drei/vier - Matinee at Die Grosse at Museum Kunstpalast

It all started with a simple question: Why is there in Düsseldorf, a city with a great cultural movement, so little cooperation between the younger generations of artists outside their disciplines? I really wanted to work with these other artists. So I talked to Caroline at RhineBuzz and she replied that she would introduce me to people who could possibly help form an answer.

I had the opportunity to ask this question to other artists, museum directors, curators, press members and PR people, arriving quickly to the conclusion that one possible answer lay in our disposition to create something together. Shortly after that I met Marquet K. Lee, a soloist of the Ballett am Rhein, and an artist with a great curiosity and sensibility. He studied in New York and has had the opportunity to experiment a great deal of modern expressions in art and is very open to interdisciplinary creations.
Marquet had met Caroline on a previous RhineBuzz project and asked her similar questions to mine, so she took him along to a performance of guitarists from the Robert Schumann School of Music.
Marquet and I met, chatted and an idea was born!

With Caroline advising us on the logistical and pragmatic aspect of the project we developed the idea for drei/vier. As two foreigners in Germany, our main subject was to explore what exactly made us feel familiar here and what reminded us entirely of our non-German position. This fitted well with collaborating with RhineBuzz which is full of people like us.

A secondary subject that is very important to us, is the involvement of the public. We are both, Marquet as a dancer and I as a musician, used to performing on a stage, we accept this audience-artist separation. But we wanted to break with this and make the performance as open and inclusive for everyone as possible. That is why we decided to add a third artist, Milan Schell, student of the Institute for Music and Media at the Robert Schumann Music School, who will create this bridge between the audience and ourselves using projections and changes in lights.

For the past several weeks we have worked together along with the company of three other great dancers from the Ballett am Rhein, Nicole Morel, Sonny Loscin, Wun Sze Chan and the talented musicians Marta Pérez López, Julia Jacobs and Eduardo Herrero Fernández, to explore our themes and create this performance.
Each using our own mediums, this very thin line which separates what exactly makes us feel familiar, and what it is to be unfamiliar, is explored with one another and an audience.

Thanks to RhineBuzz, and we are able to present this work as part of the series of matinees at the exhibition Die Grosse, one of Germany’s oldest arts exhibitions, in the Museum Kunstpalast
We look forward to you joining us, and to you creating, sharing and experiencing both us, and yourselves, in this performance with us.
drei/vier 
Matinee at Die Grosse
Sunday March 2 at 11:55
Museum Kunstpalast
€6 (€3 concessions) entry

with special thanks to Michael Kortländer 
chairman of Die Grosse 

Arturo Castro-Nogueras

Die Grosse Kunstaustellung NRW Düsseldorf 2014

Sculpture ©Beatrix Sassen
award winner of the Artists Arts Prize 2014

One of my favourite shows in the Düsseldorf calender, Die Grosse gives 152 artists from Düsseldorf and the greater area of the state of North Rhine-Westfalia the chance to show what is happening in the studios right now. This is a chance to see some of the most innovative work around, an opportunity to actually purchase directly from the exhibition, and if you take a tour you get to hear how the exhibiting and sales part of the art world works. We may also get to meet an artist or two and find out a little about the creative process.
This is a show packed with painting, photography, sculpture, collage, graffiti, video ... absolutely all genres of the creative process.
Last year these tours were well over-subscibed; the feedback was great!

Historically, this show for artists by artists is one of Europe's oldest and was a starting point for many names which later became hugely influential in the art world. Rodin, Max Ernst and Kandinsky to name but a very limited few!

Every year an artist is awarded the Artists Arts Prize, selected by their peers, this is an award of particular significance to the artist chosen. This year the prize goes to Beatrix Sassen, a woman of great talent and drive, who has a friendly and most endearing gentleness about her. She was permitted to study at the prestigious Düsseldorf Art Academy at just 16, where she was a student of the celebrated German conceptual artist Josef Beuys.

Peter Royen, winner of the Artists Arts Prize 2013 with RhineBuzzer and artist Ace Grandison exchange precious words and ideas at the meet & greet after the RhineBuzz tour in 2013. Peter Royen greatly enjoyed the RhineBuzz community and trying out all the languages he had picked up during his long and creative lifetime. 
Peter Royen later in 2013, just a few months after this photograph was taken. We were all very glad that we had the wonderful chance to meet him.


Die Grosse
Museum Kunstpalast
Ehrenhof 4-5
40479 Düsseldorf

RhineBuzz Tours in English with Michael Kortländer and Caroline West 
February 16 at 2pm
March 2 at 2pm
€5 per person for the tour, €6 exhibition entry per person 
Reservations: tours@rhinebuzz.com


There is a series of events, Matinee, to accompany the exhibition and RhineBuzz is proud to be producing a performance to be premiered at the Museum Kunstpalast on:

Arturo Castro
Marquet K. Lee
photo ©Norman de la Cruz
Sunday March 2 at 11:55 
RhineBuzz proudly presents drei/vier - Arturo Castro, student of the Robert Schumann Music Conservatory, Marquet K. Lee, soloist of the Ballett am Rhein and Milan Schell, student of the Robert Schumann Institute of Music and Media in a performance of music, dance and multi-media, and artists.
Milan Schell
Together with their peers, Nicole Morel, Sonny Loscin, Wun Sze Chan, dancers from the Ballett am Rhein and musicians, Marta Pérez Lopéz and and Eduardo Herrero Férnández, they will be exploring questions and emotions of the familiar and what it means to be unfamiliar - a status most of the RhineBuzz community can identify with on a very personal level.
I look forward to seeing you there!

In Order to Join - films and lecturers at the Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach and Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf






ART HISTORY AS GLOBAL HISTORY – A NEW DISCIPLINE
Lecture / Discussion / Tour / Films

Framing the exhibition IN ORDER TO JOIN −
Political in a Historical Moment
Curated by Swapnaa Tamhane and Susanne Titz

Sunday, 16 February, 2014


11:30am Exhibition tour with curators Swapnaa Tamhane and Susanne Titz
12:30pm Break in the Museumscafé
1:00pm Lecture and Discussion with Prof. Dr. Monica Juneja – Writing Parallel Histories?
4:30pm Leave with shuttle bus for Filmwerkstatt in Düsseldorf





6:30pm Fearless: The Hunterwali Story (1993), Dir. Riyad Vinci Wadia, 60 Minutes,
English with German subtitles
8:30pm The World Before Her (2012), written and directed by Nisha Pahuja, 60 Minutes,
English with German subtitles

LECTURE

Monica Juneja, Professor of Global Art History at the University of Heidelberg, will frame the
exhibition “In Order to Join” into a larger narrative of contemporary art as an event not to be
understood as a single episode. Her talk will query the conditions which have made visibility for gender and hitherto marginalized cultural practices possible in contemporary global circuits. What does this mean for the way we think about terms such as “Modernism” and “Conceptualism” in art? Can we rethink the premises of these concepts in the light of new cultural geographies? Juneja will also speak about the discipline of art history, and of ways of writing about regions for long labeled the “non-West” and therefore continuously in a state of being compared.

Monica Juneja is Professor of Global Art History at the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context since since January 2009. 
Her areas of research include practices of visual representation, the disciplinary trajectories of art history in South Asia, gender and political iconography in modern France, the interface between Christianisation, religious identities and cultural practices in early modern South Asia.

FILMS

“Fearless: The Hunterwali Story” is a documentary about Mary Evans (1908-1996), and her
life as India’s most popular stuntwomen. She played the masked and cloaked ‘Fearless Nadia’ in
“Hunterwali” (1935), a Hindi stunt film in which she chased and defeated evil characters. She
starred in 40 films until her career ended in the late 1950s. Evans was born in Perth, Australia, in
1910, and came to India because her father was transferred in the military.
While she began her career as a theatre artist and working in the circus, her fortune changed when
she met the famous Jamshed Wadia, the director of stunt and action films in Bombay. The artist
Pushpamala N., included in “In Order to Join”, has selected this film because it has been a huge
influence on her, and she has quoted the appearance of Nadia in her early photo-romance series,
Phantom Lady.

“The World Before Her”, a documentary written and directed by Nisha Pahuja, considers two
varying positions of the modern Indian woman in the world’s largest democracy in transition.
The documentary contrasts boot camps for Miss India beauty pageant contestants and the Durgha
Vahini, a militant Hindu fundamentalist training camp with first person accounts by the young
women involved. While they share opposite views, they ultimately share a similar desire to shape
the future of India. This documentary is a fascinating portrayal of the contradictions of both skewed
ideas of tradition and religion and what being “modern” is or could be. This documentary has been
selected by Swapnaa Tamhane, co-curator of “In Order to Join”.

Admission for Museum Abteiberg and Filmwerkstatt is 12 Euros, which includes the shuttle bus,
entry into the museum and the films, while the symposia is free.

Please register with Museum Abteiberg for the Shuttle bus leaving from Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf at 10:30 am to come to Museum Abteiberg. 
mail@museum-abteiberg.de

Registration is not required for the lecture or the films.

Opening Party Duesseldorf Photo Weekend 2014 with Rusty Egan at the NRW Forum



Hey RhineBuzzers! You are all invited to the opening party of the Duesseldorf Photo Weekend 2014 at the NRW Forum with London nightlife guru, the legendary Rusty Egan
His musical cv reads like the encyclopedia of punk rock and later the New Romantic scene of elecronica - simply packed with iconic names from the London music world - having worked with the likes of Glen Matlock, Depeche Mode, Spandau Ballet, Soft Cell, Midge Ure, Visage, The Skids, Steve Strange and Spear of Destiny.

Rusty Egan
©Iain McKell

Record store owner, dj, promoter, one of the key people instrumental in introducing musicians from abroad such as Kraftwerk, Eno and the Yellow Magic Orchestra to the London nightclub scene ... Egan opened the Camden Palace and has been hugely influential at other venues such as the Blitz Club

In 2009 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the London Club & Bar Awards

Düsseldorf's Henry Storch of Unique Records will kindly be opening the evening.

Be there!

Opening Party Duesseldorf Photo Weekend 
with Rusty Egan and Henry Storch
Friday January 31
from 10pm

NRW Forum
Ehrenhof 2
40479 Düsseldorf

Duesseldorf Photo Weekend 2014



Following the great success of the first two Duesseldorf Photo Weekends 2012 and 2013, this event will now take place again for the third time from January 31 to February 2 2014. Numerous galleries, museums and institutions from the Duesseldorf art and photography scene will open their doors for an entire weekend to show exhibitions and hold events on the theme of photography.

The launch of the Duesseldorf Photo Weekend 2014 will be the opening on Thursday January 31 2014 in the NRW Forum with the exhibition under the theme “Heimat” (The Fatherland) from the DZ Bank Frankfurt, which will be showing extracts from its collection. The DZ Bank owns one of the most important collections of photography in Germany. A small catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

In the north wing of the NRW Forum the exhibition of the U.S. master photographer Duane Michals (born 1932) will be opened at the same time. Michals became especially renowned for his sequence photography, which he completes with handwritten texts. The exhibition shows photographs from the late 50s and finishes with his newest works, the so called Tintypes. These are old photographic plates which Michals has painted over. Parallel to the exhibition a new film will be shown about Michals: “The Man Who Invented Himself”, directed by Camille Guichard.


Duane Michals, 
The Illuminated Man, 1968 © Duane Michals 
Courtesy Galerie Clara Maria Sels / Admira Milan


We are delighted that Duane Michals will in Düsseldorf for the opening of the Duesseldorf Photo Weekend with many thanks to Air Berlin.

More than 24 galleries and institutions with photography exhibitions have contacted Clara Sels, the organiser of the event. The Polish Institute are dedicating a retrospective on the classical Polish photographer Jerzy Lewczynski under the title of “The Memory of the Picture”. In a solo exhibition, the collection Philara Werke will show the work of the artist Natalie Czech. The Malkasten Duesseldorf will present, under the title “ANTIFOTO”, the work of the British partnership MacDonaldStrand.

The exhibition programme will be complemented by a series of events.

The opening will be at he NRW Forum on January 30 at 19:00. This is a public opening, you do not need an invitation to attend.

On Friday January 31 at 22:00 these will kick off with a party with the legendary British DJ Rusty Egan at the NRW Forum. You are all invited! Come along and party with us!

On Saturday February 1 the Portfolio Review will take place from 12:00-20:00 in the NRW Forum where national and international photography magazines may be viewed in the Magazine Salon.

The programme for the Duesseldorf Photo Weekend 2014 is available here.
The Photo Weekend has, just as last year, invited European curators to come and gain an overall impression of the current photography scene in the Duesseldorf galleries and institutions taking part. Amongst those that will visiting Düsseldorf will be curators from some of the world's most prestigious arts institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum London, the Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, the MACBA, Barcelona and the Photography Museum, Antwerp.

Tours will be offered around the various parts of town where the galleries are concentrated. Details coming up on the website this week. These will be in German, but your guide is likely to speak some English, as will most gallery owners and assistants. Book a tour, they are very popular and a great way of finding all the different locations with ease. I will be giving a tour in English, but cannot do so over the actual Photo Weekend; as yet I have to set a date. Most galleries will be showing their exhibitions after the weekend.

Duesseldorf will show, once again, that this city is a metropolis for modern photography. The international press last year were most impressed by the diversity of the shows and sheer number of galleries taking part and at how very much our city has to offer.
Once again, it's going to be a great show!


Construct NYC 12
© Barbara Kasten
Galerie Kadel Willborn 


Duesseldorf Photo Weekend 2014
January 31 - February 2 
Opening at the NRW Forum January 31 19:00
Opening Party with Rusty Egan at the NRW Forum January 31 at 22:00
Ehrenhof 2
40479 Düsseldorf


RhineBuzz Tours at the Tonhalle "The Suspicious Saxophone - Degenerate Music During the Nazi Regime"

An exhibition by Albrecht Dümling

75 years ago Düsseldorf hosted the ‘Reichsmusiktage’ - an event orchestred by the National Socialists to promote what they considered to be the thriving musical culture in Germany under the Nazi regime.
Part of this ‘festival’ included the exhibition by Hans Severus Ziegler, ‘Entartete Musik’ - Degenerate Music, an exhibition which set out to discredit the creators of music that the National Socialists considered ‘Un-German’ and so a threat to their moral standards and ideals.

From January 7 - 23 the Tonhalle will be showing the exhibition ‘Das Verdächtige Saxophon - Entartete Musik im NS-Staat’ - The Suspicious Saxophone - Degenerate Music During the Nazi Regime. An exhibition, created by Albrecht Dümling in 1988, and expanded in 2007, that takes a critical look at this little known passage in musical and political history. The roots behind these ideals are detailed, as is which music was banned - and the 'reasoning' behind which genres of music, and which people were selected. This included everyone, not those who wrote or made music but also lyricists, critics, conductors, concert managers. Everyone who wasn't considered to be of the Arian race.

Several of the musicians that were forced to flee Europe and take up work abroad are portrayed, and the global influence of this persecution that seeped into so much music, not just classical, but also popular and jazz, is shown. The world of film scores for instance, changed greatly when a persecuted Hungarian/Austrian composer was obliged to make a living in any way he could, and so when Korngold fled to the USA, he found his way to Hollywood and became an award-winning composer. Today he is considered one of the founders of film music.
There will be 7 public tours in German, one in English and one in French. I am supervising a young team of most knowledgeable and enthusiastic musicology students from the Robert Schumann Music Conservatory and the Heinrich Heine University, Christina Klein, Elisabeth Wahle and Roland Ring, who will talk you through this exhibition.

Certainly not your regular RhineBuzz event, but as always, a cultural tour that will be accessible and easily understandable. For me, a great challenge to offer you, both our regular and new RhineBuzz audience, new insights into subjects we often know so little about.

So do join us for a most important and thought-provoking opportunity to take in this exhibition, where you can discover so much about a most disturbing period in history. 

This is an exhibition which has toured to over 60 countries. Deutsche Welle reported on this exhibition a while ago.

You can only access the exhibition if you take part in a tour, or are visiting a concert.

Cost of the tour is €5 per person. Each tour lasts 45 minutes with time for questions afterwards.
Places are limited. 
Reservations for the English or French tours: tours@rhinebuzz.com 
Please send reservations for the English tour by January 11 and for the French tour by January 17.
Reservations for all German tours: Uwe.SommerSorgente@duesseldorf.de

Tour dates at the 
Tonhalle
Ehrenhof 1
40479 Düsseldorf

English tour: January 12 at 16:15
French tour: January 18 at 16:15

German tours:
January 8 at 18:00
January 9 at 18:00 
January 12 at 15:00
January 15 at 18:00
January 17 at 15:00
January 18 at 15:00
January 19 at 14:00

b.17 Ballett am Rhein


b.17 Ballett am Rhein
©Gert Weigelt

“The creative act knows no memory, no science and no cognizance. These things are always bound up with the past. The creative act accepts no conditions outside of itself. That is why it is free.”
Sergiu Celibidache

It is my first experience at the Ballett am Rhein, for one of their new productions called simply “7”. I’ve seen ballet before but nothing quite like this. In my native Puerto Rico, we have a couple of ballet and contemporary dance companies, but they don’t do more than a couple of performances a year, presenting programmes limited very often to “standards” like the Nutcracker or Giselle. I have also seen several ballets here in Germany but something as strong and captivating like Martin Schläpfer’s work, never. He is the current director of Ballett am Rhein and fast becoming one of Europe’s top choreographers.

The work is a complex and emotionally charged choreography that combines great imaginative and sublime, often abstract, movements to Gustav Mahler’s complete 7th Symphony. If you haven’t heard this symphony, let me tell you: it is a monumental orchestral tour-de-force with rich and dense harmonic colors juxtaposed with astonishingly beautiful melodic moments. So now imagine a ballet on top of that. At a first glance it just seems too complicated, that is why in the beginning as I sat there through the performance continuously trying to understand it, I asked myself the most basic question of all: Why?

Then I remembered a phrase by legendary Rumanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache. Immediately I stopped thinking and just went along with the work until finally I was liberated from myself and everything around me through a wonderful and marvelous work of art full of sound and movement in a way very rarely seen before. If you haven’t got plans for Friday December 6, I strongly advice you experience this performance.   

Arturo Castro for RhineBuzz

RhineBuzz can offer discounted seats in the stalls and upper tiers for the performance on December 6. Please email opera@rhinebuzz.com for details. 


Ia Orana!



Yes, I was one of the impossibly lucky folks who won a couple of round-the-world tickets.
But I didn't want to go around the world.

Instead I chose to visit the South Pacific ..... Jurassic Park for Real
Lush green, green landscapes that jut out of the never-ending blue ocean

A people colourful, songful, graceful and with a raw beauty that will surely always be of great mystery and fascination to us 

A journey of many tiny islands, often precarious, mostly very bumpy flights, sharks, Jaques Brel, awe inspiring waves, the home of surfing and tales of cannibals ....

I spent 8 weeks travelling around some of the most remote islands in the world including the Marquesas which, with their geographical location of being almost 5,000 km away from mainland Mexico, rarely see visitors but for the round-the-world-sailors that take shelter in their harbours. These islands were also the destination where the expressionist painter Gauguin chose to escape European civilisation and "everything that is artificial and conventional", and to this day, there is very little infrastructure. 

The Austral Islands were also on my schedule, the paradise where Fletcher Christian landed following the Mutiny on the Bounty and where in the middle of the deep, dark South Pacific Ocean I made friends with a colourful, curious tropical fish who ate out of my hand!

Beat the winter in Germany and come and join us for a lively talk and impressions of paradise on 
Wednesday December 11 at 7pm 
at the English Language Forum  in the heart of the Altstadt
Neustrasse 39
40231 Düsseldorf

Please register with Andy theforum@web.de or caroline@rhinebuzz.com
€10.00 inc South Pacific cocktail :)
Spaces are limited!

Philippines Benefit


The Düsseldorf non-profit organisation damenundherren Kulturverein e.V are hosting an event on Friday November 21 beginning at 7pm in aid of the Philippines.
The evening will be filled with Düsseldorf's creative folks who will offer Fillipino food, live music, the finest djs, Haru Specks and Henry Storch, a photo exhibition and a novel auction of vinyl!
Beautiful images of the Philippines put together by designer Detlef Klatt, who has worked extensively in the Philippines for many years will also be on sale.
All proceeds will go to an aid organistion known to Damenundherren Kulturverein e.V who also have close contacts to the islands.


damenundherren e.v.
Oberbilker Allee 35
40215 Düsseldorf

Well done to everyone involved in the evening, €2000.00 was raised and special thanks to 
Carmen Brown who turned up as the surprise singer for the evening :)