RhineBuzz

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

Museum Abteiberg

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

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 7^th 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 :)

'Willkommen in Deutschland' three extraordinary concerts - a most personal review by Mircea Gogoncea

Mircea Gogoncea was the solo guitarist playing at the Tonhalle recently for the historical concerts commemorating the music and musicians that were banned in the exhibition 'Degenerate Music' which took place in the Ehrenhof in Düsseldorf, 75 years ago. Together with the Symphony Orchestra of the Robert Schumann Music School and the legendary Toten Hosen these three concerts were indeed 'more than a concert' as the city's press officer Natalia Fedossenko commented.

The performances could only happen in Düsseldorf - in this constellation, at this very location and with these artists. Those who either chose Düsseldorf, and all its rich musical heritage, to study here; or those who have been part of the local music scene for decades. Together with Germany's biggest rock band, the Toten Hosen, who have been rockin' for over 30 years and who are Düsseldorf 'kids' - the school choir who also sang in these concerts, came from the grammar school that two of the members of the Toten Hosen studied at themselves - and the students of the RSH Symphony Orchestra created remarkable music together, celebrating both the joys of the vibrant music scene of years ago and remembering in a most poignant way, of the tragedies.

This was essential viewing for anyone interested in the Düsseldorf, and indeed German music scene, both on a historical and contemporary level. I was so very grateful for the opportunity to be one of the audience, the tickets sold out in a handful of minutes.

As I met Mircea after the concert his eyes just beamed and beamed. This exceptional musician has played numerous concerts all over the world, but this experience poured out of every cell as a moment most exceptional in his young, yet all ready astounding musical life.

I asked him to write down his personal thoughts on what he had been part of, and sitting at an airport a few days later, having just won one of the 'grand slams' in the guitar world, the International 'Julián Arcas' Classical Guitar Competition in Spain, merely one week after the concerts, this is what he sent me:

Being part of the “Willkommen in Deutschland” concert series in the Tonhalle Düsseldorf this October has been one of the most exciting, horizon broadening and, above all, fun experiences I have ever had since moving to Germany in 2009!

I immediately clicked with the concept – the subtle play on words resulting from the Toten Hosen’s song “Welcome to Germany” and the message of the evening: of tolerance and acceptance as the societal antidote to the very Nazi ideological and practical intolerance against which the concert series has been conceived. As a foreigner in Germany – one who happens to have always felt quite welcome on the shores of the Rhine – this was an especially important point for me.

However, playing together with the Toten Hosen on stage, being part of the great show that they put on together with all the other musicians involved, and watching them do what they do best in front of the cheering crowd has been by far the most exciting part of it all. With great pleasure I discovered how superstars of the German punk-rock scene can be such wonderfully approachable, humble, and above all, dedicated and concentrated musicians who are not afraid to try something new and work with others on elaborate and highly demanding concepts!

Being on stage with them, in front of the clapping, whistling and constantly cheering crowd, was a truly unforgettable experience! Indeed, as classical musicians, we are used to audiences that generally choose to express their feelings and appreciation differently – and yet the thrill and satisfaction resulting from having members of the public cheer one’s every onstage move is something that can neither be replaced nor fully grasped without having been experienced first-hand.

And so I found myself during the last encore of the evening, surrounded by members of the Toten Hosen in the middle of a very sold-out Tonhalle, being carried by the audience’s wonderfully extroverted reaction and the Hosen’s own stage presence, complemented by the sheer force of a full symphony orchestra, smiling over the entire course of the piece of music and above all, enjoying: the fact that I was there, the fact that we were there, that we put on such a show, and that the audience was there to receive it the way they did.

It’s been an incredible for this for this skilled young person who is not only a world- class musician, but who is also tackling the world of technology with his pioneering platform - iolma - bringing the possibility of musical education to everyone on the planet and consequently sharing the great gift that only music can bring.

SHiFT Relays

RhineBuzz is delighted to be co-producing SHiFT, Social and Human ideas For Technology, which has now come to Düsseldorf.
Founded by Pedro Custódio in Lisbon in 2006, SHiFT is a creative and vibrant exchange of ideas and realities for the future.

On October 11 2013 the SHiFT team from Lisbon and Düsseldorf will be hosting SHiFT Relays, a taster of the first SHiFT Conference in Düsseldorf, scheduled for next year.

SHiFT Relays, this coming Friday, will be bringing you hands-on insights to the reality of 'printing' whatever you need at home - from a flower vase to a spare part for your car; understand the future of 'connected healthcare' and find out how the phenomenon of the bicycle affects what you desire and ultimately buy. See what drones see; learn to play guitar from the very best educators in the world from the comfort of your own home; or discover how, as a startup, you can 'make people fall in love with you ...'

All this, plus cool folks to exchange the very latest sparks for the future with at GREY düsseldorf

Places are very limited, please register here

Séquence 8 - Les 7 doights de la main at the düsseldorf festival!

Urban circus, raw, graceful, spellbinding ...

The audience is enchanted yet, at the same time, completely on edge as the very young acrobats leap and climb and throw themselves into situations that are so precarious that all you can do is hold your breath!

Séquence 8 by the young Canadian circus company Les doights de la main is not 'just' acrobatics, it's also a social piece about the necessity of being dependent on others and yet being able to shine on a very individual level.

Philosophical, charming, thought provoking and also very entertaining. It's about life, the fragility of friendships. You, me, you and me.
Quite an achievement.

Love without ego.

Simply captivating - I wish I could go again!

Séquence at the düsseldorf festival!

Friday September 26 and 27 at the Theatre Marquee on Burgplatz

Ticket Hotline: 0211 82 82 6622

The festival continues until October 6