The toxic building – How Jan Glisman turned the deconstruction of the Deutsche Welle towers into a multimedia art project

All Jan Glisman really wanted to do was to "just" document a spectacular event in Cologne: The demolition of all three parts of the 138-metre-high Deutsche Welle broadcasting tower, the third-highest building in the city. The funding had been approved, the plans worked out, but then - everything turned out quite differently. The risk to the broadcasting operations of Deutschlandfunk, which is connected by a common foundation slab, and the spread of asbestos fibres feared by residents in the neighbourhood had prevented the blasting. “Blasting” therefore became "deconstruction". A process that was to extend over a total of five years and challenged Glisman to document precisely that period. Huge numbers of photos, video material and drawings were initially created without any concrete idea of what was to happen with them ...

Wilko Austermann – Focus on the curator, Episode 3 of the series “Behind the Arts”

Anybody travelling in the Rhineland and visiting the Upcoming artists exhibitions, is very likely to have come across his name. Whether the Antichambre in the Hotel Friends in Düsseldorf, Malkastenpark, MMIII Kunstverein Mönchengladbach, Quartier am Hafen Köln or Krefeld Kunstverein, you will find: Curated by Wilko Austermann. What exactly does a curator do? Or, to put it more accurately: How does Wilko Austermann personally define his responsibilities? We meet at MMIII Kunstverein Mönchengladbach, where he uses the example of Yoana Tuzharova's Plasma soil exhibition, that he conceptualised, to talk about his main ideas. It becomes immediately obvious, that here we have a classic case of being able to differentiate between profession and vocation.
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Conrad Hicks – In the realm of the Toolmaker

Cape Town. In Observatory, Cape Town's creative hotspot, I visit Conrad Hicks – an artist -blacksmith, or a toolmaker, as he calls himself. His studio forms a backdrop of a special kind. It is right in the middle of the previously burnt-out Art Déco cinema, which he bought and restored. Already the exterior view is quite surreal – it immediately takes me to a scene in the film Metropolis ...

A 4 Foundation – An innovative art lab

Cape Town. There are academies, galleries, museums, art exhibitions, festivals ... and now also a laboratory to experiment with art. At the initiative of the collector Wendy Fisher and her curator Josh Ginsburg, an innovative institute, the A4 Foundation, came into being in 2017, right in the middle of Cape Town. Here, space – literally and figuratively - was created for the passionate experimentation with art, new forms of art funding and communication of art and, particularly, for trying things out. Today, in our conversation with Josh Ginsburg, we hear some more about it ...

Norval Foundation – A museum as a leisure destination

Cape Town. With the opening of the Norval Foundation, another architectural and conceptual highlight for culture buffs was created in Cape Town. The opening of the Zeitz Mocaa Museum as recently as last year drew international attention for the first time to as yet little known African contemporary art. This led to the creation of another space which feels committed to exploring and presenting the African art of the 20th and 21st century ...

Zeitz Mocaa – The light house project

IAmidsts the vicinity of the V&A Waterfront, the port and restored docklands surrounding the two historic basins of the Cape Town harbour, lies the Zeitz MOCAA Museum which opened in 2017. It is the first museum on the whole continent which focuses exclusively on contemporary African Art and the first which had spectacular architecture created for the presentation of its art ...

Mischa Kuball – Irritation as a concept

Berlin, Jewish Museum. I have an appointment with Mischa Kuball in the Libeskind building, one of THE contemporary architectural icons of Berlin. His light and sound installation res·o·nant, specially created for this location, remarkably illustrates the working method of this conceptual artist, who has been presenting his artistic statements in public and institutional spaces since 1977.

Paul Böhm – Integration as a construction task

Cologne-Marienburg, 8 December 2017. Today I am visiting the architect Paul Böhm, grandson of Dominikus Böhm, son of Gottfried Böhm, Stephan, Markus, and Peter Böhm's brother. A family that wrote and still writes architectural history. In addition to dealing with a wide variety of construction tasks, above all the church construction task is what shaped not only the work of the first two generations, but was also a natural part of the Œuvres of the younger Böhms ...