Transartfest 2013
International Art Biennial at Supermarkt, Berlin from July/August 2013
Dates and Location
July 27 - August 9, 2013
Opening: July 27, 20:00
Location: Supermarkt Creative Resource Center
Brunnenstrasse 64, 13355 Berlin
The Transartfest Biennial
Transartfest 2013! comprises two weeks of events and exhibitions, concerts, discussion groups, seminars and workshops, performances, screenings, speed crits, alternative tours, and a multi-author book launch. All events are free and open to the public. Limited places are available for the one day workshops, seminars and discussion groups by application. Please inquire about remaining places with Drew Henmi: [email protected]
Opening
Saturday, July 27 20:00 Transartfest Vernissage
Concerts + Performances
Tuesday, August 6
18:00 – 19:00 Dafna Naphtali + Hans Tammen: "mechanique(s)"
mechanique(s) is a collaboration between Dafna Naphtali and Hans Tammen involving live electronics, sound processing, analog modular synth and voice. The duo formed in the late 90's to investigate the overlap of various elements of their technical and aesthetic practices — in compositions and improvisational settings for Naphtali’s interactive processed sound/noise system and Tammen’s custom analog modular synth built around chaotic behaviors.
Wednesday, August 7
18:00 – 19:00 Lynn Book excerpts from"Escapes"
Book performs extended media works for voice, text, electronics, video projection and sound ephemera. These are part of the larger project, UnReading for Future Bodies, where she investigates the dark mists of alien-ness that both conceal and accentuate pathways for flight and resistance at the borderlands of life.
Thursday, August 8
18:00 – 19:30 Ensemble Xenon: "Perfect Hotel"
Margarete Huber: Perfect Hotel (2013) for ensemble and participating audience
Ensemble Xenon: Free Improvisation
Markus Wettstein: MA KE FOGU HA MI SURI (2005) for children’s instruments and four performers
Performers:
Lynn Book’s hybrid projects include full scale performance media works, concerts in music and club settings, exhibitional stagings, curations, recordings and public actions drawn from performance art, movement, theatre, visual art, language, sound and new music. Citations, fellowships, and awards include National Endowment for the Arts and Franklin Furnace. The New York Foundation for the Arts supported ‘The Dice Project’: a CD of adventurous women composers with live concert/media events at Thundergulch, EAR Studios at RPI, and The Kitchen in New York. Recent work include ‘FROTH’, a collaboration with an opera company, Art Stays Fest, in Slovenia in 2010 and 2011. She is working on a 3 vol. video book, ‘UnReading for Future Bodies’. ‘Escapes’, 2012, a book of ‘poems’ emerged from a series of projects interrogating opera, Greek tragedy, media hybridity, and the performance of extended bodies.
Ensemble Xenon, formed in Berlin in 2009, is a composer-performer ensemble straddeling the fence between free and noted music. Central to their work are the compositions and concepts of the members of the ensemble as well as free improvisation, sometimes including other genres like dance, installation or video. The ensemble also performs a repertoire of new music of composers that relates to the its working style. Musicians/Composers: Margarete Huber – soprano, Kathrin von Kieseritzky – saxophone, children’s instruments, Matthias Müller – trombone, Markus Wettstein – metal objects and melodica, children’s instruments, Henriette Scheytt – violin, Mike Flemming – viola, children’s instruments, Christopher Williams – double bass, Michael Turnbull – children’s instruments.
Dafna Naphtali is a sound-artist/improviser/composer from an eclectic musical background. As a singer/guitarist/electronic-musician she performs and composes using her Max/MSP programming for sound processing of voice and other instruments. She has collaborated & performed with Ras Moshe, Kathleen Supové, Lukas Ligeti, David First, Joshua Fried, Darius Jones, Alexander Waterman, co-led the digital chamber punk ensemble, What is it Like to be a Bat? with Kitty Brazelton since 1997 and was a founder of Magic Names vocal ensemble (performing Stockhausen’s Stimmung). Dafna is a 2011 recipient of Franklin Furnace Fund award to develop work with Eric Singer’s LEMUR music robots.
Hans Tammen creates sounds that have been described as an alien world of bizarre textures and a journey through the land of unending sonic operations. He produces rapid-fire juxtapositions of radically contrastive and fascinating noises, with micropolyphonic timbres and textures, aggressive sonic eruptions, but also quiet pulses and barely audible sounds – through means of his "Endangered Guitar" and interactive software programming, by working with the room itself, and, as a critic observed, with his "…fingers stuck in a high voltage outlet". Signal To Noise called his works "…a killer tour de force of post-everything guitar damage".
One Day Courses
All courses start 10:00 at Supermarkt and are preceeded with a pecha-kucha style presentation by the day's course leaders at 9:00.
Monday, August 5
Michael Bowdidge: "Coming Up For Air" workshop
Kate Martin: "Displacement" discussion group in various locations
Merete Rostad "Conversation Pieces: Public, art and the city"
Tuesday, August 6
Alanna Lockward: "Afropean Film" seminar
Jennifer Hope Davy + Julia Holzl: "Ways of Ending" seminar
Lynn Book, "Voice and Its Objects" workshop
Jean-Ulrick Desert: "Art and the Echo Chamber" discussion group
Wednesday, August 7
Astrid Menze: "Collective Stop Motion" workshop/on location
Dafna Naphtali, "Interactive Sound: Techniques and Practice" workshopNoam Toran: "Object as Protagonist" workshopGretchen Sigrid Blegen "Assessing Environments and Building Installations" Supermarkt DIY Masterclass
Thursday, August 8Virgil Wong: "Brains + Bodies: Future and Past" workshop/Berlin Medical Historical MuseumYuen Fong Ling: "Delete/copy/paste" workshop/life drawingStephan Takkides: "The Edge of Berlin" workshop + tour
Detailed descriptions and course leader bios can be accesed from the Transartfest event page.
Short Film Festival
"Trans-ideology: Nostalgia" Short film festival, curated by Ming Turner
Trans-ideology: Nostalgia aims to show a selection of new video works from international artists that cover a wide range of ideas surrounding the concept of nostalgia. Fabio DaSilva and Jim Faught suggest in their article ‘Nostalgia: A Sphere and Process of Contemporary Ideology’ (1982) that nostalgia isolates and mythicises selected objects from the past so that we feel we are enjoying a more tranquil and conflictless past. This nostalgic past is somehow not completely the reality, rather, it is ambiguous and is purified. DaSilva and Faught indicate that the past is usually perceived as more tranquil than the present. The nostalgic past ignores real material conditions and tensions, and embraces an emotional utopia.
Nostalgia offers a comfort zone where we find a peaceful and conflictless past, and where we escape from the hectic and demanding real life in capitalist society. As nostalgia reduces our critical engagement with the past, history is not entirely real but is selected and mythical. Therefore, nostalgia is based on either dreamy and subjective views of the past, or fantasy about the future. The screening aims to show selected lens-based work which is created with the ideology of recalling the internal and utopian world of individuals – either a nostalgic past or a fantasised future.
Schedule TBA
www.transart.org/transartfest
LOCATION FOR ALL EVENTS:
Supermarkt Creative Resource Center
Brunnenstrasse 64, 13355 Berlin
For further information please contact Drew Henmi:
[email protected]
Transart Institute
228 Park Ave. S. #34726
New York
www.transart.org
