Deutsches Historisches Museum - Verf�hrung Freiheit. Kunst in Europa seit 1945 - Blog

The New York Times wrote in 1987 in an article titled ‘Berlin by Night’ that ‘John le Carré sends one of his characters in a melancholy mood to Berlin: “Scared of himself he hastened to a fashionable Greek nightclub he knew of, run by a woman of cosmopolitan wisdom”.’ This woman is Fofi and this is her story (and how we met her):  

Dear all,

we hope all of you had lovely holidays with family and friends and an equally lovely New Year’s Eve.

Our past year was filled with excitement, new friendships, exhibitions ending and new ones opening, lots of work but also lots of fun and we hope it was the same for you.

What all happened? 

Dark were the sides of the idea of liberty shown by the first exhibition ‚Vertigo of Freedom‘ at the CHB last year. This year it is the second basic democratic principle that moves exhibition and artists: égalité, equality.

The exhibition starts already outside on the façade of the CHB. There we read the ‘Partial Declaration of Human Wrongs’:  

Raul Keller is a young Estonian artist whose works can currently be seen in Kumu’s exhibition ‘Out of Sync – Looking back at the History of Sound Art’ (until January 12, 2014). Right at the beginning of his talk he informs us that he does not actively consider himself a sound artist:

‘I work predominantly with sound but also with photography, the fine arts and text. I think John used a very nice term: ‘auditory culture’ – the contemporary field which embraces music and sound art approaches and somehow blends them with popular culture and different practices.’  

“Most people would probably say that architecture does not produce sound, it cannot be heard. But neither does it radiate light yet it can be seen. We see the light it reflects and thereby gain an impression of form and material. In the same way we hear the sounds it reflects and they, too, give us an impression of form and material”

(Steen Eiler Rasmussen – Experiencing Architecture (1959)

In the second part of our symposium, the American artist John Grzinich, based in Estonia, talked about the project ‘tuned city: architecture and sound’ in Tallinn.