MNHMH Mnimi Memory Mαρια Πανοσιαν

RikschaFahrt by artist in residence Carla Mercedes Hihn from the Berlin residency program in Istanbul. Video by Dirk Holzberg, Musik Riuchi Sakamoto und Alva Noto.

Urban structures, urbanity, nature and landscapes are issues of Carla Mercedes Hihn  installations and drawings. She is developing a new space, interacting with the architecture and creating a multi-dimensional situations.

Carla Mercedes Hihn

Rosa Luxemburg  was a founding member of the German Communist Party. Parts of the so called “Freekorps”- units killed her and her Comrade Karl Liebknecht on the 15th of January 1919. They held them responsible for prior riots following a general strike in Berlin.

Liebknecht and Luxemburg were part of a minority of people critisising the massacre of Armenians durnig the first world war and pleeding for international socialism and standards of human rights.

The Freekorps units were mainly consisting of retired soldiers and people with antirepublican political views.

Jason Lutes Graphic Novel Triology about Berlin before WW II. describes in a fictional story the clashes between Communists and the rising Nazi-movement. In the first book “Berlin city of Stones” the depression and anger in the workers movement after the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht is one main topic.

Most Germans beleived in the propaganda against the communist movement. Until today the older generation isn’t aware of the fact, that the song “There is a corps swimming in the Landwehrkanal” isn’t a nice folksong, but an awful blasphemy on Rosa Luxemburg’s death.

David Bowies first single after a ten years break is a hommage to Berlin, where he lived from 1976 to 1978.

With black and white pics from Schöneberg, the wall, the ruins of the Reichstag….. I love it, because I adore his albums “Heroes” and “Low”, that where produced in the Hansa-Tonstudios just beside the wall in those days.

It is a clever advertisement trick to market the single over I-Tunes by making it a requirement to buy the whole album in advance for getting this song for free though! Well, the album appears in March and it probably won’t disappoint either

Anyway Musicians like David Bowie, Iggy Pop and later on Nick Cave gave lots of Inputs to trigger Berlin’s trashy charme for getting a hotspot for creatives worldwide.

Where are we now?

Had to get the train

From Potzdamer platz

You never knew that

That I could do that

Just walking the dead

Sitting in the Dschungel

On Nurnberger strasse

A man lost in time near KaDeWe

Just walking the dead

Where are we now?

Where are we now?

The moment you know

You know, you know

Twenty thousand people
Cross Bose Brucke

Fingers are crossed
Just in case
Walking the dead

Where are we now?
Where are we now?
The moment you know
You know, you know
As long as there’s sun
As long as there’s sun
As long as there’s rain
As long as there’s rain
As long as there’s fire
As long as there’s fire
As long as there’s me
As long as there’s you

(David Bowie)

Hassan Khan was presented in a complex magnificant show at the Museum Salt Istiklal (21.09.12-06.01.13). The Egyptian artist participated in a serial of events, several talks, a filmscreening and the final Music-performance “Superstructure II.” at the music club Ghetto.

Ghetto from InEnArt on Vimeo.

Listen to Sperstructure II and watch the other visuals beside!

Khan likes to compare Istanbul and Cairo. For him both metropoles have similaritis. They are chaotic melting pots with a buzzing scene of upcoming artists and other creatives gaining space in the central city spaces. But it is important to realize the distortion of daily life in this rapidly changing environments. This fact is beautifully picked as a central theme in the Videoinstallation below. A working couple using its freetime after work to walk through Cairo and to fight the whole time 🙂

Hassan Khan from InEnArt on Vimeo.

“The raven is smoking. The raven smokes all night. It smokes and smokes and smokes,” trumpets Andreas Fischer’s kinetic sculpture Rabenrohr (Raven’s Mouthpiece) while it knocks impatiently on the floor and moves on the spot. Rabenrohr, which consists of a mega-phone atop a pole, has formed part of the Museum Ludwig’s collection since 2007, and from the outset its insistently reiterated words have aroused visitors’ curiosity.

The Museum Ludwig surveys Andreas Fischer’s mechanical works in the exhibition Your Time Is My Rolex. The artist, who was born in 1972, uses motors and microprocessors in combination with found materials and objects, including armchairs and workmen’s tools, to construct sculptures that move and speak. Depriving the components of their original purpose, he incor-porates them into new contexts that grant them a different, narrative significance.

In the form of humorous mechanical parodies of human beings, the apparatuses act, complain, and accuse, obsessively telling fruitless existential tales or engaging in futile dialogues repeated ad nauseam. The machines repeat their motions and routines in endless loops, never breaking through into something different, and constantly reiterate their words, whether in soliloquies or dialogues, without reaching a meaningful conclusion.

Wirds Bald (Get a Move-On) blares out the words “It’ll get better, it won’t get better,” as a shooting apparatus repeatedly takes aim at an unidentifiable target but always jams before firing. Embodied in a machine, the all-too-human nature of the scenario has an unsettling effect on the spectator, generated by an apparent determinism that, through repetition, arouses a desire to break out of the vicious cir-cle.

Jasmina Merz

Museum Ludwig, Cologne
December 01, 2012 – March 17, 2013
Opening: November 30, 2012, 7 p.m.