Villa Aurora Events Archive
January 2015
Susan Sontag Revisited
Berlin
Information
Sontag combined ingenuity and a boundless curiosity with unconventional critical analyses and avantgarde commitments; open towards all things new in culture and art, she supported many artists just breaking onto the scenes of literature, fine art, and film from the early 1960s onwards and helped them gain worldwide recognition.
Who was Susan Sontag? The SUSAN SONTAG REVISITED series of events will seek to answer this question in readings, performances, lectures and film essays created specifically for this symposium. Some ten years after Susan Sontag’s death, we will commemorate this great universal intellectual and at the same time demonstrate the currency and relevance of her reflections for the present day.
20.01. – 05.02.2015: Film series at Kino Arsenal, Potsdamer Straße 2, 10785 Berlin
As a tribute to Sontag the filmmaker, Kino Arsenal will present a retrospective from 20 January to 5 February 2015.
9.01. + 30.01.2015 from 12:30h: Symposium at ICI – Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin, Christinenstraße 18 – 19, Haus 8, 10119 Berlin, free admission
The two-day symposium at the ICI Berlin features lectures, conversations, talks, and film essays by artists and scholars who were closely connected to Susan Sontag and have dealt with her work intensively.
For more information visit Facebook or the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry
Partners: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung; Berliner Senat; Hauptstadtkulturfonds; Arsenal, Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V.; SYNEMA - Gesellschaft für Film und Medien; DEFA Stiftung
Welcoming Reception
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Los Angeles, CA 90272)
Participants
Benedikte Bjerre was born in 1987 in Copenhagen (DK) and has been a student of Prof. Peter Fischli (CH) and Simon Starling (GB) at school of fine arts HfBK Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main since 2009. Bjerre received a BA in Sociology in 2009 from the University of Copenhagen prior to her studies in Fine Art. Since 2013 she has been a guest teacher at Fatamorgana The Danish School of Art Photography.
Benedikte Bjerre has, during her stay at Villa Aurora, through the medium of photography, focused on small-scale mobile architecture, as a possible peek into big-scale social structures.
On the occasion of Meet the Fellows Benedikte will collaborate with San Francisco born artist Buck Ellison (*1987) and Elif Erkan (born 1985 in Ankara/Turkey). Their topic: representation and social connotation in object making.
Heatsick is the project of musician and visual artist Steven Warwick, whose new album, Re-engineering, is out now on PAN. Heatsick's entrancing live show is created in real time based upon loops that are moulded, stretched and reduced to interlink, nestling and merging with one another in a similar way to his visual artwork, where objects and media combine and coalesce in an environment inviting the viewer's participation. Heatsick proposes a live dance music that expands and unlocks the senses: his use of limited resources to produce an immersive, maximalist sound environment - often stretched beyond three hours and augmented by elements of his broader art practice for his Extended Play... performance series - has been favourably received at venues, clubs and festivals across the world including Berghain/Panorama Bar, Unsound, MoMa and Novas Frequencias in Rio.
At Villa Aurora Heatsick will perform tracks from his latest album Re-engineering which he describes as a "cybernetic poem", indulging us in the mores of hypnotic dance music while holding a critical, and at times satirical, lens toward the culture writ large.
At Villa Aurora I am working on two projects.
Her first feature Nothing Bad Can Happen won the AFI- New Auteurs critics award in Los Angeles and was recently selected as Best Foreign-Language Film 2014 by LA Weekly.
At Villa Aurora Katrin Gebbe is working on her new screenplays Pelicanblood and the Danish-German-co-production The Begging Hand.
For more information about her work visit her website.
Christine Matzke will be researching the roots of Hollywood, i.e. the stands of Holly Trees, Hollywod owes its name to. Her quest is based on the map Map of Hollywood by H.H. Wilcox and Co., 1887.
Christine Matzke works in the genres of drawing, print and photography. In her series of blackish-greyish images she fuses individual and collective memories.
Screening of "Nothing Bad Can Happen"
Goethe-Institut Los Angeles (5750 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 100, Los Angeles, CA 90036)
Information
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/94849519" width="500" height="300" frameborder="0"></iframe>
Nothing Bad Can Happen - Trailer from Drafthouse Films on Vimeo.
Tore is a fervent new member of the fundamentalist Christian youth group, "Jesus Freaks".
Returning from his baptism, he and his fellow believers encounter a broken-down van belonging to a man named Benno. Tore seems to restarts the van by prayer, which he interprets as a message from God.
Soon, he moves in with Benno, his wife, young son and adolescent daughter and sleeps in a tent in the backyard, helping the family with their garden. After Benno punches him in the nose during a party for his own amusement, the violence between them escalates into a downward spiral of physical and psychological abuse.
A powerful debut from writer director Katrin Gebbe, the film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.
Strengthened by performances from newcomers Julie Feldmeier and Swantje Kohlhof, Nothing Bad Can Happen explores a harrowing intersection of religion and heresy that is based on true events.
Related Links:
Katrin Gebbe
Drafthouse Films
Participant
Katrin Gebbe started her film career by shooting short and experimental films at the AKI, Academy of Visual Arts and Design (The Netherlands) and the SMFA, School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, USA. 2006 she finished her studies in Visual Communications with the Bachelor of Design and started her masters in directing at the Hamburg Media School. In October 2008 she graduated with honors.
During this time she directed several award winning short films, a.o. her final exam film SORES & SIRIN, which wins the European Young CIVIS Media Prize handed out by the European Union and qualified for the Academy Award best live action short film. Her first feature TORE TANZT (production: Junafilm) was part of the official program of the Cannes International Film Festival and nominated for the Camera d’Or. The film won the Award of the German Film Critique, the Bavarian Film Award and was nominated for the German Film Awards (a.o. best directing). Katrin Gebbe lives and works in Hamburg.