On May 22nd, FELLOWS & Friends met at the artists’ residency Torstrasse 111  in honor of Alice Wang and Benjamin Tong, Villa Aurora’s 2013 Berlin fellows,
The Berlin fellowship was founded in 2012. It gives L.A. artists the opportunity to work and live in Berlin for a period of several months. The Villa’s goal is to foster transatlantic exchange. Whereas the fellowship program offers artists living and working in Germany a chance to stay and work at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, Fellowship Berlin is designed to invite artists from the Los Angeles area to stay in Germany.
In addition to housing facilities, Torstraße 111 offers gallery spaces, where Alice Wang and Benjamin Tong presented their works.
Alice Wang was born in China and studied in Toronto, Los Angeles and at New York University. The artist and fimmaker lives in Los Angeles, and since 2012 she has been spending time in Paris as an art fellow. Her work on view at Torstrasse was titled ‚The Secret Blackness of Milk‘.
A native of Toronto, Benjamin Tong studied computer sciences and has a Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts. He was an arts’ fellow in Mexico City and currently exhibits in the U.S., in Canada and Europe. His performance had the title: ‘In a thousand years we will have corrected the earth’s rotational axis shifting it 45 degrees aligning to that of Venus, and the polar icecaps will have melted giving the seas a flavoring of lemonade’.
Dr. Miriam Kellerhals opened the evening with a lecture on art and copy right. She explained the prerequisites, an artistic creation has to have in order to enjoy copy right protection and the rights resulting from it.  Furthermore she discussed the circumstances, under which the work can be quoted, copied or satirized by others, without violating copy rights. Kellerhals cited German legal opinions and the decision by the New York Court of Appeal in the case of „Patrick Cariou vs. Richard Prince“ (April 4th, 2013).
Dr. Miriam Kellerhals studied in Konstanz and Munich, and trained as a lawyer in Berlin. Then she worked as research associate at FU Berlin. She wrote her dissertation about copy right in employment. As an attorney, she specializes in copy and media rights and media law, teaches at various colleges and lectures internationally
Ulrike Seyboth and Ingo Fröhlich, our hosts at Torstrasse 111, presented their catalogue „ich zeichne die Zeit, du malst den Moment“ (I draw the time and you paint the moment) published by Lukas Verlag in Berlin.