Villa Aurora Events Archive
April 2016
Los Angeles
68projects (Fasanenstraße 68, 10719 Berlin)
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Berlin - L.A. Trilogy III
Participating artists
Marcel Buehler | Hans Diernberger
Veronika Kellndorfer | Anna McCarthy
Hans-Christian Schink | David Zink-Yi
Eclectic Salon
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Los Angeles, CA 90272)
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Celebrating the Diversity of L.A.’s Musical Landscape
Eclectic Salon # 4
Villa Aurora and Salastina Society present Masterpiece Discovery
A piece of music held in reverence and awe by fellow musicians, Beethoven's String Quartet in C# Minor Op 131 stands out among that composer's works as an astounding example of his creative genius. This is the music that Schubert wished would be the last thing he would hear in his life. Beethoven himself called it a new approach to composing, and it looked far enough into the future so that it remains a profoundly inspirational and novel work to this day.
Brian Lauritzen and the musicians will take you on a tour of the work before the complete performance.
Los Angeles
68projects (Fasanenstraße 68, 10719 Berlin)
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Artist Talk
Hans Diernberger, Veronika Kellndorfer, Hans-Christian Schink in conversation with Julia Rosenbaum (in German).
Women’s Rights and Journalism in Syria
Berlin (Friedrichstraße 231 (2nd back yard, 3rd floor), 10969 Berlin)
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Panelists
YASMINE MEREI, journalist and human rights activist, editor-in-chief of the feminist magazine Saiedet Souria
YAHYA ALAOUS, journalist and human rights activist
DINA ABOUL HOSN, journalist, author, and translator, co-founder of Abwab, Germany’s first Arab-language newspaper for refugees
Moderator: JULIA GERLACH, freelance journalist and author
Women’s Rights have been a sensitive topic for journalists in Syria for a long time. In some parts of the country extremist Islamic groups severely curtail women’s mobility and deny them access to education, enforcing their extremely restrictive vision of gender roles with massive violence. Many refugee women and girls are routinely subjected to sexual violence. Prostitution and forced marriages are part of their sad reality.
The Assad regime, although portraying itself as enlightened and moderate has overlooked, even long before the protests in 2011, the rise of an Islamic-conservative movement. Journalists voicing concern about and reporting on the deficits in women’s rights too openly were punished.
Participants
YASMINE MEREI: journalist, linguist and human rights activist. Merei worked for several Syrian papers and was co-publisher of the magazines Al-Haqiqa and Suwar. She is managing editor of the woman’s magazine Saiedet Souria (http://saiedetsouria.com), founding member of the Syrian Women's Lobby and Associate Director of the Campaign Against Childhood Marriage. Yasmin Merei was a Villa Aurora Fellow from June to December 2015.
YAHYA ALAOUS was imprisoned from 2002 to 2004 for his articles critical of the human rights situation in Syria. After his release, he was stripped of his civil and political rights. He continued writing anyway, mostly for Thara, an underground weekly e-magazine for women’s and children’s rights. After the revolution started in 2011, he wrote for an opposition newspaper under an alias. He eventually had to leave the country and has been living in Berlin since April 2015. His column about his life as a refugee appears in the online edition of Süddeutsche Zeitung.
DINA ABOUL HOSN is a journalist, author and translator and member of the coordinating committee of the Syrian Feminist Lobby. A member of the Druze, an oppressed minority, she suffered from ever increasing governmental harassment since spring of 2011. She moved to Dubai in the fall of 2012 and worked as a reporter for the Gulf News. However, the presence of Syrian secret service agents made her life too dangerous, and she applied for political asylum in Germany. Aboul Hosn is co-founder of Abwab, the first Arab-language paper by and for refugees in Germany (https://issuu.com/abwab.de). Dina Aboul Hosn also works as English-speaking editor for the website I am a human story (http://iamahumanstory.com/en/).
JULIA GERLACH was based in Cairo for seven years and reported on the Arab World for German-language media such as the Berliner Zeitung, Focus, Cicero and Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag. In 2015 she moved back to Berlin. Her book Der verpasste Frühling. Woran die Arabellion gescheitert ist (The missed spring. Why the Arab uprising has failed) was published recently by Ch. Links Verlag.
Exhibition Opening
Museum of Photography Berlin (Jebensstraße 2 10623 Berlin)
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M+M 7 Days
You are cordially invited to the exhibition opening on Wednesday, April 27, 2016 at 7 pm.
Moritz Wullen
Partners
An exhibition of the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Mussen zu Berlin, in cooperation with Villa Aurora.
Exhibition
Museum of Photography Berlin (Jebensstraße 2 10623 Berlin)
Information
M+M 7 Days
In an installation created especially for the Fürstensaal room of the Museum für Fotografie, the Munich-based artist-duo M+M are featuring a film cycle entitled 7 Days. The seven-part work is shown in its entirety, each part having been developed successively by M+M within a timeframe just short of seven years. The installation is akin to a multi-perspective cinema, in which the language of film expands to include the surrounding spatial structures and incorporate new narrative styles. Each film of the cycle tells its own story, though split in two and projected as separate, parallel variants. The protagonist – played by the actor Christoph Luser – finds himself subjected within the “seven days" to a variety of seemingly mundane, yet also entirely contradictory, situations. All seven films relate in some way to key scenes from different movies, in which the psychological dimension of interpersonal relationships plays a particularly significant role . By presenting them in dual format, M+M create new interpretations of the scenes while developing a cinematic language that explores the mutability of contemporary identity.
This approach characterizes M+M's re-imaginings of scenes from a number of films, including Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (1963), John Badham's Saturday Night Fever (1977), and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), with each film dedicated to a particular day of the week. There are certain themes that crop up to some degree throughout the different films, such as the relationships between father, mother, and child, and the forces of erotic attraction (or alienation) between a man and a woman, or between men. Each film comprises a precisely synchronized dual projection, with identical dialogue, camera work, and editing, in the midst of which one character is replaced by another. Consequently dialogues and storylines are subject to change both in terms of their mood and meaning, be it on a subliminal level or more substantially, which in turn brings an unsettlingly diverse range of different facets to the fore. An integral aspect of7 Days is the arrangement of the projection screens in the room, the fragmentation of the homogeneous film space and its narrative structure into a multi-perspective cinema, from which an engaged observer is able to derive interconnections between the projections, multiple images, and stories. By exploring the possibilities and peculiarities of synchronized storytelling, a form with which the 7 Days film installation actively experiments, M+M give expression to their interest in the increasingly complex experiences of space, identity, and time, that have come to characterize our society.
M+M frequently combine different media in their conceptual-oriented work, from photography, video, and film, through sculpture, to architecture and projections in public spaces. Their activities have in recent years focused on multimedia installations.
Partners
An exhibition of the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Mussen zu Berlin, in cooperation with Villa Aurora.
Artist´s Talk
Museum of Photography Berlin (Jebensstraße 2 10623 Berlin)
Information
Partners
An exhibition of the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Mussen zu Berlin, in cooperation with Villa Aurora