabriel Fauré wird eine 2019 erstmalig uraufgeführte Suite von Thomas Blomenkamp zu hören sein. Besetzung: Catherine Klipfel, Klavier Stefan Hempel, Violine Emanuel Wehse, Violoncello Programm: Gabriel Fauré: Klaviertrio d-Moll, op. 120 Thomas Blomenkamp: Preludio, Prestissimo, Pavane und Precipitato für Klaviertrio (2019) #RepertoireNRW Franz Schubert: Trio B-Dur, D 898 Ausführliche Informationen zum Ensemble: www.morgensterntrio.com Preise: 19,50 Euro inkl. VVK Gebühr, ermäßigt (Schüler, Studenten, KölnPass-Inhaber) 12,- Euro inkl. VVK Gebühr, Kinder bis 14 Jahre haben freien Eintritt. Der Vorverkauf startet zur Zeit jeweils drei Wochen vor den jeweiligen Konzertterminen. Karten sind auf KölnTicket erhältlich: www.koelnticket.de Aktuelle Infos & Link zum VVK unter: www.koelner-klassik-ensemble.de Über die Konzertreihe: Die Musikmetropole am Rhein ist Heimatort zahlreicher international anerkannter Musikerinnen und Musiker. Mit ihrer Vielfalt und Qualität hat sich dabei die freie Kölner Kammermusikszene weltweit höchstes Ansehen erspielt. Die Kammerkonzerte im Kunstverein geben diesen Spitzenensembles aus Köln und NRW nun ein festes Schaufenster in ihrer Heimatstadt. Ab 2020 finden jährlich sechs Konzerte, jeweils Samstag Abends um 18 Uhr, im Riphahnsaal des Kölnischen Kunstvereins statt. Zentral am Neumarkt bietet der Riphahnsaal mit seiner offenen, schönen Architektur eine hervorragende Akustik für Kammermusik der internationalen Spitzenklasse. Die Verbindung von zeitgenössischer, bildender Kunst und der epochenübergreifenden Kammermusik setzt ein Symbol für die Einheit von Kunst, ihrer Vielfältigkeit und Aktualität und verspricht ein einzigartiges Ambiente.

Mariana Valencia Tulum, New York Video presentation and conversation with Mariana Valencia Wednesday, March 30, 2022 Online Zoom, 6 – 8pm CET (in English) Participation link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83878297992 Meeting ID: 838 7829 7992 reboot: responsiveness is pleased to premiere New York-based artist and choreographer Mariana Valencia’s latest video work Tulum, New York in its newly conceived multi-language versions in English, German, and Spanish. On March 30, 2022, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum Aachen invite to a screening of the videos and a subsequent zoom-conversation with Mariana Valencia to contextualize her practice in dialogue with Viktor Neumann, one of the three curators of reboot. All three versions of Tulum, New York will be on view at Kölnischer Kunstverein and Ludwig Forum Aachen on site afterwards. “Exploring the ‘pandemic screen’, Tulum, New York makes use of the video-chat function that’s been imposed onto us as a means to connect and transport during pandemic times. Here, Mariana Valencia retells her recurring dreams that feature her psychotherapist, during the beginning of the first Covid-19 lockdown. Her face fills the frame and moves in slow-motion, out of rhythm to the speaking and in a surreal incantation. Tulum, New York sits between the tropical and urban, wakefulness and dreams, loss and attachment.” Choreographer and performer Mariana Valencia works in the New York experimental field of dance and performance. Her commissions include Baryshnikov Arts Center, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Danspace Project, The Whitney Museum, The Shed and Performance Space New York. Valencia’s work has toured in Korea, England, Norway, Macedonia and Serbia; her residencies include AUNTS, Chez Bushwick, New York Live Arts, ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Gibney Dance Center, Movement Research, and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (OR). Valencia is an LMCC Extended Life grantee, a Whitney Biennial artist, a Bessie Award recipient for Outstanding Breakout Choreographer, a Bessie Award nominee for Best Production, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award to Artists grant recipient, a Jerome Travel and Study Grant fellow, and a Movement Research GPS/Global Practice Sharing artist. Valencia is a founding member of the No Total reading group and she has been the co-editor of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence. She’s worked with artists AK Burns, Elizabeth Orr, Em Rooney, Fia Backstrom, Geo Wyeth, Guadalupe Rosales, Jazmin Romero, Juliana May, Jules Gimbrone, Kim Brandt, Lauren Bakst, Lydia Okrent, Morgan Bassichis, MPA, and robbinschilds. Valencia has published two books of performance texts, “Album” (Wendy’s Subway) and “Mariana Valencia’s Bouquet” (3 Hole Press). She holds a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA with a concentration in dance and ethnography. reboot: responsiveness Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum Aachen jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices. reboot: Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia Graphic design by Sean Yendrys reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of: reboot: responsiveness is supported by:

Pure Fiction Shifting Theatre: Sibyl’s Mouths Performance program starts at 2.30 pm with Mark von Schlegell (feat. Arjan Stockhausen), Luzie Meyer and Erika Landström with Dana Munro In Shifting Theatre: Sibyl’s Mouths, members of the writing and performance group Pure Fiction—Rosa Aiello, Ellen Yeon Kim, Erika Landström, Luzie Meyer, and Mark von Schlegell—respond to the unpredictable cultural landscape of today by staging this strikingly relevant novel’s motifs in a shifting theatre of sound, installation, lecture, film and puppetry. Voices animate and prophesize; make presence out of absent figures and forces; translate from symbol to action and back. In a time when coming together physically as a group seems near impossible; coming apart together is newly significant. Like the fragmentary prophecies of the eponymous Sibylline cave, works made specifically for the exhibition come to life at various stages, and in accordance with their own internal script and time-line. Through a careful interrogation to the where and who, their individual unfoldings seem to ask in discordant chorus: what is performance? The 2G rule applies. No registration required. The event takes place in the context of Show & Tell and is supported by:  

Rory Pilgrim Is there a story that has helped you to recover? Informal public presentation of a two-day workshop, organized by the Kölnischer Kunstverein and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf Sunday, January 23, 2022, 7 – 8 pm Venue: Salon des Amateurs Grabbeplatz 4, 40213 Düsseldorf Free Admission. Please note that this is a 2G+ event. For admission, a negative daily (not older than 24 hours) rapid test result is required in addition to proof of vaccination or recovery. A booster vaccination replaces the test result. Please register at info@reboot-responsiveness.com. Can we recover, if the systems around us do not change? By storytelling, how might we recover those systems? Over the course of a two-day long workshop, artist Rory Pilgrim has invited people from Cologne and Düsseldorf to reflect through different forms of storytelling on what ‘recovery’ might mean today. This workshop results in this informal public event, giving the opportunity for participants to share stories developed in the workshop in whatever way comfortable for them. With recovery implying a return to a previous state of health, or even the retrieval of something stolen, can we instead rethink recovery as a way to imagine something completely anew with possibilities? Inspired by the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, who described the story as a ‘medicine bundle’, we will explore how we use storytelling to share what recovery might mean to us in our own lives. This might be personal or born out of wider political concerns. Reflecting on how we might share our own stories or the stories of others, we will work with different forms of storytelling that feels intuitive to each person and as a group, such as through speech, writing, recordings and nonverbal forms such as tableau making and movement. Through this, we will together explore how experiences of recovery become entangled with wider systems of care, bureaucracy and law. By sharing stories, we will find ways to reimagine what recovery might be and as a way to shape the narratives and change we hope to implement for ourselves, local communities and the wider world. Rory Pilgrim (UK/NL) is an artist and facilitator working across many different mediums including film, music, drawing, and live performance. Centred on emancipatory concerns, Pilgrim aims to challenge the nature of how we come together, speak, listen, and strive for social change through sharing and voicing personal experience. Working with others through different methods of dialogue, workshops, and collaboration, Rory is interested in how we form community locally and globally from both beyond and behind our screens. If you would like to register as a participant for the entire two-day workshop, feel free to get in touch! Hermann Mueller info@reboot-responsiveness.com reboot: responsiveness Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices. reboot: Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia Graphic design by Sean Yendrys

with Nikola Dietrich, Director Kölnischer Kunstverein

We are pleased to present our latest Jahresgaben on December 8, 2021 and would like to invite you to a tour of the Jahresgaben exhibition on December 9, 2021. Our director Nikola Dietrich will guide you through the exhibition. For your visit the vac­ci­nat­ed-re­cov­ered-rule (“2G-Regel”) ap­plies at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Please have proof of vacci­na­tion or past ill­ness and a valid iden­ti­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ment ready. The vac­ci­nat­ed-re­cov­ered-test­ed-rule (“3G-Regel”) ap­plies to chil­dren and teens un­der 18. Chil­dren up to the age of school en­try do not re­quire proof. Stu­dents un­der the age of 16 are con­sid­ered test­ed. Stu­dents 16 years of age and old­er are asked to pro­vide school cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. Adults who can­not be vac­ci­nat­ed for med­i­cal rea­sons must pre­sent a neg­a­tive rapid test (max. 24 hours old) in ad­di­tion to a med­i­cal cer­ti­fi­cate.

We are pleased to present our latest Jahresgaben on December 8, 2021 and would like to invite you to a tour of the Jahresgaben exhibition on December 9, 2021. Our director Nikola Dietrich will guide you through the exhibition. For your visit the vac­ci­nat­ed-re­cov­ered-rule (“2G-Regel”) ap­plies at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Please have proof of vacci­na­tion or past ill­ness and a valid iden­ti­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ment ready. The vac­ci­nat­ed-re­cov­ered-test­ed-rule (“3G-Regel”) ap­plies to chil­dren and teens un­der 18. Chil­dren up to the age of school en­try do not re­quire proof. Stu­dents un­der the age of 16 are con­sid­ered test­ed. Stu­dents 16 years of age and old­er are asked to pro­vide school cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. Adults who can­not be vac­ci­nat­ed for med­i­cal rea­sons must pre­sent a neg­a­tive rapid test (max. 24 hours old) in ad­di­tion to a med­i­cal cer­ti­fi­cate.

Cally Spooner’s “A Lecture on Stagnation” read by Will Holder …for single mothers; followed by a conversation on Dead Time, between Cally Spooner and Hendrik Folkerts. Friday, November 19, 2021, 6 pm Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne Since 2007 Will Holder has orally published work authored by those who do not share all or any aspects of his white, male, heterosexual speaking body. The presence of these discrepancies are intended to highlight what our bodies DO have in common, and collectively undergo, rather than only speak of that which normatively divides us. Central to this series of publications is Alice Notley’s Doctor Williams’ Heiresses, (1980) and the poet’s expressed desire to synthesise a female, speaking voice within male poetic meters. Will attempts something comparable, with respect to a sense of Notley’s poetry, while reading Cally Spooner’s “Lecture on Stagnation”. Will’s reading is a way to lead into Cally Spooner’s ongoing project Dead Time. Over the coming three years, Dead Time will be periodically published with Will Holder, to test a thesis —- ‘dead time’ is an event that is chrononormatively-inactive and therefore holds the potential to restitute life. Dead Time (2018) is a 63 page performance score. It was composed by artist and writer Cally Spooner, in response to what she has coined to be ‘a global techno-temporal-performance culture’; a crime scene in which it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead. Since 2018 Spooner has been incrementally translating Dead Time into a number of works that can coexist under various conditions, and which will culminate in an Opera in the future. For now, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Spooner and curator Hendrik Folkerts discuss the present-tense condition of Dead Time, avoiding future-orientated speculation and chronological reminiscence. They will be accompanied by Melody Giron on cello. She will join the conversation from New York, to present Dead Time’s current work in progress. Typographer Will Holder makes books, and publishes the work of others, orally and in print. He likes to draw attention to an ongoing, shared authorship of meaning, co-produced in the gaps between bodies, their speech and the printed page. Since 2007, Holder edits F.R.DAVID, a journal concerned with reading & writing and typography: the organisation and reproduction of language, published by uh books, Brussels. Hendrik Folkerts has curated numerous solo and international group exhibitions as well as collection presentations, new commissions, and public programs, anchored in the expanded field of performance and building on feminist, queer, and anti-colonial histories of art. He is a curator of Moderna Museet Stockholm. He previously held positions as Dittmer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (2017–2021); as Curator at documenta 14, Kassel/Athens (2014–2017); as Curator of Performance, Film, and Discursive Programs at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2010–2015); and as the Coordinator of the Curatorial Program at De Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2009–2011). He frequently writes for art journals and magazines, as well as exhibition catalogues and artists’ monographs. Rooted firmly in her training in philosophy, Cally Spooner’s practice is generated through writing, unfolds as performance, then lands as film, sound, sculpture, drawings or scores. Her performances incorporate duration and rehearsal as acts of resistance to techno, temporal and performative climates in which it is hard to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead. Dead Time is co-produced with reboot:responsiveness; O-Overgaden, Copenhagen; Le Centre Pompidou, Paris. Deadtime is fully supported… … Organisationally and practically, by Rhea Dall of O-Overgaden, Copenhagen. Academically, by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; and the University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen. Financially, by Novo Nordisk Foundation, Hellerup. reboot: responsiveness Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices. The first cycle, reboot: responsiveness, departs from desires, anxieties and hopes amplified by the current pandemic. Hosted in two different yet aligned sites that mutually interact with one another as much as they support, complement and challenge each other, reboot: responsiveness provides infrastructures for provisional stagings, rehearsals, processual choreographies, and encounters around notions of presence, intimacy, care, and responsibility. reboot: responsivenessdevelops activities together with a core collective comprised of Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia. Embracing diverse formats, and working together with further invited guests and audiences in Cologne and Düsseldorf, these artists and thinkers will explore ways to dedicate time to one another and to perform in time, to develop alternative vocabularies, archives, gestures, movements, and translations, to share and transmit resources and ideas, and to find modes of resistance and togetherness in response to the current situation we are living in. reboot: Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia Graphic design by Sean Yendrys http://reboot-responsiveness.com/   

Cally Spooners „Lecture on Stagnation“, gelesen von Will Holder …für alleinerziehende Mütter, 2021 gefolgt von einem Gespräch zu Dead Time zwischen Cally Spooner und Hendrik Folkerts. Freitag, 19.11.2021, 18 Uhr Kölnischer Kunstverein, Köln Seit 2007 veröffentlicht Will Holder mündlich Werke, die von Personen verfasst wurden, die nicht alle oder keine Aspekte seines weißen, männlichen, heterosexuell sprechenden Körpers teilen. Die Präsenz dieser Diskrepanzen soll DAS hervorheben, was unsere Körper gemeinsam haben und kollektiv durchmachen, anstatt nur über das zu sprechen, was uns normativ trennt. Im Mittelpunkt dieser Reihe von Veröffentlichungen steht Alice Notleys Doctor Williams’ Heiresses (1980) und der ausdrückliche Wunsch der Dichterin, eine weibliche Sprechstimme innerhalb männlicher Versmaße herzustellen. Etwas mit diesem Bewusstsein in Notleys Lyrik Vergleichbares versucht Will Holder in seiner Lesung von Cally Spooners „Lecture on Stagnation“. Die Lesung leitet über zu Cally Spooners fortlaufendem Projekt Dead Time. In den kommenden drei Jahren wird Dead Time in regelmäßigen Abständen von Will Holder veröffentlicht werden, um die Hypothese zu testen, „tote Zeit“ sei ein Ereignis, das chrononormativ-inaktiv ist und daher das Potenzial hat, Leben wiederherzustellen. Dead Time (2018) ist eine 63-seitige Performance-Partitur. Sie wurde von Cally Spooner in einem techno-temporalen Performance-Klima komponiert, einem Tatort, an dem es immer schwieriger wird, zu unterscheiden, was lebendig und was tot ist. Seit 2018 übersetzt Spooner Dead Time schrittweise in eine Reihe von Werken, die unter verschiedenen Bedingungen koexistieren können und in eine Oper integriert werden könnten. Im Kölnischen Kunstverein diskutieren Folkerts und Spooner den gegenwärtigen Zustand von Dead Time und vermeiden zukunftsorientierte Spekulationen und chronologische Reminiszenzen. Begleitet werden sie von Melody Giron am Cello. Sie wird sich dem Gespräch aus New York anschließen, um das aktuelle Werk von Dead Time vorzustellen. Der Typograf Will Holder stellt Bücher her und veröffentlicht die Arbeiten anderer sowohl in mündlicher als auch in gedruckter Form. Er möchte die Aufmerksamkeit auf eine fortlaufende, geteilte Autorenschaft von Bedeutung lenken, die in den Lücken zwischen Körpern, ihrer Sprache und der gedruckten Seite entsteht. Seit 2007 ist Holder Herausgeber von F.R.DAVID, einer Zeitschrift, die sich mit Lesen, Schreiben und Typografie beschäftigt: mit der Organisation und Reproduktion von Sprache, herausgegeben von uh books, Brüssel. Hendrik Folkerts kuratierte zahlreiche Einzel- und internationale Gruppenausstellungen sowie Sammlungspräsentationen, neue Auftragsarbeiten und öffentliche Programme, die im erweiterten Feld von Performance verankert sind und auf feministischen, queeren und anti-kolonialen Kunstgeschichten basieren. Er ist Kurator am Moderna Museet Stockholm. Zuvor war er als Dittmer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art am Art Institute of Chicago (seit 2017-2021), Kurator der documenta 14, Kassel/Athen (2014-2017), Kurator für Performance, Film und diskursive Programme am Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2010-2015) und als Koordinator des kuratorischen Programms am Kunstzentrum De Appel, Amsterdam (2009-2011) tätig. Er schreibt für Kunstzeitschriften und -magazine sowie für Ausstellungskataloge und Künstlermonografien. Cally Spooners künstlerische Praxis, die stark auf ihrer philosophischen Ausbildung fußt, entsteht durch Schreiben, entfaltet sich als Performance und wird schließlich zu Film, Sound, Skulptur, Zeichnung oder Partitur. Ihre Performances nutzen Konzepte wie Dauer und Probe als Akte des Widerstands gegen technologische, zeitliche und performative Klimata, in denen es schwer ist, zwischen Lebendigem und Totem zu unterscheiden. Dead Time ist eine Koproduktion von reboot:responsiveness; O-Overgaden, Kopenhagen; Le Centre Pompidou, Paris. Deadtime wird unterstützt… … Organisatorisch und praktisch von Rhea Dall von O-Overgaden, Kopenhagen. Wissenschaftlich von der Königlich Dänischen Kunstakademie und der Universität Kopenhagen. Finanziell von der Novo Nordisk Foundation, Hellerup. reboot: responsiveness Der Kölnische Kunstverein und der Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf präsentieren gemeinsam reboot: – ein kollaborativer, zyklischer, antirassistischer und queer-feministischer Dialog zwischen performativen und forschungsbasierten Praktiken. Der erste Zyklus, reboot: responsiveness, geht von den Sehnsüchten, Ängsten und Hoffnungen aus, die durch die aktuelle Pandemie verstärkt werden. An zwei unterschiedlichen, jedoch miteinander verbundenen Orten, die sich gegenseitig unterstützen, ergänzen und herausfordern, bietet reboot: responsiveness Infrastrukturen für provisorische Inszenierungen, Proben, prozesshafte Choreografien und Begegnungen rund um Themen wie Präsenz, Intimität, Fürsorge und Verantwortung. reboot: responsiveness entwickelt Aktivitäten gemeinsam mit einem Kernkollektiv bestehend aus Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner und Mariana Valencia. Mittels verschiedener Formate und gemeinsam mit weiteren eingeladenen Gästen und dem Publikum in Köln und Düsseldorf werden diese Künstler:innen und Denker:innen Wege ergründen, einander Zeit zu widmen und zeitgemäß mit Zeit zu performen, alternative Vokabulare, Archive, Gesten, Bewegungen und Übersetzungen zu entwickeln, Ressourcen und Ideen zu teilen und weiterzugeben, und Modi des Widerstands und des Miteinanders als Antwort auf die aktuelle Situation, in der wir leben, zu finden. reboot: Konzipiert von Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich und Viktor Neumann Kernkollektiv: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner und Mariana Valencia Graphikdesign von Sean Yendrys http://reboot-responsiveness.com/de/ 

In conjunction with the exhibition of Melike Kara Nothing Is Yours, Everything Is You, a presentation of the publication WHERE WE MEET, 2021 (ed. Fabian Schöneich, graphics: Anne Stock, 83 pages) with film screenings, an installation, and an introduction by Fabian Schöneich will take place on Thursday, November 18, 2021 at 6 pm. Sponsored by:

Cally Spooner: DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo) Performance Thursday, November 4, 2021, 11 am – 6 pm Venue: Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf Please note: Due to illness, tomorrow’s performance on November 6 at the Kölnischer Kunstverein unfortunately has to be cancelled without substitution. Saturday, November 6, 2021, 4 – 5 pm Venue: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne Free admission. Please note, that a proof whether you have been vaccinated, tested negative or recovered from a past COVID-19 infection is required. In DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo), 2021, a dancer is shifting across a spectrum of heightened activity and waiting. Effectively an anatomy study for the 21st-century, the dance examines a technical and temporal performance climate in which the human body is imaged, both vital and corpse like. Equally it asks how this same, imaged body might evade capture, circulation and compression, by recasting itself as a preparatory and durational reality. In Düsseldorf DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo) is shown sporadically throughout the day as a durational installation-performance. In Cologne the piece is performed to a captive audience for the first time. In this new capacity, DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo) is joined by an additional work from Spooner’s DEAD TIME oeuvre: DEAD TIME (Narrator’s Script). In both locations the performance will be presented alongside Spooner’s work from 2018, Still Life. DEAD TIME is an ongoing project by Cally Spooner and a 63 page performance score she composed in 2018. Spooner has been incrementally translating it since, into a number of works that can coexist under various conditions, and which will, over time, integrate into an Opera. DEAD TIME (Narrator’s Script) first appeared in Spooner’s solo show, DEAD TIME, at the Art Institute Chicago in 2019. It was subsequently produced as a sound work for Common Guild, Glasgow, using a recording made at Camden Art Centre in 2020, organised and commissioned by Parrhesiades, London. The piano is Neil Luck, the Narrator is Jesper List Thomsen. DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo) is choreographed by Cally Spooner with Magdalyn Segale Scenography and dramaturgy developed by Cally Spooner with Hendrik Folkerts Danced by Magdalyn Segale Commissioned by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Special thanks to Charles Billot for helping to make DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo) remotely. reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of: reboot: responsiveness is supported by:

Ewa Majewska Coronaseminar #5. Reboot solidarity together.  October 20, 2021 Online-Zoom, 6 – 8 pm CET (in English) Participation link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85942240996?pwd=TyswL2I5UHlCZXFPbzJjaTNkNUsvQT09  Meeting ID: 859 4224 0996 ID Code: 581273 While the Covid-19 pandemic has changed our lives to various degrees, it has also built a sense of global community, of embodied shared experience of being exposed to a virus that knows no borders. Paradoxically, a deathly disease re-established a sense of shared world and shared response-abilities. Now, as large parts of our lives get “back to normal”, we need to think about how to be together in the world, which can bring such global cataclysms, where the climate crisis knocks on our door, where the precarity, instability and economic inequalities shape our daily experience. The sense of being in this together will persist, although right now we are perhaps most focused on how to liberate ourselves from constraints, on how to be free in a world of so many obligations. Therefore, I believe it is a good moment to discuss the texts of Butler and Bifo – both interested in how we stay together in the trouble, yet with the autonomy and potency to transform the status quo. Please feel welcome to participate in the discussion, and to make some plans for the future. Co-hosts: Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, Viktor Neumann Texts: Judith Butler, „Creating an Inhabitable World for Humans Means Dismantling Rigid Forms of Individuality”, April 2021: https://news.yahoo.com/judith-butler-creating-inhabitable-world-110002078.html Franco Berardi „Bifo”, Freedom and Potency, in: e-flux, March 2021: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/116/378694/freedom-and-potency/ reboot: responsiveness Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices. The first cycle, reboot: responsiveness, departs from desires, anxieties and hopes amplified by the current pandemic. Hosted in two different yet aligned sites that mutually interact with one another as much as they support, complement and challenge each other, reboot: responsiveness provides infrastructures for provisional stagings, rehearsals, processual choreographies, and encounters around notions of presence, intimacy, care, and responsibility. reboot: responsiveness develops activities together with a core collective comprised of Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia. Embracing diverse formats, and working together with further invited guests and audiences in Cologne and Düsseldorf, these artists and thinkers will explore ways to dedicate time to one another and to perform in time, to develop alternative vocabularies, archives, gestures, movements, and translations, to share and transmit resources and ideas, and to find modes of resistance and togetherness in response to the current situation we are living in. reboot: Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia Graphic design by Sean Yendrys http://reboot-responsiveness.com/ reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of: reboot: responsiveness is supported by:

With Naama Arad, Noa Glazer und Oren Pinhassi

Equality, Diversity, and Solidarity in the Art World Lectures and dialogues by and with Michael Annoff, Maximiliane Baumgartner, Madeleine Bernstorff, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Pary El-Qalqili, Ewa Majewska, Stephanie Marchal, Chus Martínez, Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck, Bahareh Sharifi and Brigitte Sölch Thursday, 7.10.2021, 6 – 9 pm Venue: Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf Friday, 8.10.2021, 10 am – 5 pm Venue: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne >> You can download the complete program at the following link. Free admission, no pre-registration required Proof of a negative corona test or proof of vaccination or recovery is required for participation.  A cooperation between the Department for Art History and the Marie Jahoda Center For International Gender Studies (MaJaC), Ruhr-University Bochum and reboot: responsiveness, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf Organized by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, Viktor Neumann and Änne Söll It has been 100 years since women were admitted to state art academies, thus marking a milestone within the long struggle for professionalization of female artists in Germany. Femininity continues to function as one of many, often intersecting, hierarchizing and exclusionary categories that have always been established and constructed in transnational art institutions. While a continuous increase in the presence of women at German art academies can be noted from the 1950s onward, their discrimination in the art world persisted. In response, part of the 1970s women’s movement—along with its allies from other freedom movements—dedicated itself both theoretically and artistically to combating institutionalized gender inequality; from the beginning, Black women along with women of color underscored the intersectionality of structural mechanisms of exclusion. While studies show minimal changes in parity within the field of contemporary art since the 1990s, inequalities remain ubiquitous. To what extent the women’s or gender-equality officers intended in all German states can transform the art system remains an open-ended question. The persisting patriarchal, anti-social, and racist structures and resulting power imbalances only reluctantly destabilize the myth of the—white, heterosexual, cisgender, and ‘capable’—male genius in all areas of the field.The symposium will analyze causes of intersecting power structures and mechanisms of exclusion and discuss proposals to overcome them. How can the art world achieve an equality that considers factors such as migration and educational background, sexual orientation, and physical and neural difference from the very beginning? The event will kick off on October 7, 2021, at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. The temporal and thematic framework of the symposium will be introduced by a screening of the suffragette movement at the beginning of the 20th century, compiled and commented by Madeleine Bernstorff, as well as a keynote lecture by the feminist philosopher and author Ewa Majewska. Based on the Guerilla Girls’ actions for equality in art institutions, Majewska will present current strategies of resistance as tested and practiced by art institutions in Poland. She proposes to avoid simplistic conceptions of parity in favor of urgent intersectional and decolonial perspectives. The second part of the symposium will take place on October 8, 2021, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and will bring together lectures and dialogues between thinkers, artists, and cultural practitioners. The first block will be devoted to historical excursions on the processes, problems, and potentials of equality in the art world: Brigitte Sölch (University of Heidelberg) will shed light on the situation of female art historians around 1900 and present the DFG network “Women Art Historians before 1970.” Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck (University of Cologne) will provide insight into the holdings of the Central Archive of the International Art Trade. The artist Maximiliane Baumgartner will talk about exclusions from the canon and trans-temporal solidarizations. In a second block, Stephanie Marchal (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) uses the example of art criticism, while Chus Martínez (FHNW Basel) examines institutionalized inequalities based on artistic training, to consider art historical revisions and structural transformations. In a concluding block moderated by Gürsoy Doğtaş (University of Applied Arts Vienna), curator Michael Annoff, director Pary El-Qalqili, and Diversity Arts Culture program director Bahareh Sharifi describe how discrimination is interconnected, critically question the art system’s notion of diversity, and discuss the need for an institutional code of conduct and further structural changes. reboot: responsiveness Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices. The first cycle, reboot: responsiveness, departs from desires, anxieties and hopes amplified by the current pandemic. Hosted in two different yet aligned sites that mutually interact with one another as much as they support, complement and challenge each other, reboot: responsiveness provides infrastructures for provisional stagings, rehearsals, processual choreographies, and encounters around notions of presence, intimacy, care, and responsibility. reboot: responsiveness develops activities together with a core collective comprised of Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia. Embracing diverse formats, and working together with further invited guests and audiences in Cologne and Düsseldorf, these artists and thinkers will explore ways to dedicate time to one another and to perform in time, to develop alternative vocabularies, archives, gestures, movements, and translations, to share and transmit resources and ideas, and to find modes of resistance and togetherness in response to the current situation we are living in. reboot: Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia Graphic design by Sean Yendrys http://reboot-responsiveness.com/   reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of: reboot: responsiveness is supported by:

with Nikola Dietrich, Director Kölnischer Kunstverein

Ewa Majewska
Coronaseminar 4. How do we stay with the trouble?
Online-Zoom (in English)
with David Liver, artist

Participation link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86307280916?pwd=RG9hUTdDbmYvUzhPY3E2M2RPWFpaZz09
Meeting ID: 863 0728 0916
ID Code: 940123

In the current state of political and ecological dystopia, how do we avoid what Donna Haraway aptly called melancholia and techno-fixes? How do we stay with the trouble? How do we work our way through the darkness? Artists are known for their ability to be trouble; thus, we will interview one of them, David Liver, about the trouble and his own ways to stay with it. We plan to discuss the strategies of staying with the trouble together, and then we will move towards Haraway’s more specific takes on troubles of the Chthulucene. We will end this Coronaseminar session with another discussion – now concerning the role of art and art institutions in these troublesome times, when the pandemic is one of many troubles we need to stay with.

David Liver is known for his dematerialized art, and for his obscure imagery where he employs satire, gonzo-style autobiography, and black humor. Voice Over is his latest work, an online artist-run review published by the Council of Europe and KANAL – CENTRE POMPIDOU in Brussels. Liver is writing, producing, and directing with Urubu Films. His current film project is “Tuli Tuli Tuli, 1001 ways of being joyfully revolted,” a doc film about Beat hero and Fug Tuli Kupferberg, directed in collaboration with Canadian director Thomas Burstyn. http://www.the-david-liver.com

Text:
Donna Haraway, a Conversation about the book „Staying with the Trouble”, in: Artforum, 2016, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/donna-j-haraway-speaks-about-her-latest-book-63147


reboot: responsiveness
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices.

reboot:
Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann
Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia
Graphic design by Sean Yendrys

http://reboot-responsiveness.com/


Next date of the Coronaseminars – reboot: edition 
Coronaseminar #5. Reboot solidarity together.
October 20, 2021


reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of:

reboot: responsiveness is supported by:

Ayelet Gundar-Goshens Lügnerin war 2019 das »Buch für die Stadt«, nun ist die israelische Autorin mit ihrem neuen Buch Wo der Wolf lauert (beide Kein & Aber) im Literaturhaus zu Gast. Psychologisch raffiniert erzählt der Roman von den Ängsten und Befürchtungen einer Mutter, ihr Sohn Adam könne am Tod eines Mitschülers schuldig geworden sein. Über die zerstörerischen Mechanismen von Rassismus und Schuld spricht die Autorin mit Moderatorin Antje Deistler. Aus der Übersetzung von Ruth Achlama liest Milena Karas. Es könnte perfekt sein: Lilach Schuster hat ein Haus mit Pool im Herzen des Silicon Valley, einen erfolgreichen Ehemann und das Gefühl, angekommen zu sein – fern von der Gefahr in ihrer Heimat Israel. Aber plötzlich stirbt ein Mitschüler ihres Sohnes Adam unter ungeklärten Umständen. Je mehr Lilach über den Tod des Jungen erfährt, desto mehr fragt sie sich, ob sie ihren Sohn überhaupt kennt. »Ein subtiles Eltern-Kind-Drama« (DLF), politisch aktueller denn je: Ayelet Gundar-Goshens neuer Roman nimmt den Leser mit in die Finsternis einer von Rassismus und Ausgrenzung geprägten Seele. Veranstalter: Literaturhaus Köln Veranstaltungspartner: Kein & Aber Corona-Hinweis Die Veranstaltung richtet sich nach den aktuellen Corona-Maßnahmen der Stadt Köln, Informationen finden Sie unter www.stadt-koeln.de Für Ihren Besuch denken Sie bitte an Folgendes:

• Es gelten die Pflicht zum Tragen einer medizinischen Maske sowie das Abstandsgebot.
• Der Einlass erfolgt gegen Vorlage eines tagesaktuellen Negativtestergebnisses oder eines entsprechenden Nachweises über eine vollständige Impfung oder Genesung in Verbindung mit einem amtlichen Ausweisdokument. Ein Test vor Ort ist nicht möglich.

Ort: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Hahnenstraße 6 | Literaturhaus Köln virtuell Eintritt: 11,- / 9,- € | Mitglieder: 7,- € als Online-Veranstaltung: 5,- € Tickets ausschließlich erhältlich über Offticket.

with Miriam Bettin, Assistant Curator Kölnischer Kunstverein

After World War II, Die Brücke (The Bridge) was planned as a place of encounter and dialogue and built in 1949/1950 according to designs by Wilhelm Riphahn. The angular building, completely created in the sense of a synthesis of the arts, is characterized by its gracefulness. Each structure is shaped differently according to its function and characterized by the choice of different materials. When the British Information Center vacated the building in 2000, the Kölnischer Kunstverein moved in after the heritage-listed building had been adapted to its new use under the direction of architect Adolf Krischanitz.

Guided tour of the exhibition Guilty Curtain by the team of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Guilty Curtain is a site-specific installation conceived for the historic space of the Kölnischer Kunstverein and shown as part of the commemorative year 1,700 Years of Jewish Life in Germany.

Duration: approx. 45 minutes
Max. number of participants: 10
Registration deadline: Thursday, 09.09.2021

Admission free

Ewa Majewska Coronaseminar #3. Care labour in the Pandemic. Bring your kids! June 30, 2021 Online-Zoom, 6 – 8 pm CET (in English) with Nikola Dietrich, Director Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne Participation link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87498627975?pwd=eGNxQjFHcHY2cU81R1FkUG5HZCtjQT09 Meeting ID: 874 9862 7975 ID Code: 275976 What can we become together? How and why do we care in the pandemic conditions? We will experiment with the children-on-zoom situation, as well as feminist views on the pandemic and precarization. The perspectives on care, affect and mothering have changed, over the years and with the pandemic, too. The gender divisions have also changed, as today more and more people declare they are non-binary, transgender or otherwise realize much more diverse gender identities than “man/woman”. This means it is necessary to discuss the gender division of labour in a broader sense of these identity transitions. Care is also racialized, class-wise divided and gendered, a flexible, intersectional approach would very much be needed. For some of us – the quarantine was an exposure to pain and loss, for some – to a more convenient, fulfilling life not scattered by travels and rush, for some other again – a painful reminder of the patriarchal and racialized distribution of obligations and inequalities. We all – while rebooting – want to take a break from what was problematic, at the same time – we might want to reflect on what the embodied, affective experience is today. Texts: Catherine Malabou, “To Quarantine from Quarantine, Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe and „I“”, 2020. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/23/to-quarantine-from-quarantine-rousseau-robinson-crusoe-and-i/  Silvia Federici, Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint, 2008 https://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/precarious-labor-a-feminist-viewpoint/  reboot: responsiveness Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices. The first cycle, reboot: responsiveness, departs from desires, anxieties and hopes amplified by the current pandemic. Hosted in two different yet aligned sites that mutually interact with one another as much as they support, complement and challenge each other, reboot: responsiveness provides infrastructures for provisional stagings, rehearsals, processual choreographies, and encounters around notions of presence, intimacy, care, and responsibility. reboot: responsiveness develops activities together with a core collective comprised of Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia. Embracing diverse formats, and working together with further invited guests and audiences in Cologne and Düsseldorf, these artists and thinkers will explore ways to dedicate time to one another and to perform in time, to develop alternative vocabularies, archives, gestures, movements, and translations, to share and transmit resources and ideas, and to find modes of resistance and togetherness in response to the current situation we are living in. reboot: Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia Graphic design by Sean Yendrys http://reboot-responsiveness.com/ Further dates of the Coronaseminars – reboot: edition  Coronaseminar #4. How do we stay with the trouble? September 29, 2021 Coronaseminar #5. Reboot solidarity together. October 20, 2021   reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of: reboot: responsiveness is supported by:

Genoveva Filipovic in conversation with Josef Strau on site at the Kölnischer Kunstverein on the occasion of the current exhibition Bridge of Sigh. This is a return invitation after the joint conversation at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf on the exhibition Spirits and Objects by Josef Strau last fall. Genoveva Filipovic (*1986 in Frankfurt am Main) lives in New York and currently in Cologne. She studied at the HfG in Offenbach am Main and at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (until 2013). Her works have recently been shown at Galleria Federico Vavassori in Milan (2019), Kunsthalle Zurich (2019), Goton in Paris (2018), Dead Ends in New York (2016), Vilma Gold in London (2016), and Neue Alte Brücke in Frankfurt am Main (2014). Under the title The Mephisto Hours, Josef Strau (*1957 in Vienna, lives in New York and currently in Cologne) presented an exhibition at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin in 2021. In 2020, he had a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and was included in the Busan Biennale 2020, curated by Jacob Fabricius. In recent years, Josef Strau’s work has been shown in a number of institutional solo exhibitions, including A Turtle Dreaming (… Echoes from an Encapsulated Space Exiled Sounds of Letters Requiring Symphonic Treatment) at Secession, Vienna (2015), The New World, Application for Turtle Island, The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2014), and A Dissidence Coincidence But WHCTLJS at the Malmö Konsthall (2008). The talk will be held in German. Admission: € 5,- / € 2,50 (reduced). Admission is free for members. Since the number of participants for the event is limited due to the corona restrictions, please register under the link below. Please note the current regulations and minimum distance. Presentation of a negative rapid test is not required. The exhibition of Genoveva Filipovic is supported by:

Ewa Majewska
Coronaseminar #2. Pandemic intimacies.
June 9, 2021
Online-Zoom, 6 – 8 pm CET (in English)
Guest: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, artist and choreographer

Participation link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89666026766?pwd=cnJXVDNib2FGaVlQOWtpeTJ1L0lEQT09
Meeting ID: 896 6602 6766
ID Code: 462096

In this Coronaseminar we will discuss the basics of the pandemic being together – universality, breathing, intimacy, sex and the means of production and representation. Our Guest’s contribution, by the artist and choreographer Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, will focus on mediating intimacies, suspended time and foregrounding infrastructures. We will also discuss the following texts:

Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe”, in: Critical Inquiry, 2020. 
https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/

Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2. https://queerartpractices.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/warner_berlant.pdf

Eng-Beng Lim, “Queer Coronasutra, or, How to have promiscuity in a Pandemic”, 2020, 
https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2020/03/24/queer-coronasutras/


reboot: responsiveness
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices.

The first cycle, reboot: responsiveness, departs from desires, anxieties and hopes amplified by the current pandemic. Hosted in two different yet aligned sites that mutually interact with one another as much as they support, complement and challenge each other, reboot: responsiveness provides infrastructures for provisional stagings, rehearsals, processual choreographies, and encounters around notions of presence, intimacy, care, and responsibility. reboot: responsiveness develops activities together with a core collective comprised of Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia. Embracing diverse formats, and working together with further invited guests and audiences in Cologne and Düsseldorf, these artists and thinkers will explore ways to dedicate time to one another and to perform in time, to develop alternative vocabularies, archives, gestures, movements, and translations, to share and transmit resources and ideas, and to find modes of resistance and togetherness in response to the current situation we are living in.

reboot:
Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann
Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia
Graphic design by Sean Yendrys

http://reboot-responsiveness.com/


Further dates of the Coronaseminars – reboot: edition 

Coronaseminar #3. On Motherhood. Bring your kids!
June 30, 2021

Coronaseminar #4. How do we stay with the trouble?
September 29, 2021

Coronaseminar #5. Reboot solidarity together.
October 20, 2021

 

reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of:

 

reboot: responsiveness is supported by:

Ewa Majewska
Coronaseminar #2. Pandemic intimacies.
Online-Zoom (in englischer Sprache)
Gast: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Künstler und Choreograph

Teilnahme-Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89666026766?pwd=cnJXVDNib2FGaVlQOWtpeTJ1L0lEQT09
Meeting-ID: 896 6602 6766
Kenncode: 462096

In diesem Coronaseminar werden wir die Grundlagen des pandemischen Zusammenseins diskutieren – Universalität, Atmung, Intimität, Sex sowie die Mittel der Produktion und Methoden der Repräsentation. Der Beitrag unseres Gastes, des Künstlers und Choreographen Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, wird sich auf die Vermittlung von Intimitäten, die Aufhebung der Zeit und die Betonung von Infrastrukturen konzentrieren. Außerdem werden wir die folgenden Texte diskutieren:

Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe”, in: Critical Inquiry, 2020. 
https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/

Lauren Berlant und Michael Warner, “Sex in Public”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2. https://queerartpractices.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/warner_berlant.pdf

Eng-Beng Lim, “Queer Coronasutra, or, How to have promiscuity in a Pandemic”, 2020, 
https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2020/03/24/queer-coronasutras/


reboot: responsiveness
Der Kölnische Kunstverein und der Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf präsentieren gemeinsam reboot: – ein kollaborativer, zyklischer, antirassistischer und queer-feministischer Dialog zwischen performativen und forschungsbasierten Praktiken.

Der erste Zyklus, reboot: responsiveness, geht von den Sehnsüchten, Ängsten und Hoffnungen aus, die durch die aktuelle Pandemie verstärkt werden. An zwei unterschiedlichen, jedoch miteinander verbundenen Orten, die sich gegenseitig unterstützen, ergänzen und herausfordern, bietet reboot: responsiveness Infrastrukturen für provisorische Inszenierungen, Proben, prozesshafte Choreografien und Begegnungen rund um Themen wie Präsenz, Intimität, Fürsorge und Verantwortung. reboot: responsiveness entwickelt Aktivitäten gemeinsam mit einem Kernkollektiv bestehend aus Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner und Mariana Valencia. Mittels verschiedener Formate und gemeinsam mit weiteren eingeladenen Gästen und dem Publikum in Köln und Düsseldorf werden diese Künstler*innen und Denker*innen Wege ergründen, einander Zeit zu widmen und zeitgemäß mit Zeit zu performen, alternative Vokabulare, Archive, Gesten, Bewegungen und Übersetzungen zu entwickeln, Ressourcen und Ideen zu teilen und weiterzugeben, und Modi des Widerstands und des Miteinanders als Antwort auf die aktuelle Situation, in der wir leben, zu finden.

reboot:
Konzipiert von Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich und Viktor Neumann
Kernkollektiv: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner und Mariana Valencia
Graphikdesign von Sean Yendrys

http://reboot-responsiveness.com/de/


Weitere Termine der Coronaseminare – reboot: edition

Coronaseminar #3. On Motherhood. Bring your kids!
30. Juni 2021

Coronaseminar #4. How do we stay with the trouble?
29. September 2021

Coronaseminar #5. Reboot solidarity together.
20. Oktober 2021

reboot: responsiveness ist eine Kooperation von:

reboot: responsiveness wird unterstützt von:

Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices.

The first cycle, reboot: responsiveness, departs from desires, anxieties and hopes amplified by the current pandemic. Hosted in two different yet aligned sites that mutually interact with one another as much as they support, complement and challenge each other, reboot: responsiveness provides infrastructures for provisional stagings, rehearsals, processual choreographies, and encounters around notions of presence, intimacy, care, and responsibility. reboot: responsiveness develops activities together with a core collective comprised of Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia. Embracing diverse formats, and working together with further invited guests and audiences in Cologne and Düsseldorf, these artists and thinkers will explore ways to dedicate time to one another and to perform in time, to develop alternative vocabularies, archives, gestures, movements, and translations, to share and transmit resources and ideas, and to find modes of resistance and togetherness in response to the current situation we are living in.

http://reboot-responsiveness.com

reboot:
Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann
Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia
Graphic design by Sean Yendrys

Coronaseminar – reboot: edition
First session on May 12, 2021, 6 – 8 pm CET

The Coronaseminar by Dr. Ewa Majewska marks the first public meeting of reboot: responsiveness and will unfold over five sessions of reflexive being together in the second year of the pandemic:

For many of us, the last months have been those of fear, pandemic, danger, precarity and insecurity. The oppressive presence of the life-threatening virus changed our lives in every possible way, by means of fear most of us experienced, changes in the everyday routines, work, kinship and intimacy. Everything is different now, and yet – many things stayed intact. Solidarity networks still form, there is some hope for better addressing the ecological dangers, online formats have successfully replaced the in-situ presence in so many contexts that it might reshape our habits of traveling and consumption. However – distinctions, marginalization and exclusions not only stay with us throughout the pandemic, but also sharpen, at least in some important contexts.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic many theorists immediately jumped to their computers, ready to offer what Donna Haraway rightly qualified as “easy techno-fixes”, on the level of thinking. In Warsaw, we decided to open an online-space for thinking the pandemic together, and thus the first edition of the Coronaseminars opened in April 2020 already, conducted with the generous support of the MoMA Warsaw and the curator Natalia Sielewicz. In this online-space, we could be together in what proved to be one of the most stressful times, we were reading theory together, discussing it, sharing our strategies to survive the health risks, precarization and panic. It felt both comforting and strange to find such loads of intimacy and closeness in this highly-mediatized format (Zoom + Fb stream). Yet – for many of us this was not just a seminar, but also a safe space.

Now – opening the new series of the Coronaseminar – reboot: edition, we would like to open our space, support and need to connect with those who want to be together in the moment of the (hopefully) ending time of the pandemic. With this year’s main reboot: theme of responsiveness, we want to discuss the post-pandemic future, as in: a life we will be living, work-related changes, shifts and transitions of intimacy and kinship, new formats and distributions of care, and the questions of equality and redistribution. We would like to see to what extent the art institutions and culture producers can involve in such problems and whether we can bring some solidarity and change.

We invite everyone interested in such online-discussion format, with some prospects of meeting offline, if the situation allows. We will be reading some texts, usually available online, sharing our solidarity practices and solutions from the time of pandemic, challenging our assumptions, as well as practicing being together – despite the alienating modes of contemporary culture. Staying with the trouble – Haraway’s book title – is a motto of these sessions. Ewa Majewska’s concept of the weak resistance will be our welcoming context, then we will move further in the post-pandemic thinking and practice. We invite anyone who can join us.

—Dr. Ewa Majewska


Dates of the Coronaseminars – reboot: edition #1-5

Coronaseminar #1. How do we reboot?
May 12, 2021
Online-Zoom, 6 – 8 pm CET (in English)
Co-hosts: Ewa Majewska, Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, Viktor Neumann
Guest: Natalia Sielewicz, MoMA Warsaw.
Texts: Tithi Bhattacharia, “Social Reproduction Theory And Why We Need it to Make Sense of the Corona Virus Crisis” [Link]
Participation via the following link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88698404962?pwd=aVpPYmZHaC9NeUUxZGg0bUZiRFBOdz09
RSVP to register, before May 10: info@koelnischerkunstverein.de

Coronaseminar #2. Pandemic intimacies.
June 9, 2021

Coronaseminar #3. On Motherhood. Bring your kids!
June 30, 2021

Coronaseminar #4. How do we stay with the trouble?
September 29, 2021

Coronaseminar #5. Reboot solidarity together.
October 20, 2021

reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of:

reboot: responsiveness is supported by:

Modern Lovers 
A screening on Valentine’s Day in the context of the exhibition THE KÖLN CONCERT
by Dorothy Iannone & Juliette Blightman with video works of both artists

Program: 

Juliette Blightman
Girlfriend, 2009

Dorothy Iannone
The Story of Bern (Or) Showing Colors, 1970

Dorothy Iannone
Follow Me, 1977

Dorothy Iannone
The Berlin Beauties Or You Have No Idea How Beautiful You Are, 1978

Juliette Blightman
I Will Always Love You, 2019

Juliette Blightman
Diseaseeds and Pollutionation, 2020

Total running time: 80 min

The screening takes place via the internet platform Zoom. With the following link you can join the meeting via your browser: https://zoom.us/j/97358733748

For access via a zoom account:
Meeting-ID: 973 5873 3748

Hounds of Love 
An evening zoom of music, performance and readings, with friends and heroes of Juliette Blightman and Lily McMenamy. The artists come together for the first time, both drawing inspiration from the world around them; as women, as friends and as cosmic dancers.

Tune in from 7 pm Köln time.

The conversation takes place via the internet platform Zoom. With the following link you can join the meeting via your browser:

https://zoom.us/j/91574222270

For access via a zoom account:
Meeting-ID: 915 7422 2270

The event is part of the exhibition  THE KÖLN CONCERT  by Dorothy Iannone & Juliette Blightman and can be viewed here afterwards: 

  In accordance with the Corona Protection Regulation of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Kölnischer Kunstverein will be closed from 03.11.2020 until at least 31.01.2021. During this time, no events will take place on site. Online events will be announced via our newsletter at short notice.  

Aleksey Semenenko, the star violinist, will be performing together with the pianist Inna Firsova. Program: Ludwig van Beethoven: Sonata No. 6 in A major, op. 30 No. 1 Igor Stravinsky: Divertimento “Le Baiser de la fée – The kiss of the fairy Olivier Messiaen: Thème et Variations for violin and piano (1932) Gabriel Fauré: “Au bord de l’eau” op. 8; “Aprês un rêve” op. 7 Eugène Ysaÿe: Poème élégiaque, op. 12 Alexander Rosenblatt: Carmen Fantasy on themes from the opera by Georges Bizet After his Kennedy Center debut, the Washington Post wrote: “Semenenko (…) explored every corner of the composer’s imagination (…) a true triumph”. Since winning the prestigious Young Concert Artists Auditions in New York in 2012 and the Boris Goldstein Violin Competition in 2015, Aleksey Semenenko has become one of the world’s violinists’ elite and has performed extensively as a soloist and chamber musician in Europe and the USA. Aleksey Semenenko plays a Stradivarius violin from 1699, which was donated to him by the German Foundation Musikleben. Aleksey Semenenko forms a permanent duo with the pianist Inna Firsova. They have given concerts in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, at Schloss Elmau, at the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival, among others. At the 67th Dubrovnik Summer Festival 2016 they won the Jury and Television Prize Orlando as “Best Concert” of the festival. Fees: 19,50 Euro incl. advance booking fee, reduced (pupils, students, KölnPass holders) 12,- Euro incl. advance booking fee Children up to 14 years have free admission. Ticket sales exclusively in advance via KölnTicket! Tickets are available at KölnTicket: www.koelnticket.de Information & link to the VVK under: www.kammerkonzerte.koeln About the concert series: The music metropolis on the Rhine is home to numerous internationally renowned musicians. With its diversity and quality, Cologne’s independent chamber music scene has earned itself the highest reputation worldwide. The chamber concerts at the Kunstverein now give these top ensembles from Cologne and NRW a permanent showcase in their home city. Starting in 2020, six concerts will take place annually, on Saturdays at 6 pm, in the Riphahnsaal of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Centrally located on Neumarkt, the Riphahnsaal with its open, beautiful architecture offers excellent acoustics for chamber music of the international top class. The combination of contemporary, visual arts and chamber music spanning all epochs is a symbol for the unity of art, its diversity and topicality and promises a unique ambience. This concert series is supported by: Kulturamt der Stadt Köln, Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft NRW and RheinEnergie Stiftung Kultur.

Guided Tour through the exhibitions Dunja Herzog – Meanwhile and Emma LaMorte – Aussicht  with Miriam Bettin, Curator of the exhibition by Emma LaMorte

Instagram Live: Tarot Conversation: The Tower by Jessa Crispin, independent writer and editor (USA) 
Online Event, no registration required, access via our Instagram-Account“

A tower, hit by lightning or perhaps simply on fire, is nearing collapse. In many versions of the card, two figures fall from the top of the tower to the ground below. Rather than the self-destruction of the Devil, the Tower is destruction that comes from the outside. It is a shaking, a tumult, a calamity. What you have built up, the Tower takes down. It is perhaps the most dreaded card in the deck. It falls at number sixteen.” – Jessa Crispin, “The Tower”, in: The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life, New York 2016.

Feminist and astrology-affin writer and publisher Jessa Crispin takes us on a journey to the secrets and opportunities of tarot. In the context of Emma LaMorte‘s exhibition Aussicht, she talks about the destructive but also recovering qualities of the tarot card “The Tower”.

Jessa Crispin is an independent writer and editor based in Baltimore, MD. From 2003 to 2016 she was responsible for Bookslut, a monthly magazine and blog and has been hosting the podcast Public Intellectual since 2017. She frequently writes for The New York Times and The Washington Post covering politics, art, literature, film, pop culture, food, feminism, religion, and housing and is a columnist for The Guardian since 2019. Most recently she has published Why I am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto (2017), The Creative Tarot (2016) and The Dead Ladies Project (2015) and is currently working on her book-in-progress My Three Dads (planned for 2021). In collaboration with the artist Jen May she printed and distributed the Spolia Tarot Deck in 2018 and is giving tarot readings, lectures, and workshops on a regular basis.

Show & Tell is an ongoing series of events in various formats, accompanying the exhibition or independent of it. Changing guests are invited, including artists, authors and musicians. The series is supported by:

Stan Brakhage: Anticipation of the Night, USA, 1958, 43 min, colour, mute, 16 mm
With an accompanying text by Emma LaMorte.

“The daylight shadows of a man in its movement evokes lights in the night. A rose bowl held in hand reflects both the sun and moon like illumination. The opening of a doorway onto trees anticipates the twilight into the night. A child is born on the lawn, born of water with its promissory rainbow, and the wild rose. It becomes the moon and the source of all light. Lights of the night become young children playing a circular game. The moon moves over a pillared temple to which all lights return. There is seen the sleep of innocents in their animal dreams becoming the amusement, their circular game, becoming the morning. The trees change colour and lose their leaves for the morn, they become the complexity of branches in which the shadow man hangs himself.” – Stan Brakhage

Show & Tell is an ongoing series of events in various formats, accompanying the exhibition or independent of it. Changing guests are invited, including artists, authors and musicians. The series is supported by:

Konrad Elias-Trostmann, violin Prach Boondiskulchok, piano Vladimir Waltham, cello Program: Kaija Saariaho: Light & Matter Edvard Grieg: Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 (Arr. Linos Piano Trio) Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Trio in F Major Wq. 01 No. 3 Johannes Brahms: Trio in C minor Op. 101 In 2015 Linos Piano Trio won the 1st prize as well as the audience award at the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition and is since then considered one of the most dynamic and creative piano trios in Europe. “Slow-burning and gripping” commented The Strad Magazine and the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung wrote: “the trio fascinated right away”. The Linos Piano Trio performs worldwide in concert halls such as Wigmore Hall London, Melbourne Recital Centre, Holzhausenschlösschen Frankfurt and Muziekgebouw Eindhoven. CAvi-music released the first recording of the complete works for piano trio by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in early 2020. Since 2016, the project “Stolen Music”, which is very popular with listeners, has also been produced. Here the musicians arrange great orchestral works for their instrumentation in order to expand the repertoire for piano trio. Fees: 19,50 Euro incl. advance booking fee, reduced (pupils, students, KölnPass holders) 12,- Euro incl. advance booking fee Children up to 14 years have free admission. Ticket sales exclusively in advance via KölnTicket! Tickets are available at KölnTicket: www.koelnticket.de Information & link to the VVK under: www.kammerkonzerte.koeln About the concert series: The music metropolis on the Rhine is home to numerous internationally renowned musicians. With its diversity and quality, Cologne’s independent chamber music scene has earned itself the highest reputation worldwide. The chamber concerts at the Kunstverein now give these top ensembles from Cologne and NRW a permanent showcase in their home city. Starting in 2020, six concerts will take place annually, on Saturdays at 6 pm, in the Riphahnsaal of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Centrally located on Neumarkt, the Riphahnsaal with its open, beautiful architecture offers excellent acoustics for chamber music of the international top class. The combination of contemporary, visual arts and chamber music spanning all epochs is a symbol for the unity of art, its diversity and topicality and promises a unique ambience.

Broadcast: Something Like #21: The Continuous Present, with Bitsy Knox, Rosa Aiello, and Emma LaMorte, in-situ at the Kölnischer Kunstverein
Online Event, no registration required

≈≈ The show will air live on Cashmere Radio on October 8, 10 am – 1 pm. It will then be available on Something Like’s Cashmere page and on Mixcloud ≈≈

“. . . It’s at this moment that I decide to make a change, set up some rules, do something, because when the life of the living moves slow, it speeds the overall sense of time. It gives the impression that life goes by “In a flash,” “In a breath,”  “Before you know it.” I decide: First, I will forbid the use of any such phrase, including, “Where has the day gone?” including “Already?”. Second, I will do all I can to avoid tradition, which speeds time. Like ritual speeds time. Like routine, which I cannot possibly avoid, speeds time. Third, and most important, because it is something I can control, I will adopt an exercise for slowing time: to place details in time, so to prevent the seamless fold from taking hold. . .”  (an excerpt from Calypso Goes out of Favour by Rosa Aiello)

In this very special 21st episode of Something Like, Bitsy speaks with artists Emma LaMorte and Rosa Aiello about Emma’s exhibition, Aussicht, in-situ at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, late into the night. As they go on an ekphrastic exploration through Emma’s exhibition, they ask: what is the continuous present, and how do we move through it? What does the passage of time feel like for an artist—for a new mother—and how does this relate to care, to duty, to patience, to pleasure, to injustice?

Taking a page from Aussicht, this is an episode in four parts, and features an original score by LNS (Laura Sparrow), as well as excerpts from Rosa Aiello’s text for the exhibition, Calypso Goes out of Favour, an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, Calypso’s Way.

Bitsy Knox (*1984 in Vancouver) is a poet, performer, and radio host based in Berlin. Bitsy has read poetry and performed across Europe, most recently at Haus am Lutzowplatz, Hopscotch, Horse & Pony, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, OHM, and Project Space Festival, Berlin; W139, Amsterdam; Une, Une, Une, Marseille; Feeelings, Brussels; and PEACH, Rotterdam. Her bi-monthly radio show on Cashmere Radio and CHFR Hornby Island, Something Like, traverses folk traditions and new age, experimental, and minimal composition through lenses of poetry and amateur musicology. Bitsy has collaborated with Brussels-based musician Roger 3000 since 2016. Their first LP as Bitsy Knox & Roger 3000, OM COLD BLOOD was released by Tanuki Records in 2018, and a forthcoming EP, The Heat Within, will be released by Tundra Records in Autumn 2020. Bitsy’s poems have been published by Tabloid, General Fine Arts, Arts of the Working Class, and Pure Fiction, among others. Her first chapbook, Meaningless Secrets, was published in 2020. She holds a MFA from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.

Show & Tell is an ongoing series of events in various formats, accompanying the exhibition or independent of it. Changing guests are invited, including artists, authors and musicians. The series is supported by:

 

Guided Tour through the exhibitions Dunja Herzog – Meanwhile and Emma LaMorte – Aussicht  with Miriam Bettin, Curator of the exhibition by Emma LaMorte.

Guided Tour through Cologne: Blaufärber*innen, Goldspinnerinnen, Zauberei. A guided tour by and with Irene Franken, historian and Alternative Honorary Citizen of Cologne. Accompanying the exhibition Meanwhile by Dunja Herzog, Cologne locations will be visited that touch on aspects of colour, craftsmanship, magic and gold. The theme will then be Dunja Herzog’s initiator, Prof. Maria Mies, who left many metres of her writings to the Women’s History Society – comparably productive as councilman Hermann von Weinsberg, who in early modern times wrote about 7,000 pages of diary and lived on the Blaubach. Finally, the fight for the self-determination of women over their bodies will also be dealt with. Start: Waidmarkt, Hermann-Josef-Fountain Duration: approx. 1 1/2 to 2 hours Max. 15 participants, mouth and nose protection or visor are a condition of participation (in German) The registration deadline is 02.10.2020 at 2:30 pm.

Live Narration by Rosa Aiello, Emma LaMorte & Benjamin Marvin with music by LNS
With a book presentation of the publication accompanying the exhibition

Live Narration is a collaborative project with text by Rosa Aiello, visuals by Emma LaMorte and Benjamin Marvin and music by LNS. Using an overhead projector, images from light, shadow, and colour are created and projected on site, illustrating and commenting on the live mixed soundscape of music and language. The performance at the Kölnischer Kunstverein includes work details from Emma LaMorte’s exhibition Aussicht and a reading by Rosa Aiello from her text Calypso Goes out of Favour that is also part of the accompanying publication.

 

Rosa Aiello, born 1987 in Canada, is a writer and artist working with video, text, photography, sound, and installation. She often deals with the way language, narrative devices, domestic architecture, and other structural parameters are involved in socialisation. Her works have been shown at various institutions and galleries, most recently, Cell Project Space in London, Lodos Gallery in Mexico City, The Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbdrige, Bureau des Réalités in Brussels, Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main, and Kunsthalle Zürich in Zurich. Her writing has been published in Triple Canopy, Starship, CanadianArt, Art Papers, and F. R. David. Calypso Goes out of Favour is excerpted from her long-form fiction project Calypso’s Way, currently in progress.

LNS, originally from Calgary, CA, has since years been an integral part of buillding Vancouver’s underground music community, creating and DJing on point and under the radar events. Her DJing reflects a myriad of electronic influences, including the pioneering years of Detroit and UK Techno, IDM, and Electro. This style is mirrored in her musical production which has been featured on labels such as 1080p, Freakout Cult, Wania, and her own label LNS, of which there are two EP’s currently released.

Benjamin Marvin, born 1987 in Canada, is an artist living in Berlin. He received his BFA from Emily Carr University in Vancouver and studied in the class of Christopher Williams at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Recent exhibitions include Exhibiting Paintings at Jack’s Flat Berlin, Development (Scarlet goes to the doctor) at Gärtnergasse in Vienna (together with Emma LaMorte), Close Your Eyes It’s all pretend at Sikås Art Center and How am I at Junge Museum in Bottrop.

*Please note that the time of the event has changed to 6 pm.

Show & Tell is an ongoing series of events in various formats, accompanying the exhibition or independent of it. Changing guests are invited, including artists, authors and musicians. The series is supported by:

 

With the studio fellows Sascha Kregel, Morgaine Schäfer, Stella von Rohden and Ellen Yeon Kim. No registration is required for this event, but there may be waiting times. Please respect the rules of distance and hygiene and the obligation to wear a mouth and nose mask. Further information under: Offene Ateliers Köln 2020

Guided Tour through Cologne: Blaufärber*innen, Goldspinnerinnen, Zauberei. A guided tour by and with Irene Franken, historian and Alternative Honorary Citizen of Cologne. Accompanying the exhibition Meanwhile by Dunja Herzog, Cologne locations will be visited that touch on aspects of colour, craftsmanship, magic and gold. The theme will then be Dunja Herzog’s initiator, Prof. Maria Mies, who left many metres of her writings to the Women’s History Society – comparably productive as councilman Hermann von Weinsberg, who in early modern times wrote about 7,000 pages of diary and lived on the Blaubach. Finally, the fight for the self-determination of women over their bodies will also be dealt with. Start: Waidmarkt, Hermann-Josef-Fountain Duration: approx. 1 1/2 to 2 hours Max. 15 participants, mouth and nose protection or visor are a condition of participation (in German) The registration deadline is 23.09.2020 at 3:30 pm.

Sat, Sep 19, 2020, 7 pm – 9 pm
Show & Tell Closely interwoven: fabrics and cloths in capitalism, colonialism.
Discussion based on the artistic works by Dunja Herzog, Fatima Khan, Cate Lartey & Maryline Ogboko (in German).

Fabrics and cloths, the former luxury goods, have become commonplace. Nevertheless, as a craft practice they are still closely interwoven with social ideas. Fabrics are one of the few handicraft materials whose use by women is tolerated and even supported by society. However, the conditions of production and history of textiles are largely ignored. In a conversation about the theory, practice, and stories of various fabrics, the artists Dunja Herzog, Fatima Khan, Cate Lartey, and Maryline Ogboko make the connection between fabrics, capitalism, and colonialism.

Fatima Khan, born in Bhola in 1987, grew up in Cologne, is an artist, curator and presenter. She studied ancient languages and cultures – classical literature and German studies at the University of Cologne. She was the initiator and co-founder of q[lit]*clgn, the first feminist literature festival in Germany. Her artistic works capture banal everyday situations in a visual diary in which photos and videos merge to form documentary and art films. She produces and publishes through Instagram under @fatum.khan.

Cate Lartey is a design researcher from Düsseldorf. In her work she deals with notions of power relations and intersectional entanglements from a postcolonial feminist perspective. She explores these issues through film and photography.

Maryline Ogboko is a dancer from Düsseldorf and studies Textile and Clothing Management at the HS Niederrhein in Mönchengladbach. As part of her studies, she wrote a student research project that examines the Nigerian fashion industry from a traditional and contemporary perspective. Since 2019 she is one of the co-founders of the start-up initiative Ohemaa Green Housing, a concept that will build Tiny Houses in Ghana from recycled plastic.

The event is part of the exhibition Dunja Herzog MEANWHILE at Kölnischer Kunstverein.The series Show & Tell is supported by:

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Film screening: I Am Not a Witch, 2017, Director: Rungano Nyoni, 94 min, OmU
In the presence of the artist Dunja Herzog

In her feature debut film I Am Not a Witch, Rungano Nyoni deals with modern percecution of witches in Zambia. The nine-year-old orphan Shula is accused of being a witch by a villager and sent to a witch camp in the desert. Under strict rules she lives there and has to undergo a ritual to internalize the rules of the witch’s life. I Am Not a Witch is both social satire, feminist criticism and surrealistic portrait of rural Zambia.

Show & Tell is an ongoing series of events in various formats, accompanying the exhibition or independent of it. Changing guests are invited, including artists, authors and musicians. The series is supported by:

Guided Tour through the exhibitions Dunja Herzog – Meanwhile and Emma LaMorte – Aussicht with our Director Nikola Dietrich.

Führung durch die Ausstellungen Dunja Herzog – Meanwhile und Emma LaMorte – Aussicht  mit unserer Direktorin Nikola Dietrich.

Dear visitors and members, We are very pleased to welcome you to the opening of our two solo exhibitions Dunja Herzog – Meanwhile  and Emma LaMorte – Aussicht  on September 4, 2020 from 1:00 pm till 10:00 pm. The protection of our staff and visitors is very important to us. To ensure that the opening is in accordance with the current corona protection regulations, we will refrain from opening speeches and drinks. We will also regulate access to the building and the several exhibition rooms by security personnel. The number of visitors is limited and we would like to ask you to follow the instructions of the staff. Markings and the guidance system on the wall will also help you to find your way. Furthermore, we kindly ask you to stick to the following rules:

• It is obligatory to wear a mask throughout the entire building.
• Please keep a minimum distance of 1.5 metres to other visitors and staff.
• Please wash your hands frequently and thoroughly or disinfect them with our hand disinfectant, which is available at reception.

For further information and if you have any questions, please contact us. We thank you for your assistance and look forward to seeing you! Your team of the Kölnischer Kunstverein

Tony Conrad: Again and Again 
Online lecture by Tabea Lurk, Art historian, Basel (in German language)
with a welcome by Nikola Dietrich, Director Kölnischer Kunstverein

Inspired by the parcours of the TONY CONRAD exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the lecture will show monographic connections. References inherent in the exhibited works are explained. In addition, the US-American artist, who died in 2016, will once again have his say on the basis of his video works, statements and interviews.

Tony Conrad’s relatively late fame as a gallery or museum artist, which shaped his last years, does not seem to be waning even four years after his death. New ways of reading can still be found, the vitality of the late works still has a convincing effect, and the films of the late 1960s, the videographic works of the 1970s and 1980s, and the musical settings that permeate all phases of life still evoke an era that is partly past, partly continued by others. The artist’s video work forms the starting point for these reflections.

The lecture can be accessed via the following link and on our website.

Tabea Lurk studied art history and media theory and wrote her doctorate on Tony Cornad’s video work. After her traineeship at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (2004-2006), she worked at the Hochschule der Künste Bern from 2006-2015. Since August 2015 she has been head of the media library at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst FHNW Basel.

The public program and art education is supported by:

The exhibition TONY CONRAD is a collaboration between Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, and MAMCO, Geneva, and is based on the touring retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2018/19).

With the kind support of:

6 – 8 pm

With the double presentation of The Flicker and Flaming Creatures, the Kölnischer Kunstverein is showing two films in the framework of the current exhibition, both of which were made as collaborations between Tony Conrad and Jack Smith in the early 1960s in New York and caused scandals. Under the title Flickering, Flaming, film theorist Marc Siegel will outline the unexpected production of the flicker film from Tony Conrad’s experience with Jack Smith.

In 1962, Conrad graduated from Harvard University and moved to New York City, where he associated primarily with experimental musicians and underground filmmakers. He even became roommates with the notorious filmmaker Jack Smith, who prompted Conrad to apply his musical experiments to making movie soundtracks. Conrad’s own career as a filmmaker began on March 5, 1963, when he, Smith, and Mario Montez, Smith’s muse, became entranced by the flickering light of an old projector. Conrad had learned in college about the effects of this phenomenon on brain waves, and so he attempted to make a mind-altering film of nothing more than black and white frames, based on “harmonies” between the frequencies of the flickering light—a procedure similar to his work with sound frequencies. Praised by critics for its structural qualities, audience reactions at the premiere of The Flicker at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on September 15, 1966, ranged from nausea to hallucinations.

Tony Conrad produced the soundtrack for Jack Smith’s legendary film Flaming Creatures. Smith’s films are characterized by an unusual low-budget aesthetic and innovations that immediately attracted the praise of the critics. But the open approach to sexuality led to censorship: in 1964 the film triggered one of the biggest scandals in film history and was banned. Soon after, Smith began to use the medium of film not as an independent work, but as a component of performances. Flaming Creatures, probably his most famous film, celebrates a tumultuous harem party with boundless erotic excesses in glamorous black-and-white images.

Marc Siegel is Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. His book A Gossip of Images is forthcoming from Duke University Press. In 2014, he edited a special issue of the journal Criticism dedicated to Jack Smith. He is a founding member of the Berlin-based art collective CHEAP. In 2009 he co-curated a massive festival at the Arsenal-Institut für Videokunst and HAU in Berlin, called LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World, which had a spinoff version in Frankfurt/Main at Mousonturm and the MMK Museum of Modern Art in 2012. In this context, he worked with Tony Conrad.

The program is part of the exhibition TONY CONRAD at the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are sponsored by:

With the kind support of:

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6 – 10 pm
4-channel audio file, 240 min

NO! This sound piece is no sound piece. To listen to this sound piece, do not listen to it. Do not lie down on the floor to listen. Do not lie down on the floor, not to listen. Listen to the silence during the sound, do not listen to the sound during the silence. Do not think of an object while listening, the sound is the object. To lie down on this piece, become this piece, at least. YES!

The program is part of the exhibition TONY CONRAD at the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are sponsored by:

Mit freundlicher Unterstützung von:

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Friday, December 6, 2019, 7 – 11 pm and Saturday, December 7, 2019, 11 am – 7 pm
MICHAELA MELIÁN
Music from a Frontier Town
Sound and video installation

Friday, December 6, 7.30 – 8 pm
Michaela Melián in conversation with Prof. Anke Ortlepp

Re-education. 1,630 vinyl records from the remainder of the public library of the Munich Amerikahaus (1945–1997) are at the centre of Michaela Melián’s sound and video installation Music from a Frontier Town. Visitors are invited to personally select this find from the basement—a selection of jazz, spoken word, classical and new music LPs from the 1950s and 1960s, with which the USA presented itself as a pluralistic cultural nation—and to play it on a DJ console. The Munich artist, musician and radio playwright Michaela Melián, who has received many awards, is known for her often expansive multimedia exhibitions and concerts.

In collaboration with the Department of North American History of the Historical Institute of the University of Cologne.

Admission is free.

Friday, December 13, 2019, 6 – 10 pm
(Admission possible at any time)
REUNION AFTER CAGE
For modified chessboard and live-electronics (German premiere)

Chess players: Holger Lieff, Endre Tot, N.N.
Musicians: Peter Behrendsen, hans w. koch, Tobias Grewenig, Dirk Specht

Highlight at the end of the reiheM–Anniversary year 2019—With 4 hours of Reunion after Cage. This 114th event completes the circle of the very first reiheM event in January 2009: Variations on Variations after John Cage (also by and with Peter Behrendsen and hans w. koch).

John Cage’s REUNION for prepared chessboard and live electronics was first performed in Toronto in 1968: with Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Teeny Duchamp as chess players as well as the musicians David Behrman, Lowell Cross, Gordon Mumma and David Tudor. The distribution of sounds in space and their volume are determined by the positions of the chess pieces, not by the musical and taste preferences of the musicians. Even the chess players are not able to influence the music by certain moves or positions.
In the sense of Cage’s idea of an egoless, non-intentional music, winning or losing becomes secondary—”a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play”.
The chessboard used in this performance follows the original Lowell Cross constructed in assigning the fields to the inputs and outputs, but was equipped with modern technology (computer programming and MIDI).
The chess game is flanked by thematically relevant projections of works by the artists Takako Saito and Shigeko Kubota.

A project by Peter Behrendsen and hans w. koch.

Admission fee: 10,- / 8,-

Further information: www.reihe-M.de

Reihe M – Concert Series for Contemporary Music, Electronics and New Media – Cologne is organized by Mark e.V. and supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Cologne and the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia.

An event as part of the exhibition Maskulinitäten.

Performance Lecture by Juliette Blightman featuring films from Maria Lassnig and Chantal Akerman amongst others. Followed by No Opening SS 2020 Collection with music by Anthony Silvester (Technology + Teamwork). Lecture starts 7.15 pm, Runway Show 7.45 pm.

The main theme of the artist´s work is the relationship between art and life. She creates her works like continuous diary entries which are articulated in various media. She films, paints and writes in a radical subjective way and makes the personal public.

Watch the video documentation of the performance here.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are sponsored by:

With the kind support of:

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Guided Tours and Screening by Jonathas de Andrade O Peixe (the Fish)

Exhibition: Maskulinitäten. Eine Kooperation von Bonner Kunstverein, Kölnischem Kunstverein und Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf

Double Feature: The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin by Arwen Curry and Die Deutschen und ihre Männer by Helke Sander

An event as part of the exhibition Maskulinitäten.

A long night with night with Julia Scher (Professor, Academy of Media Arts Cologne) and guests including a screening of her 4-hour film Discipline Masters (1988) – a cathartic retelling of her youth, which informs Scher‘s interest in themes of surveillance and the notion of a sexualized and controlling gaze.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are sponsored by:

With kind support of:

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An event as part of the exhibition Maskulinitäten.

Eva Birkenstock, Michelle Cotton and Nikola Dietrich in conversation with Nelly Gawellek, Jürgen Klauke, Bea Schlingelhoff, Evelyn Taocheng Wang and other participating artists. (in English)

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An event as part of the exhibition Maskulinitäten.

The installation devised by Gerry Bibby for the exhibition takes the form of a flexible platform for readings with invited guests. This work offers visitors an insight into the artist‘s collection of notes and source materials that inform the artist‘s work and writing, and which form part of the performance.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are sponsored by:

With the kind support of:

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Organized by Miriam Bettin

Under the title CAVE ECHOES, Stella von Rohden and Sascha Kregel present a new, process-oriented work in the studio space of the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

In their artistic practices, they share an interest in becoming, especially the genesis of image and sound. The point of reference of the work shown here are the Metamorphoses of Ovid, in which the poet tells the story of the emergence of the world out of chaos through mythological stories of transformation. Based on the measure of the hexameter, sound fragments were created with synthesizers that, when mixed live, dissolve in a flat structure. The video images show the Prometheus Cave in Georgia, a scene of the Metamorphoses. Opposite is the goddess Athena. The figures quoted are Narcissus and Echó: Echó, who withers away from unrequited love for Narcissus until she is nothing but a voice. Narcissus, on the other hand, falls in love with his own reflection and is punished by Nemesis, the goddess of revenge.

What wave is, he considers body.

Stella von Rohden (* 1987 in Bremen) lives and works in Cologne. After studying Fine Arts at the University of Arts in Belgrade, she graduated at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig with Frances Scholz in 2018. Her work has recently been shown in a solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bellamartha in Grafrat (2018) as well as in group presentations at the Städtische Galerie in Hanover (2018), the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2017) and at Shoot the Lobster in New York (2017).

Sascha Kregel (* 1989 in Halle / Saale) lives and works in Cologne. In 2018 he graduated from the College of Fine Arts in Braunschweig. His works were shown in group exhibitions in the gallery Dechanatstraße Bremen (2018), at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2017), at Shoot the Lobster in New York (2017) and at the Museum of Photography in Braunschweig (2016), among others.

Both artists are current fellows of the studio program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are supported by:

With the kind support of:

5 pm Westend (D 2001) by Markus Mischkowski and Kai-Maria Steinkühler
89 min, 35 mm, b/w, German with English subtitles

6.30 pm L for Leisure (USA 2014) by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn
73 min, color, English

at 7 pm
Double Book Launch with Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda:
Letters (2019) and Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda x Teruo Nishiyama (2017)
accompanied by an artist talk with Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda in conversation with Nikola Dietrich, a reading by Jay Chung and a screening of the artists’ film She’s Gone (2009)

at 5 pm
Guided Tour through the exhibition The Auratic Narrative by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda with the director Nikola Dietrich

The artist books can be purchased at Kölnischer Kunstverein, and through the artists’ website: jcqtm.bigcartel.com

Scalalogia and The Wheel of Life (2019), Book Launch with Jasmin Werner and a lecture by Philipp Kleinmichel in combination with a concert by pogendroblem

Organised by Miriam Bettin

Watch the recording of the event here.

As part of the first edition of Show and Tell, Jasmin Werner and Miriam Bettin will introduce the publication Scalalogia and The Wheel of Life (2019), published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König. On this occasion, philosopher Philipp Kleinmichel and the punk band pogendroblem will be presenting a dialogic lecture with a concert. Based on the leitmotif of the staircase, the evening is dedicated to the subject determined by capitalism, searching for happiness, freedom, and success somewhere between consumption, creativity, and spirituality, between competition and self-actualization.

Scalalogia and The Wheel of Life (2019) by Jasmin Werner has been released beginning of the year on the occasion of her first institutional solo exhibition in the Remise of the Kunstverein Braunschweig. In cooperation with the Friedrich-Mielke-Institute for Scalalogy, the exhibition catalog includes not only installation views and images of the individual works, but also texts that deal with aspects regarding the history of art and architecture in Jasmin Werner‘s practice as well as original texts by Friedrich Mielke. With contributions by Miriam Bettin (curator and editor), Jule Hillgärtner (director Kunstverein Braunschweig), Philipp Kleinmichel (Zeppelin Universität), Harry Thorne (Associate editor frieze), Sophie Schlosser (Friedrich-Mielke-Institute for Scalalogy, OTH Regensburg) and Chloe Stead (freelance writer and critic).

Jasmin Werner (* 1987 in Troisdorf) lives and works in Cologne. In 2016 she graduated from the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2018), Gillmeier Rech, Berlin (2017), MI / mi1glissé, Berlin (2016) and RM, Auckland (2014) and in group exhibitions at Braunsfelder, Cologne (2018), Saloon, Brussels (2018) and at the Folkwang Museum, Essen (2017). In 2017, Jasmin Werner completed a residency at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. Since this year she is a scholarship holder of the studio program of the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

Philipp Kleinmichel studied philosophy, art, and media theory in Freiburg, Karlsruhe and New York. He is a graduate of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was a fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude. Since January 2018 he is a research assistant at Zeppelin University and was previously a lecturer at the University of Gießen, the University of Hamburg and the UDK Berlin. His research is on the transformation of art and mass culture in the digital age.

so-called ‘pogendroblem’, the Enfant Terrible of the Deutschpunk, have made their way from the Bergisch Gladbacher province to the metropolitan area of Cologne, where they are equally lost between pubs and competence marathon on public transport and in private-political conditions to enjoy the bad life. Their chitchat is said to be a pinch 80s, a bit of Hamburger Schule, and a nose of garage, some pop cuteness. Four white, mostly asset-backed academic cis men have little to report here. The private is political, but the private can also be boring. But they really try hard and are enthusiastic. In 2018 they released their album Erziehung zur Müdigkeit.

Show and Tell is an ongoing, autonomous series of events with shifting formats. Inivited are various guest, among those artists, authors, and musicians.

The events in the framework of Show and Tell are supported by:

With the kind support of:

Moulting, 2019

Public program of the exhibition
The Auratic Narrative

Tuesday May 14, 2019, 11 am – 6 pm

Pure Fiction, a writing seminar at Frankfurt’s Städelschule lead by author Mark von Schlegell, will conduct an “open mike” writing workshop in the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Author Wu Ming joins as a special guest as members of the seminar perform texts and workshop them publicly. Audience members are encouraged to bring their own texts to workshop.

Wu Ming is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blisset community in Bologna. The collective is formed of writers active in literature and popular culture. The group authored several novels such as 54 and Manituana. For the open-mike-workshop Pure Fiction will be joined by Wu Ming 1.

From 2011-2018, students of Städelschule invited writer Mark von Schlegell to organise a fiction seminar in the school. Since then Pure Fiction has brought together current and former Städel students to examine and above all produce texts in the most diverse forms possible, from written artistic works and experimental writing to readings and performances that inevitably draw in other aspects of the diverse artistic practices of all the class members. The works of authors from Cervantes to Woolf form the pre–given raw material of the seminar. An engagement with the material and quasi-mystical properties of printed matter have led the class to produce numerous experimental publications, readings and performances on narrative or poetic footings.

The workshop will be conducted in English.

On the occasion of the exhibition Power of Print, the professor of history Bruno Feitler from São Paulo will present a lecture on the life and work of his aunt, the late Brazilian graphic designer Bea Feitler. Bruno Feitler is responsible for the archives of Bea Feitler, and in 2012 edited the extensive publication O Design de Bea Feitler.

Please note that the event will be filmed.

Luzie Meyer’s performances, films and sound pieces reflect contemporary image production and the entanglements of the “I” within itself and with its environment. Luzie Meyer’s performance The Flute, which was performed at the Kunstverein on March 28, 2018, documented itself. The rehearsal situation around the flutist was also the plot. Meyer and the performers filmed each other. Mise-en-abyme, The Flute returns to its place of origin and celebrates its premiere as a film in the Kunstverein. Johanna Odersky works in sculpture and as Iku with electronic sound to build different spaces and atmospheres and then tear them down again. She cuts her sculptures from steel sheets. Fragile and flexible, they take different shapes adapting to the space in which they are shown. In her performance as Iku (live) Odersky samples melancholic indie tracks. Associatively cut-up and interwoven, they merge like a memory into haziness.

Please note that the event will take place in English and will be filmed.

Luzie Meyer, The Flute, 2018
Johanna Odersky, Iku (live),
organised by Juliane Duft

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A psychoacoustic urbanistic evening with audiovisual presentations by Bonnie Camplin, Starship, and Eric D. Clark.

Heygate for Life (2011), a film by Bonnie Camplin and a talk on points of connection between Brion Gysin, John C. Lilly and Aug Tellez.

A preview of the latest issue of the Berlin art magazine Starship: #18 “Gibt es Communities, gibt es Geister? Lass dich testen!” with the co-publishers Ariane Müller, Nikola Dietrich, Gerry Bibby, Martin Ebner, and Henrik Olesen. Screenings of video works by Klara Liden, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Michele di Menna, and Martin Ebner, and an installation by Timothy Davies.

Eric D. Clark presents the EP Musix’ Lost Its Colour (2018) and the music video for the track by Martin Ebner. Accompanied by the lecture Etymological Deconstruction Cyclicals of Musix’ lost colour about aspects of synesthesia, together with a sound installation by Jasmin Matthies and Dave Carbone (Caribic Residency).

Please note that the event will take place in English and will be filmed.

The artist Marte Eknæs who participates in the exhibition Cut-Up will present together with the filmmaker Michael Amstad an evening with a film program consisting of three films. The program evolves from their latest film work, People Mover (2017, that combines documentary material, found footage, and 2D/3D animation to show the construction and daily life of an imaginary city. Additional to that John Smith’s Blight (1994–96) and Charles Atlas & Karole Armitage’s From An Island Summer (1983–84) will be screened. Utilizing distinct visual languages, the three films are connected through the topics of the constructed urban space, movement and flexibility. The program is a journey through different emotional states and atmospheres, guided by each film’s compelling use of soundscapes and music. The screenings are followed by an artist talk with Nikola Dietrich.

Please note that the event will take place in German language and will be filmed.

Watch the recording of the event here.

Helene Hegemann, writer from Berlin and Deborah Schamoni, gallerist from Munich, read conversations with psychologists from various contemporary literature (f.e. Tracy’s Tiger by William Saroyen).
Additional to that, thematically associated YouTube videos will be shown .

Please note that the event will take place in German language and will be filmed.

With the kind support of Gaffel.

For their film Die Angreifbaren (The Attackables, release: beginning of 2019), the directors Kerstin Cmelka and Mario Mentrup present a CHALLENGE, a TRAILERPARK, GIFTS and a MICRODRAMA suiting the the pre-Christmas season. Bets can be made! Guests are Rainer Knepperges (Die Quereinsteigerinnen) and Sven Heuchert (Dunkles Gesetz). We are looking forward to your visit!
Blog to the film Die Angreifbaren.

Please note that the event will take place in German language and will be filmed.

Watch the recording of the event here.

With the kind support of Gaffel.

MUFA (The Museum of Unfinished Art) is a science fiction story built out of cut-up writings of Mark von Schlegell, delivered through dramatic reading, sound and projection by Ellen Yeon Kim and Mark von Schlegell. Kim und von Schlegell met in 2012 during von Schlegell’s Pure Fiction Seminar at Staedelschule, Frankfurt. They have collaborated on numerous performances and theatrical productions since, and co-directed the Ellen Yeon Kim scripted interpretation of William Shakespeare, Der Tempest, performed by Pure Fiction at Kunsthalle Darmstadt 2017.

Performed and directed by Mark von Schlegell and Ellen Yeon Kim 
Sound by Ellen Yeon Kim and Mark von Schlegell Film by Ellen Yeon Kim
Text by Mark von Schlegell

Mark von Schlegell (b. 1967) has worked as a writer and as an artist / performer / producer since the 1990′s. His science fiction novels are published by Semiotexte. His shorter writings appear in art catalogs, magazines and films the world over. His latest literary theory / art-book crossover Realometer Re-Loaded is out now from Jan Kaps, Cologne.

Ellen Yeon Kim (b. 1985) works as an artist and a writer/translator. Using the mechanism of narrative, she works with the fallacy of the virtuousness imposed by society. Ellen works with video/photo installations, sound, poetry and theatre; she studied at Städelschule, in the class of Peter Fischli and of Simon Starling and graduated as Meisterschülerin, and studied at Slade School of Art for her BA. Her last reported location is available on https://ellenyeonkim.com.

With the kind support of Gaffel.

In the film Karl’s Perfect Day the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija portrays the artist and poet Karl Holmqvist through his idea of a perfect day, following him from the moment he wakes up until going to sleep. Since the 1990′s Holmqvist has worked with text and its visual representation in posters, wall drawings, installations, videos and readings. He converges fragments of songs, political pamphlets, literature and single letters as the smallest entity of text to shift meanings and create ambiguities. Similar to his artistic works, the film is a collage of people, places, sounds, images and texts – a day without extravagant aspirations but with moments of contentedness and small pleasures.

Watch the recording of the reading here.
Watch the recording of the artist talk here.

With the kind support of Gaffel.

Within the framework of the exhibition Cut-Up the formely Zurich-based exhibition space Taylor Macklin, will organize the exhibition Sorry I’m Late. XOXO Echo addressing the nature and possible interpretations of spaces and their conditions.

In the workshop Politics and Space, Ayasha Guerin will invite the participants by means of social and communicative methods and with the help of possible scenarios – ie. Shared Socioeconomic Pathway Narratives – to create collaborative spaces for interventions in our imaginary future.
Ayasha Guerin is an artist and scholar in social science based in New York. Her work explores themes of urban ecology, community and security in public and private space. She is currently a Fellow of Urban Practice at the Urban Democracy Lab at New York University.

With the kind support of Gaffel.

with the presentation of Japanese Animes (in Engl.)

Thu 9720, 6 pm
Kunihiko Ikuhara, La Fillette Revolutionnaire Utena, 1999 (in the original with German subtitles)

Tue 9/25, 6 pm
Catherine Breillat, Barbe Bleue, 2009 (in the original with Engl. subtitles)

Thu 10/11, 6 pm
Catherine Breillat, La Belle Endormie, 2011 (in the original with Engl. subtitles)

Thu 10/18, 6 pm
Mori Masaki, The Door into Summer, 1975 (in the original with Engl. subtitles)

Thu 10/25, 6 pm
Catherine Breillat, 36 Fillette, 1988 (in the original with Engl. subtitles)

Wed 11/7, 6 pm
Chantal Akerman, Golden Eighties, 1986 (35mm, in the original with German subtitles)
with an introduction by Juliane Duft

With 31 Portraits, the Kölnischer Kunstverein presents a new publication and exhibition by Cologne-based photographer Albrecht Fuchs. The photographs at the center of the exhibition depict artists who exhibited and performed at the Kölnischer Kunstverein between 2014 and 2018. The series of images offers a partial documentation of the institution’s various activities over the last few years on one hand while giving an impression of the people who have been responsible for the works and presentations on the other. The project represents Moritz Wesseler’s last at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, which he has successfully led in his role as director over the past five years.

Admission free

With the kind support of:

In his works, Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann (*1990) investigates the history of mankind through the culture of entertainment. His installations, sculptures, and performances trace attractions, shows, and popular performance formats by using their outward look, effects, and mechanisms while undermining them at the same time. His interest here lies in the immediate entertainment value that he extracts from illusion, magic, and film as well as the natural sciences and carries over into the visual arts. One of his installations, for example, borrowed mummies from a film prop house that appeared almost animated and defenseless in an art space, but also revealed their extreme artificiality upon closer inspection.

For this installment in the Aus- & Vortragen event series, Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann has developed a performance titled Roy & Siegfried that follows the biography of the magic duo known for their tiger shows. Personal memories and public images of the two entertainers meld together in a performance that allows their self-constructed myth to be experienced on another unreliable narrative level. The magic of appearance and being – always a component of art as an imitation of reality – is multiplied as it is revealed in Frohne-Brinkmann’s performance.

The performance will take place in German. Please note that the event will be filmed.

With the kind support of:

With her art, Isabella Fürnkäs (*1988, Tokyo) attempts to build a bridge between the manifestations of the digital age and that of the supposedly old world in which physicality still plays a role. In drawings, collages, performances, video works, and installations, she exposes the present day as a confusing thicket of surfaces that can hardly be penetrated as ever more layers open up. In her delicate coffee stain watercolors, for example, skin-colored faces appear like masks behind which is something unclear – Hide & Seek. Ultimately, what’s often concealed behind all of these layers is nothingness.

In the two-part performance The Boomerang Effect (2018), which she presents as part of the series Aus- & Vortragen curated by Juliane Duft, communication sounds as if it were echoing back from the facades of words. One can sense human desire and emotional fragility behind them in the same way they are also revealed in Fürnkäs’ other works.

Performers: Nikolas Brummer, Jan Seevetal, Christiana Cott Negoesco and Isabella Fürnkäs

The performance will take place in English. Please note that the event will be filmed.

With the kind support of:

Starting with images and texts gleaned from pop culture, advertising, and literature as well as personal materials, Alexey Vanushkin explores existential themes such as the pursuit of meaning and happiness in his film works and installations. In the work W. (2018), for example, enticing advertising images meet lines of songs by the band Joy Division. The film Alphabet (2017), in contrast, uses found visual material to illustrate a sequence of ideas and seems to catalogue the tragedy of human coexistence. The works oscillate between touching, almost kitschy moments and a dry, detached confrontation with the shallows and absurdity of life. They are, at first glance, as seductive as the media environment. Having said that, they continually return viewers to their own privileged points of view that have been shaped by societally ideal images.

Born in Russia in 1988, Vanushkin will give a general introduction to his practice based on his film works. Aus- & Vortragen is curated by Juliane Duft.

The presentation will take place in English. Please note that the event will be filmed.

With the kind support of:

Luzie Meyer (born 1990 in Tübingen) creates performances, films and sound works as part of her artistic practice. A special focus of her work is the psychology of the human being with all its references to the environment.

In the performance The Flute (2018), produced for the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the Riphahn-Saal functions, so to speak, as a stage for the rehearsals of a new film by Luzie Meyer. The performance is divided into five acts, with an ensemble consisting of a narrator, a flutist, a camerawoman and a prompter. Film images projected in real time double the action in the space. fiction and reality interweave.

The curatorial supervision of the lectures and talks is provided by Juliane Duft.

Performer: Lisa Gutscher (souffleuse), Emma LaMorte (camera person), Luzie Meyer (Narrator), Theresa Patzschke (flutist)

The performance will take place in English. Please note that the event will be filmed.

With the kind support of:

Studio Visit

Henning Fehr (b. 1985, Erlangen) and Philipp Rühr (b. 1986, Brühl) work on films that appear to be documentaries in which they simultaneously act as both the observers and the protagonists. In them, they investigate the places and spheres that constitute social identities and with which utopian promises connect on the margins of our capitalist world: the art market, cultural institutions such as museums, or even techno clubs and music festivals. Engaging in the slow rhythm of the films, one perceives the nuanced complexity of the social constructs that are associated with the different phenomena. Fehr and Rühr appear to be in search of the original and the primordial in western culture. Through sculptures, paintings, and texts, their exhibitions expand their films into an interplay of different “voices” in the space.

In a performance prepared for the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the former Kölnischer Kunstverein studio scholarship recipients will present excerpts from the films Studio Visit (2016) and Empty Village (2017). An live audio commentary will accompany the moving images so that Fehr and Rühr undermine the form of a classic film presentation.
Aus- & Vortragen is curated by Juliane Duft.

The performance will take place in German and English. Please note that the event will be filmed.

With the kind support of:

This year the Cologne artist Claus Richter will put into practice the theory he has developed in recent years in his Christmas lectures at the Kölnischer Kunstverein on the history and appearance of Christmas. With his own and traditional stories and songs, a self-written Christmas play, a special stage design and many little surprises, Richter will transform the stage of the Kölnischer Kunstverein into a Christmas wonderland on St. Nicholas Day.

The play will take place in German. Please note that the event will be filmed.

Supported by:

In her installations, films, and drawings, Ani Schulze (*1982) creates visual worlds in which history and stories are not told in a conventional manner, but rather encircled in dreamlike images. For example, abandoned architectural structures or cultivated landscapes are scanned by means of a camera and then slowly revealed in her films in the form of rhythmic sequences. With the places she shows, Schulze explores the (failed) utopias of modernism as well as the relationship between man and nature. She examines social developments both past and present using the latest media technology, such as drones, as well as visual formulas and pictorial traditions drawn from landscape painting or comics.

As part of the lecture series AUS- & VORTRAGEN, Ani Schulze will show the work Aerial Vortices (2015) and her latest film Merchants Freely Enter (2017), which was created during her artist residency at Schloss Ringenberg. Within this context, she will speak about forces of gravity, bird’s-eye views, camouflage, Robobirds, picnics, cornfields, and surveillance panoramas.

The lecture will take place in German. Please note that the event will be filmed.

With the kind support of:

Thomas Wachholz (* 1984, lives and works in Cologne) examines the general conditions of industrial, handicraft, and artistic production in his formally reduced works. His works are imbued with conceptual thought and particularly emphasize both the significance and necessity of personal choice and social interaction. Wachholz’ practice is reminiscent of the efficient structuring of everyday work, the functionality and monotony of which fascinates him. For each of his groups of works, he defines a set of rules that describes processes within which materials, substances, or participants respond to each other. For example, he rubs off the color of a printed banner, creates a drawing by means of lighting matches, or has a billboard continuously rehung. Even though the linear production processes may seem unromantic, it is precisely in this that the poetry of the works lies. There is no going back in its process – Wachholz, however, sounds out the depths within the conditions that have been imposed upon it. In this way, the subjective is absorbed into the works and becomes perceptible in details and nuances.

Thomas Wachholz will introduce his practice at the event and also show an installation that was developed in cooperation with Juliane Duft and realized especially for the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

The lecture will take place in German. Please note that the event will be filmed.

With the kind support of:

One Year

Jonathan Monk (*1969, Leicester, UK) became known through his appropriation and restructuring of works of Minimal and Conceptual Art, or also Postmodernism. His artistic work – now an integral part of the international scene – has been characterized since the beginning by an analytical acumen that is generally broken by a humorous tone. In his wall works, drawings, sculptures, photographs, and films, he explores the concept of the original as well as the cult of the personality that dominates the art world, or aspects of homage and reference. Monk’s works are always associated with the objective of paying respectful tribute to the person quoted, while demystifying their practices in the same way. Time and time again, he shows in the gaps opened up by his rewritings, transformations and shifts that the personal is also a motor of artistic production.

In the lecture One Year, the British artist will speak about his work with a special focus given to works produced over the last twelve months.

The lecture will take place in English. Please note that the event will be filmed.

In cooperation with Mélange:

With the kind support of:

Matthias Sohr (* 1980) appropriates frequently overlooked objects and signs from everyday spaces. In his installations, he liberates stair lifts, handrails, circuit boards, and language from their intended use so that they appear technically cool and “uncannily” autonomous without a reference to the human body. Their forms appear aesthetically reduced in the context of an art space, perhaps even elegant. Since the objects point to their surroundings, they deliver formal references to minimal art. As post-minimalist implementations, however, they cast shadows back to their places of use. The relationship between object and viewer, the human body and technology, is re-experienced through its psychological, emotional dimension.

Matthias Sohr will guide visitors through his installation as part of the Aus- und Vortragen event, which is curated by Juliane Duft.

Please note that the event will be filmed. We would also like to point out that the event space is not barrier-free. Please let us know in advance if we can support you in your visit in this respect.

With the kind support of:

This event is also supported by:

www.koelnerarchitekturpreis.de

The Kölnische Kunstverein, in cooperation with both DC Open 2017 as well as the Open Studios of the city of Cologne, is pleased to present its ten resident artists.

On September 10^th from 12:00 noon until 6pm the following artists will exhibit works in their studios:

Albrecht Fuchs, Erika Hock, Jan Hoeft, Cameron Jamie, Stefanie Klingemann, Alwin Lay, Peter Miller, Ralph Schuster, Thomas Wachholz und Alex Wissel.

Entrance is free of cost and open to all. Refreshments will be provided.

The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr (CZ, 2016, Czech with English subtitles, 63 min) recounts the story of the psychiatric patient and artist Jakob Mohr, who was convinced that his actions were being controlled by his doctor with the aid of a mysterious machine. Mohr depicted this machine in many of his drawings as a wooden box that transmitted beams or waves that passed through his body and took control of him. The drawing Justizmord (Judicial Murder) from 1909–1910 is of a trial depicted from self-contradictory perspectives. The victimised Mohr appears in the role of the accused and his doctor is shown to be an eavesdropper and manipulator influencing the machine and the institution of the court. Mohr identifies many disguised patients and doctors who support his theory of the monstrous conspiracy against him. The drawing becomes the scene for a staged session of the court where Mohr is presented as artist, patient and criminal and in which not only his visions but also other motifs and figures associated with art brut lay claim to their own right to exist. Mohr offers us a report on the details of the legal trial that takes place in his head and into which fragments appear from the outside world of his medical records, criminal records, and an analysis of his drawing from the point of view of its aesthetic qualities.

The film and performance were created and produced in collaboration with Are | are-events.org and supported by the Czech-German Fund for the Future, the City of Prague, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and its Culture Fund, and PLATO – platform (for contemporary art) Ostrava / City Gallery Ostrava and Trojhalí Karolina, association of legal entities.

Please note that the event will be filmed.

With kind support by:

The day after Germany won the World Cup 2014, Helge Achenbach boarded a flight to Düsseldorf and was arrested on landing. It’s the downfall of a wily art dealer who played in the big league, supplying art to major corporations to the tune of hundreds of millions of Euros. Greed and glamour collide. Now he’s behind bars. Behind the great history of the art business, the issues of neoliberalism arise – in the artworks, the spirit and bodies of the Rhineland. The main question is, how did Joseph Beuys’ motto that “Everyone is an artist” become the modern ego society? Director Jan Bonny and artist Alex Wissel present their scenic research on the topic, as a challenge to both the art and film worlds. With Matthias Brandt, Bibiana Beglau, and Joachim Król as just slightly tweaked fictional characters.

Watch the trailer here.

Please note that the seats are limited and we advise to be at the Kölnischer Kunstverein at least 30 minutes before the start of the screening.
There is no booking, only box office tickets available.

With kind support by:

Michael Sailstorfer (* 1979 in Velden) became known in the early 2000s with sculptures, installations, films, and photographs that are characterized by a subtle humor and great metaphorical potential. The starting point for many of his works are situations of everyday life or social and ecological problems, which he presents to the viewer from a different angle. An example of this practice is the work “Antiherbst” (Anti-Autumn), for which he collected the leaves of an ash tree towards the end of 2012, painted it and then reattached it to the tree. For his current exhibition in Berlin, on the other hand, Sailstorfer replaced the engines of various vehicles with standard stoves to focus on the relationship between nature and industrialization.
In his lecture, Sailstorfer, who has been represented in the Cologne Sculpture Park since 2015, will give an overview of the various aspects of his work.

Please note that the event will be filmed.

With kind support by:

The performance by the artist Timo Seber, born 1984 in Cologne, follows on from his exhibition Twitch (GAK, Bremen, 2015). Since this project he has been exploring the world of the computer game DOTA 2, which is one of the world’s most popular e-sports games. At international tournaments, players can win prize money of up to 20 million dollars. Together with Baumi, a German youtuber and DOTA 2 deuhisasten with more than 110 million video views, Seber will introduce visitors to his fascination for the game and vividly demonstrate the influence on his artistic work in recent years.

Please note that the event will be filmed.

With kind support by:

Nora Turato was born in 1991 in Zagreb, Croatia. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and at Werkplaats Typography in Arnhem. Nora Turato is currently a scholarship holder of the Reichsakademie in Amsterdam. In her language performances, the artist Nora Turato calls up precise observations of everyday life. Through the artistically designed speaking of a text, through the rhythm and melody of language, Nora Turato emphasizes the urgency of her socio-cultural themes, which are always related to the here and now. Her performances resemble a tour de force, powerful, provocative and to the point. Turato will be exhibiting with Your Shipment Has Been Dispatched at the NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein from February 11.

In cooperation with Neuer Aachener Kunstverein.

Please note that the peroformance will be filmed.

With kind support by:

Kasper Bosmans, born 1990 in Belgium, is one of the most refreshing young positions on the Belgian art scene. He produces panel paintings, murals, sculptures and installations that often refer to historical or contemporary symbols, coats of arms and pictograms. In Bosmans’ work, the interest in the aspect of decoration – in the sense of Daniel Buren or Niele Toroni – can be traced just as much as in Flemish painting. In the course of his lecture, Kasper Bosmans will give an overview of the various strands within his work for the first time in Germany.

With kind support by:

As part of the “Aus & Vortragen” series, journalist Gesine Borcherdt (Blau – Ein Kunstmagazin) will discuss with this year’s ars viva prizewinners Jan Paul Evers, Leon Kahane and Jumana Manna their artistic working methods and the national and international art scene.

Jan Paul Evers: born 1982 in Cologne, studied fine arts at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts with Dörte Eißfeldt and Thomas Rentmeister. Solo exhibitions at the Villa Stuck in Munich (2014) and the Galerie Max Mayer in Düsseldorf (2013), among others.

Leon Kahane: born 1985 in Berlin, studied at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin, among other places, and studied Free Art at the Berlin University of the Arts with Hito Steyerl and Josephine Pryde. 2016 comprehensive solo exhibition at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, 2015 awarded the art prize Europas Zukunft.

Jumana Manna: born 1987 in New Jersey, studied design at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, studied aesthetics and politics at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions at Malmö Konsthall (2016), Chisenhale Gallery in London (2015), Kunsthall Oslo (2013) and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2013), among others.

With kind support by:

Jan Hoeft presents his new publication +4812 in the context of lectures and talks. Together with Kristina Scepanski (Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster) the artist will talk about the book, football hooligans, public space and business communication.

+4812 includes contributions by Kris Dittel, Carla Donauer, Ben Kaufmann, Alexander Nowak, Aneta Rostkowska, Sławomir Shuty and Huib Haye van der Werf. It is published by Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Vienna and was supported by the Kunststiftung NRW. Design: Lisa Pommerenke

The work of the same name was realized by invitation of Aneta Rostkowska for the Bunkier Sztuki Art Collection in Cracow.

With kind support by:

A few years ago, Claus Richter spoke for the first time at the Kölnischer Kunstverein about the history of Christmas. Where does the Christmas tree come from? Who invented Santa Claus? When was Christmas first celebrated? All these questions were answered then. This year Claus Richter returns with a new Christmas lecture. In his first lecture he dealt with the historical classification of the phenomenon “Christmas”. This year the Cologne artist will deal with the emotions that the ideal Christmas as a narrative awakens. Archaic longings for security, love, affection, peace and an idealized magical world are the elements from which Richter’s own obsession with Christmas is nourished. This year, he will once again use pictures, films and stories to make his way through snow-covered huts, glittering forests and cosy parlours to find out why and how the “festival of love” works so well as an ideal image.

Please note that the event will be recorded.

Supported by:

Lecture: John Tilbury reads parts from Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished
Talk: John Tilbury and Felix Klopotek

An important element of the tribute to Tilbury is the lecture from Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) a life unfinished followed by a discussion about the connection between music and politics and an assessment of current social developments by John Tilbury at the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

The event will be moderated by the Cologne author Felix Klopotek.

John Tilbury is friends with post-war modern composers such as Christian Wolff, Earle Brown and Terry Riley. He also had a friendship with Cornelius Cardew, which began in 1959 and continued with groundbreaking group projects such as AMM and the Scratch Orchestra, as well as political actions. With his biography Cornelius Cardew – A Life Unfinished, John Tilbury has presented one of the great and extraordinarily detailed works on New Music from the middle of the 20th century onwards.

The John Tilbury Tribute is organized by Prof. Dr. Heike Sperling and Marcus Schmickler.

Please note that the event will be filmed. Watch the recording of the event here.

With kind support by:

Saturday, 29.10.2016, 19-2.59 Uhr

Exhibition: Christiana Soulou – Sonnet to the Nile

Sven Johne (*1976, lives and works in Berlin) uses his works to investigate both familiar and unusual situations of everyday life: the hijacking and kidnapping of container ships, the functioning of ports or the journey of a travelling circus through Germany. Johne uses texts, photographs or films to present the results of his research. During his lecture, the artist will give an introduction to his work and present a selection of his video works.

With kind support by:

Peter Wächtler’s films, drawings and sculptures refer to surreal visual worlds that oscillate between tragedy and absurd comedy. Many of his works refer to the aesthetics of comics or children’s book illustrations, whereby the familiarity or catchiness of the image creations is undermined, for example, by the integration of bizarre text passages. The results are haunting formulations that shake the viewer up like a (nightmare) dream. The lecture at the Kölnischer Kunstverein is conceived as a fundamental introduction to the artist’s work.

Peter Wächtler (*1979 in Hannover, lives and works in Brussels) had, among others, solo exhibitions at the Chisenhale Gallery in London (2016), the Renaissance Society in Chicago (2016) and the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster (2014).

Watch the recording of the event here.

With kind support by:

Johannes Wohnseifer (artist) and Susanne Zander (Delmes & Zander) talk about production, reception, curating and historical contextualization of border areas of art.

Watch the recording of the talk here.

With kind support by:

Opening Hours
Friday, 2.9.2016, 7-9 pm
Saturday, 3.9.2016, 12-6 pm
Sunday, 4.9.2016, 12-6 pm

More information about the studio program on www.offene-ateliers-koeln.de

Hi

Anna Virnich became known for her large and small fabric pictures, for which she combines different textiles to form compositions that oscillate between abstraction and narration. With skillful sovereignty she follows the traditions of artists such as Blinky Palermo, Rosemarie Trockel or Cosima von Bonin. However, the work of the artist, who was born in 1984 in Berlin, is not limited to the genre of painting. For some years now, she has also been producing installations for which she uses organic materials such as leather, earth or plants and which appeal to our senses in various ways.

In her lecture, Virnich will present the central strands of her practice, highlighting in particular her two most recent projects in Cologne (2015) and Mexico City (2016).

Please note that the event will be filmed. Watch the recording here.

With kind support by:

(in English)

Innovations in all areas of modern life are becoming increasingly rapid. However, these innovations do not always turn out to be mere extensions of personal freedom or unconditional improvements of everyday life. In his work, artist Anders Clausen (*1978 in Copenhagen, lives and works in Berlin) examines the other, often overlooked side of technological achievements, as shown, for example, in the dependence on contemporary communication media. In the course of his lecture, Clausen will give an insight into his practice, focusing in particular on his latest project, which is an artist’s book.

Please note that the performance will be filmed.

The film Mäusebunker by Lothar Hempel is about the research centre for experimental medicine in Berlin, which is housed in a building erected between 1970 and 1981, whose architecture is committed to the uncompromising style of Brutalism. This building, which visually resembles the appearance of a battleship and which, among other things, is home to the central experimental animal breeding and husbandry of the capital’s university medicine, is the scene of different, sometimes contradictory episodes. For example, the film shows the transformation of a female scientist into a saint, while in other scenes post-modern furniture from Italy is the subject or yellow bananas appear before grey concrete. All in all, the work has the character of a surrealist collage, although it is by no means static due to the artist’s continuous treatment.

Lothar Hempel (*1966 in Cologne) has shown his works at Le Magazin in Grenoble, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles, among others.

Duration: 56 minutes

Watch the trailer here.

Cannibal, a band featuring Cary Loren, Dennis Tyfus and Cameron Jamie, brings together three singular artist biographies, each with distinctive musical references.

Cary Loren belonged to the cluster of young artists – which also included Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw and Nigara (Lynn Rovner) – who founded the art-school band Destroy All Monsters at the University of Michigan in 1973. In his Manifesto of Ignorance: Destroy all Monsters, he writes that the aim of Destroy All Monsters was to serve up a “menagerie of words, images and sounds” in order to counter the primal masculine US rock scene of the 1970s with a different gesture. It was an approach that was open to doubt and desires, and one in which the participants did not always know (if they ever did) where it would lead. They saw themselves as continuing in the tradition of free jazz, rock and avant-garde spirits such as Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart and the Silver Apples, but without negating the rock music of the Stooges or MC5 (later members of the band included Ron Asheton of the Stooges and Michael Davis from MC5). The shows were reminiscent of the Grand Guignol theatre and were short, bloody, anarchic-apocalyptic outbursts in which anything was possible.

Dennis Tyfus, whose real name is Dennis Faes, runs the Ultra Eczema Studio in Antwerp. As a child of the 1980s, he represents a type of artist open to a wide range of approaches. For Tyfus, it is natural to combine work as an illustrator, promoter, visual artist, radio journalist and musician – and he does the latter under a myriad of solo aliases (Bitchy Vallens, Herr Keula, Penis Tea Flush, Vom Grill) and with three bands (Cannibal, Call Gypsi and Speedqueen). Each domain is inconceivable without the others; his artistic practice is an interconnected, web-like structure in which everything holds meaning for everything else.

Cameron Jamie was born in Los Angeles at the end of the 1960s and permanently lives in Paris. He represents the link between generations in Cannibal. His multi-disciplinary practice encompasses performance, sound, drawings, sculpture, photography, artist books and films. In his film work, Cameron Jamie investigates to what extent geographical and traditional conditions shape people’s everyday lives. He questions the diversion projection mechanisms of societies and their members, and the shadows they cast. His film documentaries are sparse, unequivocal insights into a world of desire that is searching for meaning. To this end, he works intensively with music as a stylistic element and has collaborated with the American rock band The Melvins and the Japanese free-noise musician Keiji Haino.

To date, Cannibal have only released one album, the self-titled Cannibal (whose album was designed by Cameron Jamie). However, the referential cosmos opened up by the three protagonists with their record is impressive proof that Cannibal can be regarded as belonging to the lineage of Red Krayola, an avant-garde rock collective founded by Mayo Thompson in the mid-1960s, and Loren’s band Destroy All Monsters.
The tracks were recorded by Loren, Tyfus and Jamie in Antwerp in 2010 and, in utter laid-backedness, not mixed by Warn Defever and Cary Loren in Detroit until three years later. Over the course of the fifteen songs (some of which bear the characteristics of sketches and interludes), there develops a seemingly chaotic swirl of emotions. However, the compelling narrative of the chaos ceases when we put our fear of disorientation to one side. Inspired by the (anti-)aesthetics of white trash and horror, the three celebrate a wild ecstatic outburst between free improvisation and accentuated rhythmic significance.

What Cannibal unleash upon us is both a repelling and, in a peculiar way, tenaciously compelling mixture at one and the same time. This is symbolically encapsulated in their song Sweet Dreams, in which, from the diabolic and sombre white noise, manically recited vocal fragments can suddenly be heard, whose individual, word-like formations come together little by little in our pop-culturally educated heads as fragments of Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by the 1980s British pop group Eurythmics:

“Who am I to disagree … I travel the world and the seven seas … Everybody’s looking for something … Sweet dreams …”

Transmission interruptions.
Potholes of existence.
Completely normal madness.

The band name – referencing cannibalism – certainly plays with primitive humanity’s fear of the dark depths inside itself. Linked to the notion of being eaten by our own kind is the question of what could drive us to eat a fellow human. When Cannibal name one of their songs Phantasm, it is not to make it easy for us by deconstructing everything as pure fantasy, an illusion and a product of our imaginations. It is a way of pushing the internal, vertiginous swirl one level further around themselves.

Horror creeps up in Phantasm (and in many other songs by Cannibal) like it does in Japanese horror films: not as a quiet foreboding of evil as is the case in European cinema, but with the full force of omnipresent and inescapable terror. At two minutes, the length of the song is programmatic: in this piece, there is no place and no time for false flights of hope. Why indulge in illusions when we’re all painfully aware of the tick-tock of life in its brutal finiteness. And so the initiates squeal, and beat, and scream – and in the end, the scream slowly devours itself, just the way one individual has always broken the next in best Fassbinder fashion.

With this in mind: everything can be heard, nothing is certain. Cannibal play with their cards on the table and fully aware that nothing on earth can offer an abyss bleaker than human existence.

We can look forward to seeing how Cannibal showcase all this and much more at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Cannibal is managed by John Sinclair, the former manager of MC5.

Watch the band playing here.

Doors 8pm, Start 8.30pm, Advance sales from 6pm.

With kind support by Julia Stoschek Collection.

The film Single by Alex Wissel and Jan Bonny tells of identity issues as well as personal and universal loneliness in several nested levels of reflection:

The young artist Alex is left by his girlfriend and seeks new affirmation in the opening of a nightclub, the so-called Single Club.

This establishment existed from June 2011 to June 2012 and was located in the basement of the Bistro Agi restaurant not far from Düsseldorf’s main train station. The club was conceived by Wissel as an alternative model of public space and participatory “social sculpture”. (www.single-club.in)

The film, which consists of real documentary material from the club, re-enactments and a fictional story, includes guest appearances by Lars Eidinger, Rita McBride, Peter Doig, Agipet Iljazi, Hans-Jürgen Hafner, Magdalena Kita and Sibel Kekilli, among others.

Afterwards: Hans-Jürgen Hafner (Direktor, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen) in conversation with the artists.

Watch the recording of the talk here.

Aus- & Vortragen is supported by:

Weltpremiere

The artist Kalin Lindena was born in 1977 in Hanover and studied with Prof. Johannes Brus and Prof. Walter Dahn at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig and now lives in Berlin. Her presentations mostly have the character of stage-like stagings that infiltrate conventional exhibition modes. Thus Lindena combines textiles, objects made of paper, figurative metal constructions and cinematic works to create complex installations that take up the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk and often become the setting for performative works. In this respect, her work is associated with a special form of dynamism that touches the viewer directly and captivates him or her. For the event at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Kalin Lindena is planning a performative lecture under the title World Premiere, which will give an impression of the diversity of her work.

Please note that the performance will be filmed.

Watch the recording of the event here.

Aus- & Vortragen is supported by:

Workshop in der aktuellen Ausstellung von Uri Aran Mice

Dead Men Tell No Tales

Alvaro Urbano’s (*1983 in Madrid, lives in Berlin) works show a strong reference to architecture and fiction. In doing so, he makes use of the medium that suits him best, which can range from room-sized installations to film and performance. The performance Dead Men Tell No Tales (2016), premiered at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, is also in this context. In three acts, which are performed repeatedly and simultaneously, the artist analyses the relationship between artists’ biographies, iconic artworks and modes of presentation in exhibitions. An important moment is the perception of the objects: Surviving large pedestals, moving melancholy through the space – empty and without content. A carpet on which a child plays, but not with toys, but with replicas of famous art and cultural objects. A person dressed in black who buries an object in the garden of the Kunstverein with the help of a shovel.

Watch the recording of the performance here.

Aus- & Vortragen is supported by:

Luke Fowler, born 1978, studied applied art at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee. The focus of his artistic practice is on film collages, with which he continues the tradition of British free cinema of the 1950s. The works of the Glasgow-based artist, who also works as a musician and documentary filmmaker, have been shown in recent years at the Tate Modern in London, the Schirm Kunsthalle in Frankfurt and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, among others. In 2012 Fowler was also nominated for the Turner Prize.

Marcus Schmickler, born 1968, is a composer and musician living in Cologne. His oeuvre, which has received numerous awards and international acclaim, includes electronic music as well as compositions for chamber ensemble, choir and orchestra. Since 2010 Schmickler teaches Music/Sound at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Watch the recording of the performance here.

Guided tours through the exhibition of João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva –The Missing Hippopotamus

Andreas Schmitten in Conversation with the Cognitive Psychologyist Helmut Leder (University of Vienna)

Andreas Schmitten studied Art History and Philosophy and afterwards at the deparment for sculpture with Prof. Hubert Kiecol and Prof. Georg Herold at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Since his grauduation in 2012 Schmitten particitpated in several exhibitions in Germany, as well as interantionally.

Since 2004 Helmut Leder is Professor of Cognitive Psychologyist at the university of Vienna. His main fields of research are aesthetics, psychology of the arts, design – and face perception.

Admission from 20:00, beginning at 21:30, advance booking from 18:00

On the occasion of the world premiere of their single, released by Edition Fieber, John Bock and Aydo Abay offer far more than a classical concert in the Riphahnsaal of the Kölnischer Kunstverein!

In the context of the performative performance, rock and art context are brought together and led into the psychedelic.

Before and after the performance, Jan Lankisch and Thomas Venker from Edition Fieber will play. The Cologne artist record label has released editions of Cosima von Bonin, David Shrigley, Kai Althoff, Terence Koh and Raymond Pettibon.

Watch the recording of the concert here.

Watch the recording of the performance here.

The artist Johannes Bendzulla (*1984 in Saarbrücken), who lives in Düsseldorf, will speak at the Kölnischer Kunstverein about his practice and his current exhibition at the Natalia Hug Gallery.
Bendzulla studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Christopher Williams and Martin Gostner and at the Cologne Academy of Media Arts.

Errors Hit Orient is a collaborative music performance by Will Holder and Chris Evans. The performance takes football match newspaper reviews written by BS Johnson and sets them to musical accompaniment, with Evans playing base and Holder reciting the match reviews.

in English

Tiril Hasselknippe (*1983 in Norway) creates sculptures, objects and installations that captivate with their vivid colors, shapes and surfaces. On the occasion of her exhibition Phones, taking place at the same time in Cologne, the artist will give a basic introduction to her work and an outlook on upcoming artistic and curatorial projects.

For his works, Ariel Schlesinger (*1980 in Israel) mostly uses everyday objects such as bicycles, pencils or sheets of paper, which he brings to life through surprising interventions and usually with a good portion of humor. For example, small flames emerge from the tire valves of a bicycle, pencils bend or sheets of paper begin to dance. Ariel Schlesinger talks about his work at the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

from 7 pm

with the Cologne triumvirate (at 8pm), photo studio Albrecht Fuchs, the TNT Brass Band (live) and the DJ`s Kitty Atomic and Miss Stereo

The carnival festival of the Kölnischer Kunstverein for members, artists and friends in costume with music, food and drink.

In 2009 the Kölnischer Kunstverein revived the legendary rag ball. We are happy to be able to indulge in the LAANGEN ENT this year. The LAANGE ENT was a costume party in 1920s Cologne. It was not until 2014 that documents of this debauched artists’ festival were rediscovered and presented at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Duck costumes are therefore particularly popular this year. If you appear in a duck costume or with duck details, you will receive a special golden wizardry designed and signed by Cologne artist and archivist Claus Richter!

SOLD OUT!

Kasia Fudakowski (*1985 in London, lives and works in Berlin) is a sculptor whose installations are often associated with performance. In her works, the artist makes use of the philosophy of humour, which is expressed both sculpturally and in her performative interventions. The artist repeatedly deals with different mentalities, as her recent exhibitions “Stoics”, “Enthusiasts” and “Pessimists” have shown.

Coming Soon

Alwin Lay (*1984 in Romania, lives and works in Cologne) studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne by Johannes Wohnseifer and Mischa Kuball and by Christopher Williams at the Düsseldorf Art Academy until 2013. His works are located at the interface of photography, film, sculpture and installation, whereby photography is usually the starting point of his works.
At the Kölnischer Kunstverein the artist will talk about his work.

In David Claerbouts (*1969 in Belgium) artistic work, time has a core function in an aesthetic reflection of its entire complexity and itself becomes the most important narrative. Claerbouts’ photographic and filmic works deal with the problem of the representability of everything temporal. They explore the border between fixed and moving images, blurring past, present and future.
In Claerbouts’ video works, the boundaries between photography and film are dissolved. Last but not least, these two media are used in such a way that they thematize their respective characterizing properties, and the minimal movement of a carefully composed situation often generates in the viewer a feeling of timelessness or an awareness of temporality.
Not only are there echoes of film history, Claerbouts works are also closely interwoven with Gilles Deleuze’s film theory. Thus, in his video works, the viewer does not experience time as a measure of movement, but rather movement as the framework of time.
Claerbou’s works are characterized by a characterizing deceleration; the narrative content is de-contextualized in the atmosphere of the seemingly endless moment, thereby subtly manipulating the situation.
Claerbout often addresses the topos of time as the situation of waiting, such as in the work ‘Oil Workers (of the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain’ from 2013. This video work shows more than 40 men who, surprised by a heavy rain shower, have found shelter under a bridge and are now waiting for the rain to end, looking seemingly motionlessly towards the viewer. The constant and yet calm rotation of the camera over a classical pictorial composition manifests this temporally stretched moment of waiting.

At the Kölnischer Kunstverein, David Claerbout talks about current and upcoming projects.

in English

“Another plane flies over more organisms being moved somewhere. From the doorway I see the grey sky the threat of rain and the neighbours washing line not even a minute passes without another plane passing over I look forward to being in one tomorrow I am unsure the ribbon is passing through the typewriter ok and again I have doubts. I think of the summer I think of each plane ride I have taken, overnight trains, car journeys, each city, country – I listen to a conversation – it puts you off your confidence, then they move away.”

Juliette Blightman

Maria Loboda (b.1979 in Poland) tracks down what is hidden – and sometimes uncanny – and she deciphers or hints at it in her sculptures, collages and installations, where it often remains in a state of mystery. These works’ charging with magic and occultism and the representation of these often provides a source utilised by Loboda to create her art.

Loboda produces an archaeology of the symbolic, in which the unconscious – human beings’ links to nature and long-forgotten systems, signs and symbols – undergoes a reorganisation.

In her work for documenta 13, This Work is Dedicated to an Emperor, 20 cypresses became mysterious performers who altered their military formation each day, in an almost inexplicable manner, and assumed new formations and emblematic constellations. This work took up principles articulated by Vegetius in his 4th-century treatise De Re Militari. Strategies of exercising power and of forgotten knowledge were transposed into an almost Baroque choreography in Kassel’s Auepark.

The Sublime, which was distinguished during the Romantic period, seems to be echoed in Loboda’s contemporary enquiries. The possibility of relativising laws of regularity becomes tangible; knowledge and superstition, system and chaos meet once more in an idiom of the object, whose forms grow out of nature or the things of our precisely structured and organised daily life.

At the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Maria Loboda will speak about her artistic practice as well as recent and upcoming projects.

Born in Krakow, Poland, 1979
Lives in New York, USA

Education:

Interdiciplinary Fine Art Studies, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule,
Frankfurt, Class Mark Leckey, 2003-2008
Visiting Artist and Scholar, New York University, Steinhardt School of Culture,
Education and Human Developement, Class Carol Bove, 2007-2008

Exhibitions (solo):

2014
SCHLEICHER/LANGE, Berlin, Germany
Dead Guardian, Haus Salve Hospes, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

2013
Chalcedony into Onyx, curated by Anna Gritz, one evening event at South London
Gallery, London, UK
Las Fieras – The Beasts, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain
Frieze Projects, curated by Cecilia Alemani, Randalls Island, New York, USA
General Electric, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, USA

2012
The Tempest, Ludlow 38, New York, USA
The Messenger (Be aware of the one who appears not to be moving),
SCHLEICHER/LANGE, Paris, France

2011
Peril, Maisterravalbuena, Madrid, Spain
Dynamite Winter Palace, SCHLEICHER/LANGE, Paris, France

2010
In the Autumn the Electricity withdraws into the Earth again and rests, KROME
Gallery, Berlin, Germany
New Thoughts, Old Forms, Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld, Germany

2009
Conversational Style, SCHLEICHER/LANGE, Paris, France

2006
Moderne Ehe, Ritter & Staiff, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

The artist Jason Dodge (*1969 in Newton, PA) lives and works in Berlin

Exhibitions (selection): Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz (2013); 55th Venice Biennale, Lithuanian Pavilion, curated by Raimundas Malasauskas, Venice, Italy (2013); Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany (2012), Project Space, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Germany (2009); Casey Kaplan, New York; Lüttkenmeyer, Berlin; Yvon Lambert, Paris, and many more.

175 Years Kölnischer Kunstverein

Anniversary and summer event on 30 August 2014 from 12 to 18 p.m.!

The Kölnischer Kunstverein is celebrating its 175th anniversary this year with various events.

Program

12:00 “Hut in the Mud” by Andreas Fischer
Opening of the event with presentation of the project

12:00 – 14:00 Workshop for children
Children create their own small works of art as part of the exhibition
by Andra Ursuta / 7 – 9 years, registration: info@koelnischerkunstverein.de

12:30 – 14:00 guided tour of the exhibition “Claus Richter”
Guided tour through the art parcour designed by Claus Richter
to the 175th anniversary

13:00 Guided tour of the exhibition “Andra Ursuta”
Guided tour through the current exhibition with Carla Donauer

13:30 Greeting
Speeker: Jürgen Roters, Mayor of Cologne,
Dr. Thomas Waldschmidt, Chairman of the Board of the Kölnischer Kunstverein,
Moritz Wesseler, Director Kölnischer Kunstverein
14:30 – 16:00 Guided tour of the exhibition “Claus Richter”

14:30 Architectural tour of “Die Brücke” with Volker Spies
(Architect AKNW, metropolis planen + beraten)
Former and current use and history of the building

15:00 Lecture by Susanne Titz
The director of the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach and
former director of the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein talk about
the history and significance of the Kunstvereine in Germany

15:00 – 17:00 Workshop for children
Children create their own small works of art as part of the exhibition
by Andra Ursuta / 9 – 12 years, registration: info@koelnischerkunstverein.de

16:00 Introduction to the exhibition “Uri Aran”
About the filmic works Unitled (2006) / Mud (2010) /
Uncle in Jail (2012) by the artist Uri Aran with Carla Donauer

16:30 Architectural tour of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation with Peter Sparla
(LILL + SPARLA landscape architects/engineers)
Open House in the neighbouring building

16:30 Exhibition tour “Andra Ursuta”
Guided tour through the current exhibition with Moritz Wesseler

17:00 “The Cologne Years”
Udo Kittelmann, Director of the Nationalgalerie Berlin, in conversation with
Holger Liebs, chief editor of the magazine Monopol, about the 1990s
years at the Kölnischer Kunstverein

18:00 Drawing of the raffle with large and small works of art

12:00 – 18:00
Open studios – The scholarship holders open their rooms in the Hahnenstraße
Lottery ticket sale
Guided tours through the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung with the architects
Professor Cheret and Mrs Bozic (cheret bozic architects)

Ghost in the machine

The Kölnischer Kunstverein is pleased to welcome the Düsseldorf artist Andreas Fischer in the context of the event series Aus-& Vortragen.

In his sculptural work Andreas Fischer creates wonderfully bizarre machines from simple materials and used everyday objects. Inspired by motors and spoken texts, the slumbering machines only come to life when the viewer turns to them. The exchange between man and machine also raises questions about their mutual relationship. For through their anti-functional choreographies, the machines elude human appropriation and no longer exist only as functional objects. In their imperfection and fragility they ultimately also refer to Andreas Fischer’s fundamental interest in time and finiteness.

The artist’s lecture will take place on June 11, 2014 at 7 pm in the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

BIOGRAPHY

Born 1972 in Munich
Lives and works in Düsseldorf

EDUCATION

2003 master student of Prof. Georg Herold, Academy of Arts Düsseldorf

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2013 Head of the Clock, Gallery Johann König, Berlin
Oven about us, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg
2012 machines. Your Time Is My Rolex, Museum Ludwig, Cologne
2011 Contract with America, Gallery Vera Gliem, Cologne
2009 OFEN AUS, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn
2007 New Talent Support Bunk, Art Cologne, Cologne

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2013 The Kunstverein since 1817, Hamburger Kunstverein, Hamburg
2012 Atelier+Kitchen=Laboratories of the Senses, Marta Herford, Herford
2010 Lappenloch wall installation, Museum Ludwig, Cologne
2007 Hotel Kerberos, KIT – Art in the Tunnel, Düsseldorf
2005 Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria

SCHOLARSHIPS AND PRIZES

2014 boesner art award
2012 Project scholarship of the Kunststiftung NRW
2010 Scholarship from Ringenberg Castle
2008 Award for Visual Arts of the City of Düsseldorf

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Paul Czerlitzki (*1986 in Danzig, lives and works in Düsseldorf) is realizing a work on the occasion of his participation in the event series Aus- & Vortragen on the upper floor of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, which will be presented on 28 May in the context of an artist talk.

Posters 1994 – 2014

Wednesday, 7 May / 7pm: Book presentation: Johannes Wohnseifer, Posters 1994–2014 (StrzeleckiBooks)

A presentation of selected posters can be seen from 7 May – 14 May 2014.
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Hahnenstrasse 6, 50667 Cologne, koelnischerkunstverein.de

About the book project:

The value of ephemera. For 20 years, Johannes Wohnseifer has been designing the posters for his exhibitions. Unless someone is categorised as a ‘poster artist’ within the field of so-called ‘applied art’, then these printed works quite often appear only all the way at the back of a catalogue raisonné, devalued by way of drastically reduced reproductions. But what if the artist sees the matter quite differently? Around 80 posters, which Johannes Wohnseifer created between 1994 and 2014 for exhibitions of his work, have been gathered together here. The artist has reworked some of them, but always in the spirit of their former use.

This large-scale project is thus nothing less than a retrospective in the form of a book of posters. In this way the project removes the works from the no-man’s-land between utilitarian announcement and autonomous work. The book – in DIN A3 format, in keeping with the posters – functions both as a complete catalogue and as an artist’s book. It presents what are ostensibly utilitarian objects as autonomous artworks. Here an entire group of works that is always in danger of being passed over reveals itself as a treasure trove.

strzelecki-books

untitled (holes)

For this concert Iko Birk plays an interpretation of a fragmented score that Buch handed to him four years ago. The set of 120 music sheets was produced by Buch’s grandfather, who stopped speaking for good at the age of seventeen. The notation of the score is unusual in the sense that only few notes are present. The main part of the notation across the staves is made up by small colourful drawings that are interspersed with words. Twenty-five of the present sheets are heavily worn and only bear holes in the paper accross faded lines. On these  sheets the author appears to have painstakingly erased all notation. The sheets are only partially numbered and a beginning and an end of the score are not clearly defined.

The concert will be played once only. No recording will be made.

Wednesday, 26.2 / 7 pm: Kristina Buch / Untitled (holes) / Iko Birk plays a one-off concert / limited tickets must be prebooked via email / info@koelnischerkunstverein.de / 12 €

Review

Conzert – The World In Pieces

afterwards DJ Korkut Elbay (Cómeme, Capatazz)
starting at 20.00

World In Pieces is a musical work that Alfons Knogl developed during an Istanbul scholarship of the city of Cologne 2011. The piece will be released together with a remix by Korkut Elbay as 12″ record at Strzelecki-Books. At the Koelnischer Kunstverein, Alfons Knogl’s piece will be performed together with Daniel Ansorge and Holger Otten in a specially developed instrumental realization.

Alfons Knogl (*1976) is an artist and his work explores an expanded concept of sculpture and object, which includes references to interior design and fundamental geological formations as well as music as a sculptural form of expression.

On the same evening at 7 pm the exhibitions of the artists Thea Djordjadze (Koelnischer Kunstverein) and Marianna Christofides (OG2) will open.

Afterwards
DJ Korkut Elbay (Cómeme, Capatazz)

Preis dem Todesüberwinder

Concert
from 8 pm

In 2011 Michaela Meise published her album Preis dem Todesüberwinder (Clouds Hill, Hamburg) which assembles seven ecclesiastical anthems composed between the 16th and 19th centuries performed by Meise. The artist accompanies herself on the accordion. The producer Thies Mynther ensured a simple recording without special effects. The eponymous song – Preis dem Todesüberwinder – was recorded together with the musician Dirk von Lowtzow.

Michaela Meise (*1976) is primarily a visual artist. Despite previous music and album projects such as Songs of Nico, published in 2005 together with Sergej Jensen, or her vocal contribution to Phantom Ghost, Meise sees music as her hobby. Attentive friends of her work will discover many connections between her musical projects and her artistic practice.

Afterwards:
DJs Michael Bollhöfer (Basspräsidium Records) and
Roman Jungblut (80km vor Baghdad)

On the same night:
Opening of the exhibition
Bernd Krauß: Das ist heute möglich
at 7 pm

Concert

at 20 pm

The concert by artist and musician Michaela Melián at Kölnischer Kunstverein is the first after a number of years during which she refrained from public solo performances.
Michaela Melián is a founding member of the group “F.S.K.” (1980). She has won numerous prizes for audio drama. Her audiovisual installations are often based on intensive historical and contemporary research. Songs from her solo albums “Baden-Baden” (2004), “Föhrenwald“ (2006) and “Los Angeles“ (2007) are closely related to the development of many of her art installations.

Afterwards the party continues with DJ Tolouse Low Trax: (Kreidler/Salon des Amateurs/Karaoke Kalk).

In context of the exhibition Chto Delat?

Concerto for Modern, Movie, and Pop Music for Ten Instruments and Voice

8 p.m

European premiere, world premiere in a revised version, 2011
A cooperation project by ON – Neue Musik Köln and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Stephen Prina and the Ensemble Garage will present the Concerto for Modern, Movie and Pop Music for Ten Instruments and Voice by Stephen Prina in the theatre hall at the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

Beside his artistic career Prina received a musical education and has since the 1990s been a member of the experimental pop music band “The Red Krayola”. The Concert for Ten Instruments and Voice which premiered in 2010 in St. Louis is based on the Concerto OP24 by Anton Webern but interjects the individual movements of the concerto with pop songs and compositions by Stephen Prina. Prina himself will sing and play the guitar. Akin to his other artistic works Prina bases the concert on a key composition of modernity and shows its influence on pop music.

Composed of students and graduates of the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln the Ensemble Garage was founded by Brigitta Muntendorf and Rodrigo López Klingenfuss in 2009. The Ensemble focuses on cooperations with solo artists as well as on performances of their own compositions and works by other young composers. Projects have included performances for ON – Neue Musik Köln, KGNM, Landesmusikrat NRW, Kölner Musiknacht and many more.

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Gravity & Grace

Screening in the cinema of die Brücke
8 pm

The film tells the story of the artist Gravity who earns an additional income for herself as a prostitute in New Zealand and later on joins an occult-scientific group. Eventually she moves to New York to try and make her (mis-)fortune in the art world.

The American author and filmmaker Chris Kraus has had a determining influence on the New York video and film scene of the mid-80s and will contribute an essay to Lucie Stahl’s artist’s book. Since 1990 she supports and publishes books by long neglected female authors like Kathy Acker and Eileen Myles with the Semiotext(e) publisher. In her own written work she deals with such wide ranging topics such as feminism and gender-politics, prostitution and philosophy.

Two workshops with Stephen Prina on his work (in English)
Institute for New Music at the Cologne University of Music and Dance
Mon. 30.05.2011 (full day) and Tues. 31.05.2011 (morning),
Start at 10 am

The internationally renowned conceptual artist and musician Stephen Prina is offering a public workshop as part of a cooperation between the Kölnischer Kunstverein and the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz. In his artistic work, Stephen Prina makes use of a differentiated aesthetic system of reference in the fields of new and pop music, painting and architectural history. He also works as a composer and was a long-time member of the avant-garde rock band The Red Krayola.
In the seminar, Prina will present his working methods and in particular his two films Vinyl II and The Way He Always Wanted It II, talk about composition strategies and make his interdisciplinary approach the subject of discussion. Part of his seminar will be the preparation of a music performance with students of the Musikhochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln, which will be shown within his solo exhibition He was but a bad translation.

Program
Monday, 30.05.2011
10 am Start of the seminar, University of Music and Dance Cologne, Room 315
12 noon lunch break and transfer
13 pm Kölnischer Kunstverein, cinema
Stephen Prina presents his films Vinyl II, 2000 and The Way He Always Wanted It II, 2009.
afterwards: discussion

Tuesday 31.05.2011
10 am. beginning of the seminar, Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Cologne, Room 315
Prina talks about possibilities of composing
11.30 a.m. coffee break
12 – 2 pm Meeting with participants of the performance The Way He Always Wanted It VIII, 2011

Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln
Institut für Neue Musik, Raum 315
Unter Krahnenbäumen 87
50668 Köln

Performer/Audience/Mirror, 1977

8 pm

Dan Graham (born 1942) is an influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both a practitioner and an art critic and theorist. Graham especially focuses on the relationship between artwork and viewer in his pieces. In his early performance Performer/Audience/Mirror Graham examines not only his own movements and makes the public participate in it, he also transforms the audience into actors and reproaches the mirror to the people so that they start to observe the artist and themselves. Kölnischer Kunstverein shows the documentation of the performance at De Appel Institute, Amsterdam in 1977.

Endnotes

8 – 9 pm

Tris Vonna-Michell’s (born 1982) speech performances refer to historical events and persons, personal biographies or visited cities. He develops an intriguing immediacy through his fast and poetic monologues and includes slides, objects and texts in his performances as demonstrative tools of the stories, which he presents to the visitor mostly one-on-one. He lately started to work in installations. His slide installations for example are complemented by the underlying voice of the artist commenting and fuelling the shown images. Tris Vonna-Michell won the ars viva prize in 2008/09 and has participated in numerous exhibitions such as Koeln Show2, European Kunsthalle, Cologne (2007), Performa 07, New York, Yokohama Triennial (2008), 5th berlin biennial (2008) and Tate Triennial, London (2009). He has had solo exhibitions at among others Schnittraum, Cologne (2006), Kunstverein Braunschweig, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2007) and Kunsthalle Zürich (2008/09).

Lentz und Winters merken was

8 pm

One can nevertheless not always only read! A doctor becomes a worm through the word. Schiller´s The bell overhauls the reader. Rilke has the right to sound differently. Ballet goes without music, and brass-band music goes without trumpet. With this Lentz/Winter revue one never knows, what will happen next and especially not, what happened just a minute ago. A lot is at stake – Lentz and Winter fight for each point. Therefore the listener recognizes something again, which he did never see before.

Michael Lentz (born 1964) works as an author, musician, and performer. Since 2004 he has been president of the FreeAcademy of the Arts in Leipzig. Lentz has received numerous awards, among others the Ingeborg-Bachmann Prize (2001), the Hans-Erik-Nossak Sponsorship Award of the BDI (Federation of German Industries) (2002), or the Prize of the Literature Houses (2005) His latest novels are Liebeserklärung (2003) and Pazifik Exil (2007). In 2005 Michael Lentz and his colleague Uli Winters developed their literature performance and presented it on a tour through Cologne, Leipzig, Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, Salzburg, Frankfurt and Stuttgart. In these performances Michael Lentz reads while two puppets in the background, played by Uli Winters, constantly comment on what he is saying. By intervening in the lecture situation the puppets poke fun at the reading situation and of the performer himself.

Pictures exemplify quite nicely the Exhibition as an Event from afar, Version Cologne

8 pm

In his live performance Achim Lengerer refers to his preceding exhibition Blows into the microphone: Is it all right? Voice off mike: It’s all right. Pause… from 2006, in which he re-enacts a lecture of the American filmmaker Hollis Frampton and his famous film Nostalgia (1971) and comments on its avant-gardistic refraction of word and image. Achim Lengerer (born 1973) works with questions of language that he either thematises in his performances or spatialises within his installations. In the last years Lengerer founded different collaborative projects: labelfuerproduktion (2005) was initiated by Lengerer as a collaborative, process-oriented art project that presented performances, exhibitions and events at institutions like Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna or Kunstverein Braunschweig. He co-founded the artist-run space freitagsküche in Frankfurt a. M. in 2004 that later on moved to Berlin. The third long-term project, voiceoverhead is a collaboration with his artist colleague Dani Gal. On the basis of a huge record collection with sound documents, mainly speeches, the artists developed presentations and DJ-lectures at among others INSA Art Space, Seoul, SMART Project Space, Amsterdam and Portikus, Frankfurt am Main. Achim Lengerer has had various exhibitions and presentations at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Bonner Kunstverein, and others. Lengerer runs the travelling showroom and instant publishing house Scriptings – currently based in Amsterdam.

The Great Pretending

9 pm, Music Performance

Christian Naujoks moved only recently from Vienna to Cologne and since August 2009 he is studio scholarship holder of Kölnischer Kunstverein. His artistic work includes performances, videos and music productions. In his music lecture he will tell us stories from „the discourse department“ of the Viennese twelve-tone musik and beyond that he will touch us with his musical “aphoprisms”, which vary strangely between an exhilarated Crooner ballad and a modernistic way of being to the point.

The event takes place in the series Antenne Köln, supported by RheinEnergieStiftung Kultur and as part of the Lange Nacht der Museen.
Presented by Spex

TkH (Walking Theory), The last theoretical performance – Génerique

8 pm

After a long line of theoretical performances performed in an opera house, boxing ring, botanical gardens, on the internet, TV, radio, in the university amphitheatre, classroom, museum, gallery, paper and documenta 12 in Kassel, Walking Theory (TkH) shows its body for the last time. Its breasts, to be more precise.

TkH (Walking Theory) was founded as a research theoretical-artistic group in Belgrade in 2000. Main domain of the work of the TkH Platform is to encourage the development of contemporary performing arts practices and their critical discourses through the TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory, educational projects, an on-line platform, and artistic and theoretical projects. TkH Platform is also engaged in the cultural policy field and empowering of infrastructural and discoursive potentials of independent artistic and cultural initiatives.

Herd Instinct 360°

5 pm, Lecture Performance, performed by Frances Scholz

Fia Backström describes her lectures Herd Instinct 360° as cult action or group therapy and promises: „We will feel well“. Herd Instinct 360° is an invitation to hear, to see and speak over community. In the performance Backström performed by Frances Scholz she takes Dan Grahams historical work Performer/Audience/Mirror (1977) as a starting point and produces a kind feedback for the pictures, which groups produce. While with Graham the person in the audience is reflected as part of the mass, Backström´s performance is a kind of public speech in form of a lecture, a comment on forming and behaviour-forms of groups. Between November 2005 and January 2006 Fia Backström (born 1968) set up three Herd Instinct 360º Sunday situations at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York. The project has travelled to numerous locations such as United Nations Plaza, Berlin, De Appel, Amsterdam and Serpentine Gallery, London. Her work has recently been shown at the Whitney Biennial, New York, White Columns, New York, ICA, London and The Kitchen, New York.

Toute une nuit, 1982

On the occasion of the finissage of the exhibition Après Crépuscule a guided tour with the curator Oliver Tepel will take place. Afterwards the film by Chantal Akerman Toute une nuit, 1982 (OmU) will be shown.
With the kind support of Filmclub 813.

The Long Tail

7 pm

In May a live performance by Mark Leckey will take place on the stage of the theatre hall in the film set installation. He will give a lecture in which he will reflect his view on the history of television: meaning and decay including the role of the BBC in this context.

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MOUVOIR / Stephanie Thiersch
Performance / Dancing theater

8 pm

The Kunstverein launches its stage programme starting with the dance theatre piece Helter Skelter by the company MOUVOIR and their choreographer Stephanie Thiersch.

In Helter Skelter Stephanie Thiersch designs a perfidious choreographed arrangement combining elements of fragmented video stills, live music, recited text and dance as a critical commentary on everyday stereotypes of traditional and contemporary female roles and images. Five physically very different female dancers try on various roles whereby socially accepted behaviour and oppressive regimes are questioned. Subdued and unpredictable aggressions explode, subtle images of violence emerge from a seemingly naive childlike attitude, alarmingly familiar and socially accepted. Helter Skelter draws a picture of an emancipatory power of self-determination, as sketched out by gender theorist Judith Butler, that is itself in constant danger to turn into new mechanisms of power and exclusion.

Choreography/concept: Stephanie Thiersch; choreography/dance: Viviana Escalé, Alexandra Naudet, Karen Piewig, Teresa Ranieri, Agustina Sario; choreographic assistence: Alexandra Naudet; video: Martin Rottenkolber, Hirschberg/Schreiber; music/guitar: Joseph Suchy; light: Ansgar Kluge; technical director : Niko Moddenborg; stage: Stephanie Thiersch; costume: Svea Kossack; script: Andrea Heller

Helter Skelter ist the first performance to take place in the series Antenne Köln, generously supported by Rheinenergie Stiftung Kultur. Antenne Köln introduces the work of young local artists working in different media at the Kunstverein. Stephanie Thiersch benefits from a studio grant of the Imhoff Stiftung and the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

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Lecture by Thomas Arslan on 10. February, 7 pm

The film series The Border deals with besieged and disputed borders. For those who are unwelcome, crossing it represents a life-threatening risk. On the “other side” these borders are guarded with a complex military and police apparatus. This is where projections meet, which differ from one another depending on which side one is looking from. Here a fear of what is foreign, of other cultures, of being overwhelmed by their “poverty” and their “backwardness” meets the hope and the longing for a better life more in keeping with human dignity.

The film series shows works that deal with the border and its effects in different ways. In some of the films the border or border region is the main setting; in others it is less immediately present, but still an important point of reference.

Thomas Arslan (*1962), filmmaker and screenwriter, lives and works in Berlin.
De l’autre côté (Chantal Akerman) B/F 2002, 103 min, original version with Engl. subtitles
The film about the Mexican-US American border begins on the Mexican side and describes the hopes and desperation of those hoping to immigrate to the USA. The locations that Chantal Ackermann shows in tranquil pans and tracks are charged with this.

A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien) Taiwan 1989, 157 min, original version with German subtitles
The story of a Taiwanese family caught up in the whirl of events in the post-war era. The film begins in 1945 with the end of Japanese occupation and depicts the brief transitional period until 1949, when the country is oppressed again by the authoritarian politics of mainland China.

Touch of Evil (Orson Welles) USA 1958, 111 min, original version with German subtitles
A crime film, a late “film noir” work, which is also located at the Mexican-American border. Welles is less interested in the border as a concrete political site, but more as an exaggerated, moral no-man’s-land, where all certainties crumble into dust.

Loin (André Téchiné) F/E 2001, 120 min, original version with German subtitles
Young Serge travels back and forth between France, Spain and Morocco as a truck driver. In Tangier Serge, Sarah and Said cross paths. “Loin” unfolds a fabric of wishes and dreams, in which the private sphere and the concrete political conditions are mutually interwoven.

Border Incident (Anthony Mann) USA 1949, 94 min, original version
One of Anthony Mann’s early works. Two American undercover agents infiltrate a ring of human smugglers operating between the American-Mexican border.

Scarface (Brian De Palma) USA 1983, 170 min, German synchronized version
Al Pacino plays the Cuban immigrant Tony Montana, for whom there is nothing in the USA except misery. “The world is yours.” He takes this advertising slogan promising the “American way of life” and makes it his own with a vengeance.

Zeit der trunkenen Pferde (Bahman Ghobadi) Iran 2000, 79 min, original version with German subtitles
This feature film shot with amateur actors depicts with naturalistic force the rough existence of five orphans in the north of the Iranian part of Kurdistan. A life-saving operation for the eldest, handicapped orphan Madi is to be paid for with money earned by smuggling across the border. For this operation Madi has to achieve the impossible: to reach the other side of the border.

Allemagne, année 90 neuf zéro (Jean-Luc Godard) F 1991, 62 min, Ger./Fr. original version
A commissioned work for television on the theme of loneliness. Godard decided to make a film about the loneliness of a state. After the disappearance of the German-German border, the aged agent Lemmy Caution wanders through the former GDR territory and approaches the west. His path is strewn with traces of German history.

Artistic interest in the philosophically negated belief in miracles
Film series, compiled by Jutta Koether

„This film series is designed to showcase a special notion of ‘art film’ and apply the topic of film and métissage to the film itself. The selected films are not merely based on a single idea, but are a fabric of cinematic ideas and genres—indeed, the films are themselves nearly unclassifiable artefacts. These ‘blended existences’—mixtures in which one can find overlapping Pornocult/Underground/Horror/ DocuDrama/Drugculture/CrimeStories, and so on—address their own hybrid nature in very different ways.

Métissage is interpreted here as the ‘cultures between cultures’ which result in this context—the feelings of destabilization and the dissolution of affiliations. It is the blurring and new formation of an art form as a world between worlds, in which loss can also be experienced as liberating. There are expressions of forms of non-insight that come precisely from these intermediate worlds. There is fractured occultism. There is a potential for aggression inherent in some of the films. Or cult structures. These films inhabit an area beyond such categories as ‘feature’ or ‘auteur’ film, yet in some cases, they are marked and enriched by practical experience. In any case, the most personal subject matter intermingles with the extremely general.

Something that causes the Aufhebung (denial) of self. To not become part of the dissolution—not to inhabit the space inbetween or to consider oneself to be the other niche, but to put oneself on the line precisely there—that is the ‘Aufhebung der Aufhebung’ (denial of denial). In other words: ‘Fresh Aufhebung’—a process, an artistic interest in the philosophically negated belief in miracles. Something is communicated unintentionally in the works of this series. Psychoaesthetic effects become clear in the process. There is a mixing of effects. The film series becomes a living stage on which ‘not being denied’ is presented, and self-hybridization—a productive negation of one’s own nature and genre—is performed in very different ways.

I consider such events to be a reinforcement of the practical-political mysteries of artistic work, as rituals from which artistic action can arise. Each film is its own existence on probation; each has its own unique elements of tragedy and parody, and its own vivid, momentary revelations of the inexplorable.“ (Jutta Koether)

The artist Jutta Koether lives and works in New York and Cologne.

Colloque de Chiens
Hypothèse du tableau volé, Raúl Ruiz, F 1978, 88 min.
Ruiz’s film began as a documentary about the writer and painter Pierre Klossowski, but quickly turned into a fascinating feature film essay. In the film, an art collector conducts a tour of his fantastic collection of “living pictures.” One mysterious picture is missing. This is considered one of the most significant French films of the 1970s.

Performance, Donald Cammel, Nicholas Roeg, GB 1970, 105 min.
The story of a wanted gangster who hides out with the rock star Turner (Mick Jagger) and loses himself in Turner’s hedonistic world of bisexuality and transcendence. He eventually seems to exchange personalities with the musician.

The Man We Want to Hang, Kenneth Anger, USA 2002, Short film

Paganini, Klaus Kinski, I 1989, 82 min.
A portrait of the legendary “Devil’s violinist” from Italy, Nicolo Paganini (Klaus Kinski), who drove audiences wild with his virtuoso performances. The framework of the film is a spectacular concert during which Paganini simultaneously experiences the past and the future.
Trouble Every Day, Claire Denis, F/GER/JAPAN 2001, 97 min.
Claire Denis’s horror thriller of love and desire displays bloody, sadistic tendencies. The film stood apart when it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. There and elsewhere, “Trouble Every Day” has distinguished itself from the “normal” by making normality itself its subject in a realistic, fantastic, and thus extraordinarily self-reflexive fashion.

Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch, USA 1995, 116 min.
This film combines aspects of the western with film noir. In expressive black-and-white images, the viewer witnesses a man’s transformation from clumsy bookkeeper (Johnny Depp) to western hero.

Woton’s Wake, Brian de Palma, USA 1962

The Responsive Eye, Brian de Palma, USA 1966

Dionysus in 69, Brian de Palma, USA 1970

Medea, Lars von Trier, DK 1979, 77 min.
Lars von Trier based his television adaptation on an unfilmed screenplay by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer. It is an atmospheric and powerfully visual version of the classic Greek tragedy, in which Medea seeks bloody revenge for betrayal by her husband Jason.

Andy Warhol TV Show, USA 1979

A film series on a different concept of migration, compiled by Slavoj Žižek.

Opening speech by Slavoj Žižek on 09.06.2004, 7 pm

“With Judaism a radically new understanding of society is emerging, namely of a society that is no longer based on sharing common roots: “Every word is an uprooting. The constitution of a real society is an uprooting – the end of an existence in which “being at home” is absolute and everything comes from within. Paganism takes root […] Paganism is the local spirit: Nationalism in terms of its cruelty and mercilessness […] A humanity with roots that God has within, with the sap rising from the earth, is a jungle or a pre-human humanity. (Emmanuel Levinas)

The opposition based on this view – “good” nomadic, wandering, “deterritorialized” subject versus “evil” subject, fixed on his ethnic-religious-sexual identity – dominates our ideological sphere. But the main message of our late capitalist experience is that we cannot simply trust such coordinates. For, first and foremost, a radical “deterritorialization” of subjectivity, in which even the innermost characteristics of our identity “disappear into thin air” (Marx), is the elementary characteristic of today’s global capitalism, which has fully adopted the logic of aimless excess.

This situation forces us to question the fashionable celebration of nomadic or “hybrid” subjectivity: To use the same term to describe a poor peasant forced to emigrate because of a local ethnic war or a devastating economic crisis as to describe a member of the “symbolic class” (academic, journalist, artist, art manager) who constantly travels between capitals of culture amounts to the same obscenity as equating famine with a slimming diet. Our first ethical-political duty, therefore, is to take a more complex approach to the issues and to subject the concept of “migration” to a kind of spectral analysis in which we have to distinguish between opposing tendencies, from emancipative to enslaving.

Slavoj Žižek (*1949) psychoanalyst, philosopher and cultural critic, lives and works in Ljubljana.

Lamerica (Gianni Amelio) I 1994, 115 min, DF
The film par excellence about the emigration crisis that followed the dissolution of Real Existing Socialism: In a kind of Benjaminian dialectic in suspense, today’s longing for the promised land of Italy overlaps with the Italian longing for America.

Sansho Dayú (Kenji Mizoguchi) J 1954, 119 min, OmdU
This story, set in medieval Japan, of a noble family torn apart by war and of the mutual longing between son and mother is a melodrama in the most sublime and noble sense of the word: the story of an absolute family bond that outlasts all distortions and divisions.

Watch on the Rhine (Herman Shumlin) USA 1943, 114 min, OF
Hollywood’s most radical confrontation with the limits of liberal humanitarianism: against the backdrop of Nazism, a liberal American family generously accepts distant relatives from Europe, but then finds itself forced to take the far more radical step of participating in a necessary killing.

The blue light (Leni Riefenstahl) D 1932, 72 min, OF
Isn’t Junta, the solitary wild mountain girl, an ostracized woman who almost falls victim to a pogrom instigated by the villagers – a pogrom that must remind us of the anti-Semitic pogroms? Perhaps it is no coincidence that Riefenstahl’s lover at the time, Bela Balasy, who co-wrote the screenplay, was a Marxist.

Viaggio in Italia (Roberto Rossellini) I 1953, 82 min, OmdU
The ruins from Italy’s past form the background for a rich American couple in marital crisis: in doing so, they retain their profound ambiguity, so that the material presence of the ruins constantly undermines their “obvious” metaphorical meaning (as a symbol of the ruined relationship of the couple).

The Silence (Ingmar Bergman) S 1963, 91 min, DF
Bergman’s true masterpiece: the train journey of two sisters and a little son, with a stay in an unspecified Eastern European country whose atmosphere of sensual decay and sexual depravity offers a perfect “objective correspondence” to the discomfort of modern life.

Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais) F/J 1959, 89 min, OmeU
The love story of a couple in Hiroshima in the 1950s (a French woman fleeing the trauma of her German soldier lover, a Japanese man marked by the trauma of Hiroshima) unfolds the axiom of love as a magical event that overcomes even the most devastating historical traumas.

The Seventh Continent (Michael Haneke) A 1989, 107 min, OF
Is not the ultimate “migration” the journey to death itself? Haneke stages this directly as the planned journey of a family whose members decide to commit suicide together: no pathos, simply a cool rational implementation of the decision.

A film series, compiled by Diedrich Diederichsen

Lecture by Diedrich Diederichsen on 22.04.2004, 7 pm

In classic Hollywood cinema, mass scenes are regarded as a sign of high production costs. At the same time, they satisfy a very particular and specific cinematographic curiosity that goes back to the beginnings of moving pictures. For Siegfried Kracauer, for example, cinema was the first medium to make the new metropolitan masses of modernity visible and also made a decisive contribution to their self-image and self-discovery: to mobilization as well as to stillness. For many discourses on migration, it is also the mass nature of the migrants that makes up its decisive and also psychologically and propagandistically significant component. This is particularly true in the phobic notions of invading hordes and floods, which are so crucial to the mobilization of xenophobia and racism. In the USA, and thus also in Hollywood cinema, there have always been two kinds of masses: such phobically occupied natural catastrophically dehumanized floods of evil masses (Indians, aliens, Vietnamese) and next to and against them the positively occupied masses of settlers, but also of migrants, who contribute productively to the melting pot.

Who is a good and an evil mass, and how this changed and was fought over in the history of Hollywood, wants to show this series with selected examples: certainly none of these films is uninteresting, but also none is simply exemplary, and they were not chosen for their qualities, but rather for their symptomatic qualities.

Even the earliest film represented here, “Intolerance” by the cinema pioneer Griffith, shows that the ambivalence of mass portrayal must take the path of monumentalization. At the moment when the masses achieve a face of their own beyond the sum or enhancement of the individual, they are suitable for dehumanization as well as idealization. Griffith’s film was a kind of apology for his racist classic “Birth of a Nation”, which drastically demonized African Americans. In both films, however, one can see how fleeing or conquering, threatened or menacing masses can be dehumanized – sometimes rehumanized – by means of minor cinematographic measures. Another film in this series was also intended as an excuse: Cheyenne Autumn was supposed to revise the demonization of the Native Americans in so many Hollywood productions, and for this it invents an image from the arsenal of the history of the mostly positively portrayed European migrants who emigrated to the USA: the Cheyenne become displaced persons, but unlike the migrants from Europe, no “new home” beckons to them. Accordingly, the pop-festival monumentalization “Woodstock” identifies the hippie masses with a nation of displaced persons who are looking for a new territory. With different accents, “Days of Heaven”, “Heavens Gate” and “Gangs of New York” also show the situation of European migrants in the USA of the 19th century as class destiny, and despite different weaknesses, beyond any idealization. The migrants in Hollywood rarely made it to revolutionary masses, despite the rather biblical “Spartacus”, but as a sought-after and desired special effect especially in the first half of its history, their image was always an open space open to different ideological instrumentalizations. In the process, standards and clichés emerged that even today shape the idea of crowds of people who are not represented by a form of government or another regulated collective identity.

A Filmseries by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki.

Contemporary cinema in France takes a particular look at issues concerning migration. So extensively, in fact, that a new genre has developed called “cinema beur”—films by North African filmmakers who have grown up in France and address the problems of Maghrebi immigrants. In many of these films, as in many other films by young French filmmakers, France is portrayed well as being both a country of cinema and of immigration. However, other than very successful films, such as “La Haine,” few of these are shown in Germany. Yet our aim was not to track down and screen rare or obscure films, but to show good, interesting, key works of this socially relevant style of film-making—regardless of whether they are new or rediscovered—as a basis for discussion. (Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann)

Opening Lecture: Harun Farocki
Following the lecture:
DEUX OU TROIS CHOSES QUE JE SAIS D’ELLE / TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER (Jean-Luc Godard)
F 1966, in French, with German subtitles, 35mm, 90 Min.
The “Her” in the title refers both to the Paris suburb and the protagonist, who tries to live there as both housewife and prostitute. This film from the 1960s is France’s first banlieue film, created before the word for it was developed.

LE THÉ AU HAREM D’ARCHIMÈDE / TEA IN ARCHIMEDE’S HAREM (Mehdi Charef)
F 1986, in German, 16mm, 110 Min.
This pilot cinema beur film about the friendship between the Maghrebi Majid and the Gallic Frenchman, Patrick, abounds with cinematic brilliance and remains powerful and contemporary to this day.

LA HAINE / HATE (Mathieu Kassovitz)
F 1995, in French, with English subtitles, 35mm, 98 Min.
Over half a million viewers saw “La Haine” within weeks of its release. The film received the “Best Director Award” at the Cannes Film Festival and has become the most reviewed film in recent history. The banlieue, or Parisian “suburbs,” are the subject of the film and likewise a synonym for France’s worst problems: unemployment, social isolation, racism, suburbanism, crime, and violence.

LA PROMESSE / THE PROMISE (Luc et Jean-Pierre Dardenne)
B / F 1996, in French, with German subtitles, 35mm, 93 Min.
The Dardenne brothers—masters of Verist cinema—tell the story of the moral awakening of a 15-year-old boy who no longer wants to take part in his father’s unscrupulous practices. With documentary-style precision, the film conveys how illegal immigrants are exploited.

NENETTE ET BONI / NENETTE AND BONI (Claire Denis)
F 1996, in French, with German subtitles, 35mm, 103 Min.
Denis’s film, which received a “Golden Lion Award” at the Locarno Film Festival, justifiably received rave reviews. The film tells the tale of two siblings, Nenette and Boni, while also portraying the real life of the working class in Marseille. Migration issues likewise weave their way through this “reality” in a humorous way.

LA VIE DE JÉSUS / LIFE OF JESUS (Bruno Dumont)
F 1997, in French, with German subtitles, 35mm, 96 Min.
This film is about the life of a group of young people, who pass the time “out in the sticks” by driving around on their mopeds and fixing up old cars. Their future looks dim. Breathtaking to the last second, Dumont’s film manages to find mystery in the smallest, most banal details of everyday life. A début film that has enabled French cinema to soar to stunning heights.

SAMIA (Philippe Faucon)
F 2000, in French, with English subtitles, 35mm,73 Min.
In “Samia,“ Faucon tells the story of an Algerian immigrant and her three sisters who want to be normal, young, French people and what prevents them from achieving that. The story seems familiar, yet we have seldom, perhaps never, seen this kind of tale told in such a visually and narratively impressive way.

TERRA INCOGNITA (Ghassan Salhab)
F / Libanon 2002, in French, with English subtitles, 35mm, 120 Min.
“Terra Incognita,” screened last year at the Cannes Film Festival, is an amazing film about the lives of several people in their mid-30s in Beirut—a city in the throes of being rebuilt following a seven-year civil war. All of the film’s protagonists are naturally confronted with the topic of migration, and trying to coming to terms with the question: should we stay here and live, or leave?

Filmseries, compiled by Olaf Möller

A film series on the culture of migration, selected by Georg Seeßlen.

Film series

Film series, selected by Renee Green