This week’s recommendations are two events taking place in South London, both highlighting the work and music of producer Terre Thaemlitz aka DJ Sprinkles. Café OTO presents an evening of talk, video and audio with Thaemlitz, starting with a multi-media reading of “Naisho Wave Manifesto” (“Secrecy Wave Manifesto”), which Thaemlitz produced for the first issue of the Japanese culture journal Farben, released in June 2014. Thaemlitz discusses – as she did in the current mono.kultur #39 – the historic and strategic deployment of silence and closets. In particular, she addresses the problematic repercussions of the online digital distribution of critical cultural work, and demonstrates how the logic of hegemonic Internet platforms runs counter to the social dynamics of minor communities and subcultures. This will be followed by discussion with the audience. The evening will continue with Thaemlitz mixing a variety of ambient audio, video and conversation.

On Friday September 25th, Tief and NTS Radio will co-host a Beats in Space showcase in Peckham. DJ Sprinkles has been given the headline slot along Matt Karmil, Hesseltime and Tim Sweeney among others.

What more can we ask for?

Terre Thaemlitz: A Secret Wave Manifesto
24 September 2015 / 8pm
Café OTO
18–22 Ashwin street
London E8 3DL / Dalston

NTS Radio & Tief present: Beats In Space
25 September 2015 / 9pm
Bussey Building, The CLF Art Cafe
133 Rye Lane
London SE15 4ST / Peckham

Across photography, installation, and social sculpture, Mathias Kessler probes the contemporary imagination, employing a visual language that borrows from the Romantic landscape genre and expedition photography, using empirical reason and the “sublime” as foils for an investigation that goes beyond the mere “natural” surface to explore the more complicated political and economic forces that have drastically altered the social and natural landscape. His visually arresting images and participative frameworks are sites for confrontation with and reflection on contemporary anxieties about the environment and globalization; digitization and artificial realities; post-industrial decay and natural disasters. Kessler’s publication NOWHERE TO BE FOUND features extensive documentation and an in-depth look at a selection of his most important works. It also includes essays that focus on his investigations into the historical and contemporary implications of the persisting Western-Eurocentric fantasy of the natural world: an obsession with nature as both a terrifying unknown and an exploitable resource. Kessler pulls apart the complex movement of man and nature across this nexus of natura naturans (self-creating nature) on one hand, and natura naturata (creatd nature) on the other, rejecting a merely environmentalist stance.

NOWHERE TO BE FOUND is published in conjunction with Kessler’s solo exhibition Here and Now at Kunsthal Rotterdam.

Mathias Kessler
NOWHERE TO BE FOUND (2015)
Design by Sylvia Gruber
Published by Hatje Cantz
Published by Hatje Cantz

As the holiday season is coming to an end, we are still looking for reasons to stay or even to go back to some of our favorite spots this summer. Cyprus for instance has not only a multilayered history, but also an eclectic contemporary art scene. Part of it is Neoterismoi Toumazou, a former novelty shop turned into an artist-run space in 2013 by artist and curator Maria Toumazou. Besides the curation of a diverse exhibition programme, she also produces artist editions and multiples. We are not surprised that the upcoming solo presentation of New York based artist Marysia Gacek looks just as promising!

Marysia Gacek’s work is known for its suggestive personal symbolism, using memory and arcane cultural references that assert the transcendent possibilities of the banal. Gacek works in a variety of materials from painting, clay, to textiles and video. By starting with a place, an image, a specific memory, or an object, she creates structures and narratives using personal symbolism and different modes of representation. For her exhibition, titled Same Goals, Gacek will display a collection of sculptures and assemblages testing the elusive nature of the forms depicted and the retraining of narratives. Elements of the exhibition allude to display strategies encountered during the artist’s stay in Cyprus.

Marysia Gacek – Same Goals
03 Septmeber – 25 September 2015
Neoterismoi Toumazou
69A Odos Aischylou
1011 Nicosia / Cyprus

The pioneer of experimental music Hans-Joachim Roedelius is going to be honoured with a three-day festival at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen Welt. Lifelines is a series of events presenting his diverse creative achievements by reflecting them in discussions, films, an installation by Brian Eno, and, above all, concerts in which Roedelius will be joined by fellow friends and collaborators from his past and present, such as Arnold Kasar, Tim Story, and Christopher Chaplin. Roedelius is particularly known for his project Cluster, which was founded in 1971 in collaboration with Dieter Moebius who has sadly passed away earlier this summer, and later joined by Conrad Schnitzler.

Roedlius talks about his approach and influences in creating melodious soundscapes in his recent interview with Dominikus Mueller for frieze d/e:

“We still don’t know what electronic sounds actually do to the body, or how the body reacts to electronically generated frequencies. Does the body ‘naturally’ take in every kind of sound? We didn’t start off with the aim of doing something new. We wanted to create our own sound-language.”

Roedelius from Mindpirates on Vimeo.

Lifelines #4: Roedelius
03 Septmeber – 6 September 2015
Haus der Kulturen der Welt
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin

Martino Gamper first attracted widespread attention in 2007 with the project 100 Chairs in 100 Days, for which he reworked elements of existing  chairs into a collection of charismatic new pieces of furniture. Taking on the ultimate design object of the chair within severe self-imposed constraints in terms of time and material, the results were odd – at times impractical, at times funny-looking, but always refreshingly unexpected. Drawing upon the history of furniture yet altogether unique and original improvisations, he has toured 99 chairs around the globe, always creating another 100th chair in each new location. For the exhibition Martino Gamper – 100 Chairs in 100 Days in Japan, he will create a yet-unveiled 100th chair from a find in Marugame. Another Gamper-treat!

This might be also a good occasion to pick up mono.kultur #32, to re-read our interview with Martino Gamper, which we published in 2012.

Martino Gamper – 100 Chairs in 100 Days
The Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art
The MIMOCA Foundation
80-1 Hama-machi, Marugame-shi,
Kagawa 763-0022 JAPAN
On view 13 June – 23 September 2015

Omnipresent Kim Gordon appears in Peaches latest video for Close-Up, where she takes the role of a wrestling instructor. It is kind of odd, but also very funny to watch!

The new track “Close Up” feat. Kim Gordon will appear on Peaches upcoming album Rub, which will be released via I U She Music on September 25.

Marsha P. Johnson (L) and Sylvia Rivera (R)

The German blockbuster-directer Roland Emmerich has just released a trailer for his new movie Stonewall, and it’s been already discussed controversially, particularly about its lack of authenticity. Just to quickly recap: The Stonewall Riots were a series of protests in 1969 against the police by the LGBT community in New York after a police raid in Greenwhich’s Stonewall Inn sparked a violent backlash. Stonewall is now referred to as the most significant event in the history of LGBT liberation. People critcize the movie as another example of whitewashing. Even though the film is billed as a “true story”, it appears to be told from the point of view of a corn-fed, white, cisgender boy called Danny who is kicked out of his house because of his homosexuality and retaliates by hitting the big city. In reality, Stonewall was started by black trans drag queen Marsha P. Johnson. While Marsha P. Johnson has been given a role in the Hollywood narrative, she is played by a cisgender male. She is only listed two places higher in the credits on imdb.com than “Woman with Poodle”, played by Nathaly Thibault. Fortunately people reacted promptly. Two days after the trailer’s release, a petition to boycott the movie popped up; by now it has been signed by over 23,000 people. Boycotters claimed that the film had “white-washed” and “cis-washed” history, erasing the significant contribution made by trans and queer women of colour and drag queens in the Stonewall uprising. The petition was created by Pat Cordova-Goff, a trans activist feminine person of colour. She wrote on the page:

“OUR HISTORY WILL NOT BE WHITE/CIS-WASHED. History classes throughout our nation have built a reputation of instructing young generations that white, straight, cis folks are the saviors and founders of this land. Wrong. We were taught that light-skinned people are the goal; the goal to assimilate to. Wrong. We were also rarely taught about queer history, but when we were, it probably revolved around white cis gay men. Wrong.”

Emmerich responded to the controversy stating, “I think we represented it very well[...] We have drag queens, lesbians, we have everything in the film because we wanted to portray a broader image of what ‘gay’ means.” His responds fail even more spectacularly when saying in a Facebook comment “We are all the same in our struggle for acceptance.”

No. We are not all equal in our struggle. People like Emmerich – cisgender, white people – are born into a world that gives them unqualified power. If you, Emmerich, cannot recognise that, you definitely should not be doing a movie about the most significant moments for transgender people of colour.

Christian Kracht’s book Imperium has been considered as a “Melvillean masterpiece of the South Seas” recently. Released in Germany in 2012, it has now been translated into English by Daniel Bowes.

The protagonist of the fiction is August Engelhardt, a “nudist and cocovore”, who purchases land in what was then German New Guinea, in order to establish a nudist colony on the island of Kabakon. “Unfortunately, Engelhardt’s devotion to a ‘carefree’ future safe from the alienating effects of meat, capitalism, clothing, or any other trapping of life in the Industrial Age made it difficult for him to lure followers to his isolated utopia in the South Seas. He instead ruled an empire of one, from 1902 through the first World War, although he did share the island with three or four dozen melanesians and the occasional stray party of confused Germans” (see review on Flavorwire).

First reviews of Imperium even speculate about possible screen adaptions:”It reads like the best Werner Herzog movie, Herzog has yet to make”, it says.

The Swiss author’s evocation of the era of German colonialism makes for some marvelously grotesque – and at times unsettling – images of colonial life in South Seas. Definitely a summer read recommendation!

Censorship has been a hot-topic, no matter what the medium is. Last week, MACBA’s director Bartomeu Marí decided to cancel the show The Beast and The Foreign, due to Ines Doujak’s work , Not Dressed for Conquering that depicts former Spanish king Juan Carlos and Bolivian Labor leader Domitila Chúngara during a sodomy act with a dog on SS Helmets. After four days, the museum decided to open the show and the latest news is the resignation of the director.

Curated by Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, Paul B. Preciado and Valentín Roma, the exhibition hosts other compelling works by Masist Gül (presented by Banu Cennetoğlu and Philippine Hoegen), Ghasem Hajizadeh, Jan Peter Hammer, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, León Ferrari and more by criticising the relations of dominance and contemplating on the metaphors of the binary of white-heterosexual-male and the others. The main question of the show is crucial to think about: “Is sovereignty possible beyond power? Can sovereignty occur by questioning these relations of dominance?”

The Beast and the Sovereign
16 October 2015-17 January 2016
MACBA Barcelona

After a long sleepy winter break Art lovers can finally start planning their full-on gallery opening tours. For this weekends waverers in Berlin the ultimate must-see show tonight is the group exhibition at Micky Schubert. The opening of  her new space in Berlin’s Tiergarten area starts with a performance of the Glasgow-based artist and the former Life Without Buildings member Sue Tompkins. Don’t miss!

Gallery Micky Schubert
Genthiner Straße 36
10785 Berlin
Group Show featuring works
from the artists of the gallery
March 21, 2015 / 7-9 pm
Performance by Sue Tompkins
8 pm