Human Trans_Mission. Sophie Ramirez (SOFF) on the trail of the “absurd phenomenon of being human”.

Loud and trendy, or futuristic and downright cosmic, Sophie Ramirez alias SOFF poses on the photos of her brightly coloured Instagram-Feeds. When meeting the student of Kunstakademie Düsseldorf privately, you get a surprise. Her extraordinary styling is not just a means of her staging, but an expression of her personality. Make-up, clothing – everything is loud, stands out from what is usually described as "normal". SOFF lives this style. Bold, and impressively self-confident! But, what exactly is her art? Doesn't SOFF fall into the rather more superficial category of pop culture or, is she simply a good model? I wanted to find out and go and visit her in her live-in studio ... (to read more, tap on photo)
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INSTANT SOLUTIONS by Xenia Lesniewski – Between Concept Store, funeral parlour and travel agency

Bad-Gastein. Is that an urn in the window and a coffin at the back of the shop? Nonsense, it’s probably simply a vase and a trunk. After all, an exhibition is about to be opened within the context of the sommer.frische.kust art festival. While I am still shaking my head at my own thoughts, I pause, in a mixture of feeling dumbfounded and astonished, when I hear the opening speech: “Xenia Lesniewski created a room installation here that moves between a concept store, funeral parlour and travel agency […].” Is that possible? – My past just flitted through my mind at high speed and links up with the here and now. For those, who didn’t know this yet: Before I got involved in art, I was an undertaker….
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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 ...

Richard Siegal – Focus on the choreographer, Episode 4 of the series “Behind the Arts”

The imminent premiere of XERROX Vol. 2, a ballet for the music of the same name by Alva Noto, choreographed by Richard Siegal and performed by his company BALLET OF DIFFERENCE, was also a premiere for me. The attendance of the rehearsal and the subsequent conversation with Richard Siegal challenged me to get involved in contemporary ballet. To give you a heads up: I was immediately bowled over ...

Nathalie Vanheule – The beauty of vulnerability

How can poetic art actually be explained? Strangely enough, not by using words. It comes through the senses. As so happened when l looked at the Instagram photos of Nathalie Vanheule. Even a short glance had sufficed to directly sense the emotional power of her works which move between performance, sculptures and video installations. Trying to discover this phenomenon, I am eagerly heading to Kortrijk in Belgium to meet the artist personally ...

Ardan Özmenoglu – All wonderful

It is indeed absolutely wonderful to stand in front of Ardan Özmenoglu's front door in Istanbul. Surreal is perhaps even better. Just three weeks ago, she spontaneously invited me to her studio at her exhibition opening with the above title at Galerie Anna Laudel in Düsseldorf. And now I'm here. Am I even right? In a mix of English and sign language, I had communicated with the taxi driver and now hope that he hasn’t left me somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The bell sign "hello I'm art" is already reassuring. Address seems to be correct. But unfortunately, no one opens. The tension rises again ...
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Alex Grein – Ephemeral: photographically “exposed“

Cell phone holders, blocks of ice, dissecting tables, frozen matter in a freezer, viscous matter in canisters, photographs in deformed frames, and butterflies on video screens. Although I haven’t seen them, the mere listing makes me more than curious about this exhibition. How can we connect all of these, such different works? A first idea is conveyed in the exhibition title „d a  u   e    r“ ...
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Banz & Bowinkel – Digital shadows of real images

Admittedly, I had successfully managed to sneak by the world of Immersive art without paying attention, until I visited this exhibition. The terminology alone, with its abbreviations, seemed scary to me: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Bots, and now Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) ... Too technical. Too complicated. Or so I thought until I met Giulia Bowinkel and Friedemann Banz – THE artist duo that has been shaping the development of this young art form since its beginnings.