Susanne Gaensheimer

Eugen Blume

Catherine Nichols

Isabelle Malz

In 13 Kapiteln bieten die Ausstellung und der dazugehörige Katalog einen tiefgreifenden Einblick in das kosmopolitische Denken von Joseph Beuys, wie es sich in seinen Aktionen manifestiert, die in Form von Videoprojektionen und Fotografien präsentiert werden. Denn dort – als handelnde, sprechende und sich bewegende Figur – untersuchte Beuys die zentrale und radikale Idee seines erweiterten Kunstbegriffs: »Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler«. Das Ziel seines universalistischen Ansatzes war es, die Gesellschaft von Grund auf zu erneuern. Bis heute ist sein Einfluss in künstlerischen und politischen Diskursen spürbar. In der Ausstellung treten zeitgenössische Künstler*innen neben Vertreter*innen aus den unterschiedlichsten Bereichen der Gesellschaft mit dem agierenden Beuys in einen vielschichtigen, transkulturellen Dialog. Von heute aus bestätigen, befragen und erweitern sie seine Thesen zu den Möglichkeiten einer von der Kunst her gedachten Zukunft. MIT POSITIONEN VON B-Town Warriors, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Phyllida Barlow, Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, Fatou Bensouda, Huma Bhabha, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Angela Davis, Dusadee Huntrakul, Jes Fan, Charles Foster, Bill Gates, Núria Güell, Anna Halprin, Donna Haraway, Raphael Hillebrand, Jenny Holzer, Michel Houellebecq, Lazar Kunstmann | L’ux, Jeong Kwan, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Zoe Leonard, Goshka Macuga, Antanas Mockus, Baptiste Morizot, Bruce Nauman, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe, Howey Ou, William Pope.L, Cia Rinne, Tejal Shah, Vandana Shiva, Santiago Sierra, Patti Smith, Edward Snowdon, Christopher D. Stone, Suzanne Lacy, The Otolith Group, Thich Nhat Hanh, Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousafzai, u.a.

Cosmopolitical Exercises with Joseph Beuys

Everyone is an artist.

Gabriele Knapstein

Joachim Jäger

Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin)

This is, quite possibly, one of the world's best designed art books. Featured within its pages are works from the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection--one of the world's most significant (and yes, controversial) collections of contemporary art. But this book doesn't merely present some 400 works by 40 artists, it also seeks, through its design, to provide an individual stage--or section--for each artist in order to highlight the artist's philosophy, or to play off of his or her signature works of art. For example, Raymond Pettibon's comic-like drawings unfold to a newspaper-sized spread, while Gordon Matta-Clark's opening page has a split in it that corresponds perfectly to the cut-out in the house of his now-iconic piece, Splitting. The photograph of the house is revealed in full when the page is turned. A list of each artist's works in the collection is provided at the start of their section, which is coded with a specific color for that artist, and often features changes in paper type that correspond to a specific body of work (Larry Clark's gritty black and white Tulsa images are printed on uncoated paper, while Rachel Khedoori's Pink Room color images are made even more vibrant by high-gloss paper.) With splendid color reproductions, color-coded pages, and luxurious gatefolds, this book is not just a book about art--it is art. Anyone who has a love of art, of design, or of books will treasure this volume, which also gives detailed specs on every piece of art, and a short bio on each artist. The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection reads as a book of 40 individual monographs . . . turning each page is a treat.

Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof

Matilda Felix

The Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwart– Berlin presents the first comprehensive exhibition in Germany devoted to the legendary Black Mountain College. Founded in 1933 in North Carolina, USA, Black Mountain rapidly rose to fame on account of its progressive teaching methods and the many prominent figures who taught and studied there. Its influence upon the development of the arts in the second half of the 20th century was enormous; the performatisation of the arts, in particular, that emerged as from the 1950s derived vital impetus from the experimental practice at Black Mountain. The founders wanted to establish a democratic, experiential, interdisciplinary educational facility in line with the forward-thinking pedagogical ideas of philosopher John Dewey. The exhibition traces the history of this university experiment in its main outlines. In the first few years of its existence, the college was strongly shaped by German and European émigrés – among them several former Bauhaus members such as Josef and Anni Albers, Alexander “Xanti" Schawinsky and Walter Gropius. After the Second World War, the creative impulses issued increasingly from young American artists and academics, who commuted between rural Black Mountain and the urban centres on the East and West Coast. Right up to its closure in 1957, the college remained imbued with the ideas of European modernism, the philosophy of American pragmatism and teaching methods that aimed to encourage personal initiative as well as the social competence of the individual.0Within an architectural environment designed by the architects' collective raumlabor_berlin, the exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof is showing works both by teachers at the college, such as Josef and Anni Albers, Richard Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Shoji Hamada, Franz Kline, and Jack Tworkov, and by a number of Black Mountain students including Cy Twombly. 0Exhibition: Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin Germany (05.06-27.09.2015).

An Interdisciplinary Experiment, 1933-1957

Black Mountain

Stefanie Schneider

Marc Forster

Blotchy, overexposed, and unusually colored, Stefanie Schneider's suggestive photographs break with the conventions of the medium. The expired Polaroid film she uses distorts in a surreal way things we are familiar with from road movies: motel signs from the fifties, palm trees against a cyan-blue sky, candy-colored limousines, a gas station in the middle of nowhere. A graduate of the Folkwang School in Essen, Schneider populates these settings with young people who seem oddly lost; her colorful staging of normality seems to be subliminally threatened or threatening. Director Marc Forster had good reason to integrate Schneider's photographs into Stay, his new thriller starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts. Stranger than Paradise, Schneider's latest reminiscence of Hollywood, was published in conjunction with the film's release.

Stranger Than Paradise

Herta Müller translates her visual impressions of the semblance of light, reflections in water, bleached boulders, and colorful shadows into sensitive poetic painting.

Eugen Blume

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