Junge Akademie – Open Studios
Several times a year, fellows in the Akademie der Künste’s JUNGE AKADEMIE programme organise Open Studio Nights in their studios on Hanseatenweg.
This time, visual artists Cemile Sahin and Robert Olawuyi, composer Kaj Duncan David and singer Regina Fredriksson provide insights into their artistic practices in exhibitions, performances and screenings.
Cemile Sahin
CENTER SHIFT #0, 2019, HD video, 16 min.
Center Shift #0 is the prologue to a mini-series: a group of people come together apparently by chance to shoot a film. While looking for a story, a person is shot in the heat of the moment. This event serves as the story that is to be depicted. Each episode re-enacts the murder from a different person's perspective. It could be any one of them, every one tells the story differently and the episodes overlap. Everything revolves around the same questions: How can a picture replace a story, if there are no pictures of it from the very outset? What happens when one tries from the outside to create an image of a story that gives something back at the end of the story? Episode #0 is to be shown and lens based objects presented.
Cemile Sahin reads also from her debut novel TAXI (2019, Korbinian Verlag). In the novel a mother discovers her son, who was killed in the war, in a strange man. The war, of course, made no sense, but it had also taken away her control over her own destiny. She wants to take this back by getting this man to play her son. Her plan: a narrative in the style of an American series; director: she, Rosa Kaplan. The plan seems to work, so well in fact that this unknown man truly becomes her son and is ultimately prepared to kill for his new mother.
Robert Olawuyi
insights into artistic practice / video presentation of Breeze (2010) and Freedom is (2014)
Breeze, 2010, single channel HD video projection, stereo sound
The video projection shows the front of a building covered in ivy. The leaves initially appear to be moving in the wind, but upon closer inspection it becomes clear that the movement is being digitally abstracted at intervals. In the meditative moving image of the plants, the viewer's gaze oscillates between nature and art product. The peacefulness of the uninterrupted video loop is supported by a rather abstract, digitally generated audio track.
Freedom is, 2014, HD video, 5 min
The video presents the artist as the protagonist. The short narration begins with rather documentary imagery, which then becomes abstract and goes back to being documentary again at the end. The work examines the possibility of gaining freedom through self-determination.
Kaj Duncan David
Lecture About Myself, 2019, video and stereo sound 31 min
A fictional super computer gives a short lecture on the subject of artificial intelligence through the medium of text, image and sound. Drawing on a novel by the Polish sci-fi author Stanisław Lem, the protagonist confronts us with ideas that range from the benign to the provocative in a manner that is both playful and cryptic.
The sound composition was produced in the Studio for Electroacoustic Music and the full performance version of the piece was premiered by reConvert Duo at KONTAKTE '19. Biennial for Electroacoustic Music and Sound Art at the Akademie der Künste.
This video work forms part of a preliminary study towards the evening-long music-theatre lecture Also Sprach Golem that will be premiered at the Ultraschall Berlin – Festival für neue Musik (18 and 19 Jan 2020). Also Sprach Golem is based on the 1981 novel GOLEM XIV by Stanisław Lem and is a project in collaboration with music-theatre group Kommando Himmelfahrt, actor Grahame F. Valentine and Danish music ensemble SCENATET.
Composition and text: Kaj Duncan David
Video: Carl-John Hoffmann
Dramaturgical collaboration: Thomas Fiedler
Regina, Fredriksson
Dido's Lament – another perspective, 2019, Performance
Taking Cristopher Marlowe's play The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage and Nahum Tate's libretto Dido and Aeneas set to music by Henry Purcell as a fundamental platform, Regina Fredriksson is searching for the real phenomenon of this person and human, also as a symbol, as well as different dimensions of her as the beloved and the wanderer. Or maybe seeing this in the opposite way; maybe most of her fate as the unseen in the deepest of dimensions and therefore a deeper understanding of the fact of the tragedy in her own interpretation of a piece written by Regina Fredriksson on the subject. Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas as in the fate of deepest despair drawing a parallel with Shakespeare's Otello abandoning his beloved Desdemona
Performance: Regina Fredriksson
Director: Arila Siegert
Contrabass: Matthias Bauer
Music: Gioachino Rossini and Henry Purcell
Text: Desdemona's pray “Assisa a piè d'un salice” from the libretto Otello by Francesco Berio Di Salsa and “When Im laid in earth” from Dido and Aeneas by Nahum Tate