Villa Aurora Events Archive
November 2016
Janet Sternburg
Lapidarium (Hallesches Ufer 78, 10963 Berlin)
Information
Seeing Is a Living Thing
Can a still photograph embody living perception? Can it contain its abundance? Can photography, not a time-based medium, render ongoing flow? Can it do justice to an overspilling world? To these questions, Janet Sternburg (b. Boston, 1943; lives and works in Los Angeles and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico), a writer and philosopher as well as a photographer, says yes. Her work proves that photography can render the perceptual movement that is our experience. Working without any optical or digital manipulation and with the simplest of means – disposable and early iPhone cameras – she brings together the manifest aspects of the world on a single plane, portraying a vision of interpenetrating and layered time and space. Often shooting through windows, she uses reflection not to mirror but rather to blur conventional separations between inside and outside, solid and fluid, subject and object. These are images of consciousness – its fluidity and porosity as opposed to the delimitations that structure reasoned thought – fused with everyday life.
“Overspilling World” is Janet Sternburg’s first monograph. With texts by Sternburg, art historian Pepe Karmel, photographer Catherine Opie, curator Alexandra von Stosch, and filmmaker-photographer Wim Wenders.
Eclectic Salon
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Los Angeles, CA 90272)
Information
Varian Fry Quartett of the Berlin Philharmonic
The younger members of the Berliner Philharmoniker also uphold the Philharmoniker tradition of becoming involved in chamber music alongside their orchestral activities. In the 2012/2013 season, the four musicians Philipp Bohnen and Marlene Ito (violin), Martin von der Nahmer (viola), and Rachel Helleur (cello) founded the Varian Fry Quartet, named after the American journalist and freedom fighter Varian Fry (October 15, 1907 September 13, 1967). Fry ran a rescue network in Vichy France that helped over 2,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, among them being Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger.
The November 18th concert at Villa Aurora is the quartet’s exclusive appearence in Southern California.
Program
W.A. Mozart Divertimento F-Major KV 138
Tanja Dückers
Literatursalon im Kantkino (Kantstraße 54, 10627 Berlin)
Information
My Old West Berlin. Locations in Berlin
Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s memoir »Berliner Kindheit um 1900«, Villa Fellow Tanja Dückers reflects on her own childhood and youth in West Berlin of the 1970s and 80s. Through her poignant observations of everyday life she revives the lifestyles of the divided city’s West. On the streets and in courtyards, behind firewalls and in old hair salons, the author encounters oddities and sadness, comedy and tragedy, and also animals – from rats to foxes and even hippopotamuses.
This evening’s musical accompaniment will be provided by the singer and accordeonist AnniKa von Trier.
Annekatrin Hendel
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Los Angeles, CA 90272)
Information
VATERLANDSVERRÄTER (Enemy of the State)
Director: Annekatrin Hendel, Documentary, Germany 2011, 90 min., German with subtitles
It is about as difficult to reach him as to get to him. Director Annekatrin Hendel trudges through a lot of snow in the middle of nowhere in the Uckermark (a region in north-eastern Germany). It is the first day of shooting for a film on 75-year-old writer Paul Gratzik, former Stasi informant, turned apostate, turned dissident. The first thing Gratzik defiantly announces is that there will be no discussion on the Stasi. She will just have to get that out of her head. Period. But now we have the film. On one hand it is a psychological profile of an extraordinarily paradoxical figure, a "man of extremes": satyr, seducer, radical and hermit. On the other hand, VATERLANDSVERRÄTER tells a story about the GDR, its critics and the Stasi as it has never, in the 20 years since the End of East Germany, been told before.
"Vaterlandsverräter" is a multifaceted portrait and so far the best cinematic counter model to "The Lives of Others".
- Berliner Zeitung -
Participant
Director and Producer Annekatrin Hendel was born and raised in Berlin, Germany. After finishing her study of design, she worked as a freelance costume and production designer. In 2004 Hendel started her own company IT WORKS! Medien and acts as a producer of feature films and documentaries, director and CEO. Hendel is a member of the German film academy.