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March 23, 2014

Munich; Lenbachhaus at Kunstbaum “Playtime”

a sunday afternoon to the newly fabulous opened exhibition at Lebenchhaus at Kunstbaum ” Playtime”

a collaboration of the Lenbenchhaus and Munich Re on the subject of work.

March 15, 2014-June 29, 2014

Tehching Hsieh One Year Performance 1980-1981 (Waiting to Punch the Time Clock)
Photograph by Michael Shen © 2014 Tehching Hsieh
Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Artists:
Darren Almond, Francis Alÿs, Mel Bochner, Monica Bonvicini, Pet Shop Boys, KP Brehmer, Charlie Chaplin, Slatan Dudow, Beate Engl, Harun Farocki, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Andrea Fraser, Melanie Gilligan, Tehching Hsieh, Jörg Immendorff, Stephan Janitzky, Ali Kazma, Sharon Lockhart, Michaela Melián, Henrik Olesen, Anna Oppermann, Adrian Paci, Dan Perjovschi, Peter Piller, Julian Röder, Martha Rosler, Dieter Roth, Andreas Siekmann, Christoph Schlingensief, Allan Sekula, Richard Serra, Kerstin Stakemeier, Mladen Stilinović, Berwick Street Collective (Marc Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan), Donna Summer, Jacques Tati, Wibke Tiarks, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Timm Ulrichs, Ignacio Uriarte

“The exhibition PLAYTIME takes up the subtle critique aimed at the modern working environment by Jacques Tati in his eponymous film, and raises a variety of questions: How do artists from different generations and backgrounds engage with the subject of work? What does it mean to work as an artist today? And how is the artist’s work different from other forms of work? The artists we have invited contribute a wide range of perspectives and methods. They not only address work as such, but also the norms and behavioral precepts of a society defined by work. They examine existing power relations and gender-specific conventions in the working world and interrogate the connections between identity, the situations in which we live and work. 1960s socio-critical and activist positions enter into dialogue with more recent pieces that reflect on the conditions under which we work today.” (Lenbachaus press release)

In Bildern: Die Ausstellung „Playtime“ im Münchner Lenbachhaus

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break Installation, „Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life,“ 14 December 2002 – 23 February 2003, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2003, Vier gerahmte C-Prints, je 183 x 307cm(Courtesy Collection of Contemporary Art Fundació “la Caixa”, Barcelona Foto: Sharon Lockhart und Collection of Contemporary Art Fundació “la Caixa”, Barcelona)

super-paper-playtime-lenbachhaus-ausstellung

Dieter Roth “Solo Scenes” 1997-1998

more here

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March 21, 2014

Munich: Opera House; Bayerisches Staatsballett “Helden”

a beautiful evening at the Munich opera house with my young daughter to a new production “Helden”(Heroes)

Choreography by Terence Kohler

The music for the ‘symphonic ballet with a storyline’ is composed of pieces by Alfred Schnittke and Russian-American composer Lera Auerbach who worked closely with Kohler, contributing original scores for his work. Stage-, object- and costume design is by rosalie.

“Helden/Heroes is a comprehensive theme: Kohler choses to focus in on the conflict between Epimetheus and Prometheus. According to mythology, the former assigned animals their character traits while the ladder brought fire down to earth – hence introducing culture to human kind which opens up doors to claim power. This might either be used to bring reason and useful items to humanity, or to surrender to the satisfying feeling of omnipotence which might ultimately become self-destructive. Terence Kohler extends this challenge to find reason into the here and now in search of hope for a better future ahead.”

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March 19, 2014

Munich: Kunstverein k.m; 7 pm presentation “The Further Adventures of Parlando, Melisma, and the Cookie Master: a brief history of unique singing techniques” by curator Mark Beasley

“The Further Adventures of Parlando, Melisma, and the Cookie Master: a brief history of unique singing techniques”

Due to the exhibition “La Voix Humane” curator Mark Beasley presented a listening-session and brief history of vocalization and Extended Vocal Technique from female pioneers Patty Waters, Cathy Berberian and Joan La Barbara; Grindcore and the Death Growl to the current re-examination of voices as material in the work of Florian Hecker, Stine Motland and C. Spencer Yeh.

Mark Beasley is a curator and writer based in New York. He is currently curator at Performa, and programmed and commissioned a series of vocal concerts and artist’s projects for Performa 13. He recently organized a performance series in conduction with the retrospective exhibition of Mike Kelly at MoMa PS1, New York that included Michael Smith and Blowfly, X-TG and Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether. His recent curatorial projects with the Performa biennial include Florian Hecker’s C.D.- A Script for Synthesis, France Stark and Mark Leckey’s Put a Song in Your Think at Abrons Theater; Robert Ashley’s That Morning Thing at the Kichen; Mike Kelley’s Day is Done at Judson Church; Arto Lindsay’s Somewhere I Read, and the experimental music festival (co-curated with Mike Kelley) A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality. His first LP with the group Big Legs will be released on Junior Aspirin Records in Spring 2014.

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March 13, 2014

Munich; afternoon visit at Bernheimer Fine Art Photography; Michael Kenna “Light on Asia”

Fri, Feb.21-Sat 26 April 2014

a beautiful spring day in Munich yesterday, I visited in the afternoon the Bernheimer Fine Art Photography, a fabulous show by Michael Kenna, based on his journey through Asia.

In San Francisco Michael Kenna, got to know Ruth Bernard (Berlin 1905 – San Francisco 2006), the American photographer of German extraction who has had a great influence on Kenna’s creative development. Bernard once called Kenna’s photos “islands of serenity and silence in a loud and chaotic world.”

photos@Bernheimer fine arts, published by gallery permission

“.…In this third solo exhibition of around fifty photographs by Michael Kenna, the visitor is invited to take a sensational trip through Asia, from Japan, South Korea, China and India to Vietnam. On this journey we pass through the “Huangshan Mountains” in southern China, with their bizarre projecting rock formations, gnarled pines and steep mountain slopes shrouded in a dense sea of clouds, and follow the course of the “Lijang River”, with its clear waters and sandbanks, fringed by steep mountains and spectacular rocks. In addition to capturing the different shapes of Nature, Kenna also shows us the foremost industrial city in China: Shanghai with its skyline studded with iconic buildings such as the Oriental Pearl Tower and Jin Mao Tower sparkling in the darkness of the night.” (gallery press release)

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February 27, 2014

Munich; Haus der Kunst; opening Ellen Gallagher “AxME”

28.2-13.07.2014

A most amazing exhibition opened at Haus der Kunst of Ellen Gallagher organized by Tate Modern in association with Sara Hilden Art Museum Tampere and Haus der Kunst, Munich.

A lovely dialogue conversation with the artist and Dr Ulrich Wilmes.

photos@vk

…..Ellen Gallagher took the New York art world by storm in the early 1990s with a series of beautifully balanced, deceptively minimalist paintings such as “Oh! Susanna” (1993), “Oogaboogah”, and “Pinocchio Theory” (both 1994). In a series of work she used advertisements for wigs and other commodities as well as feature articles from black-oriented magazines like Ebony, Our World, Black Stars, etc. One of her most intriguing works consists of a grid of twenty female wig models of various skin shades set against a vast white background. The wigs are meticulously cut into elaborate shapes and float on paper as if embossed.(HdK press release)

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In the catalogue essay on the exhibition “Ellen Gallagher – AxME”, Ulrich Wilmes writes about the cornerstones of the artist’s visual language. The “yellow paintings”, made between 2001 and 2004, illustrate her source of inspiration, which also influenced other works.

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February 15, 2014

Berlin;Hamburger Bahnhof_Museum für Gegenwart-Susan Philipsz “part file score”

01.02.2014-04.05.2014

photos@vk

Susan Philipsz, Part File Score, 2014, Digitaldruck/Siebdruck, 185 x 145 cm

published photo @Hamburger Bahnhof

Curated by:
Ingrid Buschmann, Freunde Gute Musik Berlin e.V.
Gabriele Knapstein, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin

For the historic hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof, Susan Philipsz has designed a sound installation that relates both to the building’s former function as a railway station and to the architectonic structure of the hall with its 12archways. The artist connects the former railway station – a place of departure and arrival, of parting and return – with the eventful life of the composer Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), who lived in Berlin in the 1020s and 1950s.

The artist has created three pieces, based on three different musical compositions for film by Eisler, that play one after the other, each tone of the compositions wa recorded separately in the studio. In the installation, the tones are distributed among the 24 loudspeakers installed along the entire length of the historic hall. Each loudspeaker is assigned a tone on he chromatic scale, so that each of the instrumental voices becomes spatialized and wanders through the hall.

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February 15, 2014

Berlin; Eigen+Art Lab “still (not) moving” 3 artist exhibition, curated by Prof. Dr.Dieter Daniels

9.01.2014-20.02.2014

A very interesting and challenging exhibition with curator Prof. Dr Dieter Daniels presenting three positions from the field of Visual Media. photos@courtesy of Eigen+Art Lab.

In their works ,Yvon Chabrowski, David Claerbout, and Albrecht Pischel ask about the interstitial world between still and moving pictures that is newly arising through digitalization and changed cultural practices. Their refreshing indeterminacy opens up a still little-known aesthetic terrain that can be described either as a hybrid between or as a synthesis of photography and film/video. (gallery press release)
Yvon Chabrowski_Schutthaufen

Yvon Chabrowski transforms pictures from the mass media into the reflective space of a new, slowed down temporality. In Dramatische Funde im Schutthaufen (Dramatic finds in the rubble heap), she turns a press photo of a police operation in the ruins of the home that the neo-Nazi terror group NSU burned down in the city of Zwickau into a performance with actors who, caught in a video loop, are caught forever in their search for forensic evidence.

Claerbout

David Claerbout is the “classic” of this new interstitial world and has been working since the 1990s primarily at the interfaces of photo/film/video and the digital image. With Untitled (Single Channel View) from 1998-2000, we are consciously showing an already “historical work” by Claerbout in dialog with the two younger artists. …..

Pischel

Albrecht Pischel presents his works in the analog medium of film, but his content relates to painting as well as to photography and digital techniques. The 8-millimeter film “Now is forever New” was shot, unnoticed, with a hand camera in front of Barnett Newman’s original painting “Vir heroicus sublimis” in the New York Museum of Modern Art……

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February 14, 2014

Berlin; Blain Southern Gallery; Yinka Shonibare MBE “Making Eden”

15.02.2014-19.04.2014

preview opening; “Making Eden” Blain Southern opened the first solo exhibition in Berlin by internationally acclaimed artist Yinka Shonibare MBE ; followed by a great dinner at Grill Royal

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photo@courtesy of artist and Blain Southern “Adam and Eve”, 2013

Bringing together a body of entirely new work across two floors of the gallery, Making Eden explores the theme of revolution, drawing a stark contrast between the utopian ideals inherent in anarchic action and the darker realities of its consequences. Particularly pertinent in today’s global climate of social and political disillusionment, Shonibare explores both historical and contemporary cycles of revolution, seeking to demonstrate the destructive patterns of human behaviour that repeat themselves across time. (excerpt from gallery press release)

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…….Yinka Shonibare MBE has been elected a Royal Academician, alongside sculptors Tim Shaw and Neil Jeffries. He joins the governing body of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, as a representative of the category of sculpture. This governing body is comprised of 80 practising painters, sculptors, engravers, printmakers, draughtsmen and architects

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February 13, 2014

Munich; opening at Deborah Schamoni gallery; “Die Marmory Show” curated by Gürsoy Dogtas and Deborah Schamoni

14.2.2014-12.4.2014

artists: Aaron Angell, Tue Greenfort, Pierre Huyghe, Anne Imhof, Dani Jakob, Josephine Pryde, Yorgos Sapountzis und Hannah Weinberger; curated by Gürsoy Dogtas and Deborah Schamoni

with a “surprise performance” for the visitors by Yorgos Sapountzis (opening night)

all photos@Die Marmory Show, Installation view, Deborah Schamoni, Munich

photo@Die Marmory Show, installation view, Josephine Pryde, Deborah Schamoni, Munich

„P.S. Last night I dreamt of a bluetit that stared at me for a few minutes and then, without a twitter, flew away. As I turned around to speak to you, instead of words, a melodic twitter of a bird emitted from my mouth.“

(Walt Kuhn an Vera Kuhn, Oktober 1912)

The discovery of a 100-year old letter, found lodged between the marble slabs of the gallery space (formerly a residential villa), brought about the initial idea for ‘Die Marmory Show’.

………This unsent letter, dated 24.10.1912, was, with the highest certainty, written by Walt Kuhn; painter, organiser and promoter of the Armory-Show in 1913, and is addressed to his wife Vera Spier Kuhn. During his extensive travels through Europe between September and November, he remained in close contact with her. This unofficial correspondence gives a rich and detailed insight into the thoughts and planning that went into the realization of the first Armory Show.

A fabulous show that I like to visit again ; Deborah as elegant and generous to her guests to offer a lovely dinner at her personal space.. Thank you! Deborah Schamoni. you are a fresh breath in Munich.

more here at gallery

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February 9, 2014

Munich; Pinakothek Der Moderne; at the Ernst von Siemens auditorium the film “Old Joy” by Kelly Reichardt

Today, this morning at Pinakothek Der Moderne, part of a series of films screened as of Jeff Wall exhibition. at the Ernst von Siemens Auditorium I saw ” Old Joy”, 2005 written and directed by Kelly Reichardt; with Will Oldham, Daniel London; the film features a fantastic soundtrack by Yo La Tengo.

Old Joy Movie Poster

The most amazing is that films that somehow have gotten out of my attention living in New York, thanks to amazing things at the Munich museums I can catch up on my film literature..

The story of two old friends, who reunite for a weekend camping trip in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. OLD JOY is the critically-acclaimed film The New York Times calls, “A MUST SEE!”

As subtle, supple and beautifully fine-tuned a film as any American director has made in the past year. Dennis Lim, The Village Voice

interview of protagonist Daniel London and writer/director Kelly Reichardt

sample of Yo La Tengo soundrack

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