Benedikt Hipp (visual artist)

After Augustus the Strong acquired the Japanisches Palais, it was used to hold his extensive porcelain collection. For that reason, Benedikt Hipp has decided to focus his presentation on ceramics, which are dotted over his exhibition room in the Japanisches Palais. Their organic forms are sometimes reminiscent of body parts, sometimes of rocks that could come from the distant past, or equally the future.

Hipp fires his ceramics in a home-made, wood-fired anagama kiln. The wood burns for several days, during which the fly ash settles on the surfaces of the pieces and fuses with the minerals in the clay at extremely high temperatures. The resulting glaze and texture are created through a combination of the fire and the firing method, and can only be controlled to a certain extent.

The room also contains a capsule-like cube. When you go inside, the video “AEON” takes you into the dark depths of the cosmos. Celestial bodies can be seen passing the cube as if through a spaceship window. Hipp has created an animation of his sculptures, making them move through time and space as a cluster of matter. Hipp’s work thus spans thousands of years, extending from ceramics – a cultural technique that dates back to the dawn of mankind – to 3D animation in the video “AEON”.

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Blumenwiesen und Blattgemüse ("Wildflower meadows and leafy vegetables"). Rome–Dresden. 2050.

5 p.m. on 7 July 2022 2022 -->

Japanisches Palais, Dresden

This event will be taking place as part of the “NetzwerkStadt” project, and is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

Andrej Koroliov (composer)

The composer and pianist Andrej Koroliov creates acoustic, live electronic, performative and multimedia pieces. “Epilog:Abriss” ("Epilogue:Demolition”) is an hour-long existential, religious acid trip. The questions it discusses – on the nature of existence and the eternal – were triggered in no small part by the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic. The piece takes us to a place we will never see in this way in real life. It is set after our time and concerns the attempt to leave behind one’s worldly goods, life and all that goes with it, and dedicate oneself only to art. “Epilog:Abriss” is designed to get into the audience’s heads, appealing to all their senses, making them forget what is going on outside and turning the concert hall into a new, self-contained world. Rather than a temporally limited sequence of events, “Epilog:Abriss” aims to evoke a state, in which the many dystopian forms of the present are transformed into a utopian idea of the future. To do so, it takes the audience through various revolutions during which they and the musicians gradually lose control, ultimately turning into a morphing, transforming mass and opening their eyes to the uncertainty of the future.

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Concert: “Epilog:Abriss”

Composition, concept – Andrej Koroliov

Direction, choreography, concept, setting – Heinrich Horwitz

Video, lighting, concept – Rosa Wernecke

Music and performance – LUX:NM ensemble

5 Nov. 2022

HELLERAU – European Centre for the Arts, Dresden

Franziska Gerstenberg (author)

You may already have come across Franziska Gerstenberg’s work on the streets of Dresden: the city’s advertising spaces currently feature posters with various passages from her novel with the working title: “Obwohl alles vorbei ist” (“Though it’s all over”). Coming out next spring, it tells the story of a family falling apart. Most of the novel was written in Rome, and it is set in Dresden. The novel will feature at “Eppur si muove – and yet it moves” in various formats. A QR code on the posters tells you more about the sentences written on them.

Franziska Gerstenberg will also be there in person at the Japanisches Palais, presenting a project developed in association with illustrator Caroline Winkler, with whom she has loosely collaborated since 2019. This combines short texts with drawings; sometimes the text inspired the drawing, sometimes the drawing inspired the text. Far from being mere illustrations, the drawings are equal partners in the creative process. Franziska Gerstenberg is not interested in showing that all is right with the world; she prefers to look where it hurts. Thus, the stories, which are heavily influenced by her time in the south and by Villa Massimo, often have a grim ending. Not like the week starting 27 June, as that ends on 2 July – Dresden Museums Night, when Franziska Gerstenberg will be giving a reading at the Japanisches Palais from 6 p.m.

Heike Baranowsky (visual artist)

Heike Baranowsky is a visual artist. Her stop-motion video is what gives the Rome Prize winners’ presentation its title: “Eppur si muove – And yet it moves” is the famous quote by Galileo Galilei. Movement generally plays a major role in Baranowsky’s oeuvre. In the two works currently on show at the Japanisches Palais, that particularly applies to the movement of the sun.

The two-channel video installation "Soliloquio" thus comes from Heike Baranowsky’s intensive study of the meridian line at the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri in Rome. Baranowsky studied the “sunspots”, or rather the solar image that moved across the marble floors and walls, for an entire year. With the cameraman Volker Gläser, she filmed it on important dates such as the solstice or the equinox, using stop-motion techniques. The audio track developed in association with Ursula Rogg accompanies the images as an internal monologue employing narrative arcs in an attempt to sum up the artist’s experiences in the basilica, including historical facts and the pandemic.

In the stop-motion film that lends its name to the piece, “Eppur si muove”, a camera circles a shiny, gold helium balloon. Reflected in it is first the artist, and second her atelier at Villa Massimo. The balloon’s smooth surface makes the dynamics of the setup confusing: who or what is actually turning? The balloon, the artist, the atelier? Finally, when the balloon floats past the window, rather than being associated with the sun, the balloon suddenly switches to being the moon, its path crossing the sunlight. The video turns into a moment of self-reflection on the viewer’s own working conditions and current living circumstances.

Gustav Düsing (architect)

The title of Gustav Düsing’s installation “sunsight to sunclipse” is borrowed from Buckminster Fuller and relates to the fact that it is the earth that revolves around the sun, not vice versa. The sun does not, after all, actually rise, but simply becomes visible in the morning (sunsight), then disappears out of sight in the evening (sunclipse).

The piece is a kinetic tent structure connected to solar panels, directly connecting its movement to the sunlight. At “sunsight”, the fabric umbrella begins to turn and open up. At the same time, the Coriolis force causes the tent to undulate, creating a combination of shelter and air conditioning. In the evening, the umbrella collapses again, making a direct link between natural processes and the creation of architectural space.

“sunsight to sunclipse” represents an architectural attitude advocating a minimalist approach to material. Düsing’s aim is to encourage people to build more lightweight, versatile designs in future, creating architectural structures that conserve resources, are adaptable and can be used in different places. How much architecture do we need, and how much comfort? Should the architecture of the future remain a fixed, immovable boundary separating people from the climate, or can we do without the comforts we are used to, enabling the structures surrounding us to be more flexible? The installation explores these questions in the form of a prototype.

Alexander Schimmelbusch (author)

In the autumn of 2023, Rowohlt will be publishing Schwarzer Herrgott, Alexander Schimmelbusch’s fifth novel. It is the long-awaited sequel to his critically acclaimed bestseller Hochdeutschland. “A hard-hitting, fast-paced, crazy book exuding crystal-cut elegance” wrote Florian Illies in the Zeit newspaper; “a future classic”.

Schwarzer Herrgott is set in the year 2033, among the lakes of Brandenburg, just outside Berlin. The book tells the story of a group of executives at “Omen SE”, Germany’s highest-valued company. Technological progress means they no longer have to work, and now face an era of leisure, enjoying melons and figs, in a company-owned village of bungalows on the banks of a lake.

Alexander Schimmelbusch poses the central questions of our time: Who are we when we no longer have to work? What will we do instead? What form will our new spiritual experience take? What actually connects us to other people? Who were we in ancient times, when our lands still slumbered under an unbroken layer of primeval forests? What shall we do next? Should we hide? Should we lie to ourselves? Should we cry? Or should we fight?

But what for? And who with?

Schwarzer Herrgott was largely written at Villa Massimo, and tells the tale of how white-collar workers betrayed our humanist ideals. And of a punitive force at the heart of creation, in the dark depths of the world’s soul, that will find itself forced to wash away the grime of humanity, cleansing its astral body of that infestation.

On 23 September, Alexander Schimmelbusch will be reading from his new novel at the Japanisches Palais.

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Am 23. 09. wird Alexander Schimmelbusch am Japanischen Palais aus seinem neuen Roman lesen.

Unsuk Chin (composer)

The piano plays a very special role in the oeuvre of the composer Unsuk Chin, as she once wanted to be a pianist, only becoming a composer by roundabout means, at a teacher’s suggestion. Today, her works are performed by large ensembles such as the Berliner Philharmoniker or the London Symphony Orchestra, important soloists – the violinist Leonidas Kavakos being one example – and conductors such as Sir Simon Rattle or Kent Nagano.

It was her fascination for the piano that led Unsuk Chin to compose six piano études, starting in 1995. The music writer Oscar Bie wrote of Chopin: “more genuine piano music than the Etude there cannot be. The essence of the piano has in it become music.” According to Chin, that applies not only to Chopin but also to other great composers of piano music: Liszt, Debussy, Bartók, Messiaen, and even the works of those that went before them: Scarlatti’s Essercizi, Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier or his Clavier-Übung publications. In her études, Unsuk Chin tests the limits of the instrument’s capabilities, almost going beyond those of the musician playing the pieces in the process.
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On 5 November, Unsuk Chin’s “Klavieretüden” will be performed in the European Centre for the Arts, Hellerau as part of the 4:3 festival. (Piano: Yejin Gil)

bankleer (Kasböck / Leitner – visual artists)

The duo bankleer (Karin Kasböck and Christoph Maria Leitner) have been working in Berlin since 1999. They see art as a practice responding to social, political and historical events. bankleer straddle the dividing line between situational sculpture, performance, installations, text and video.

Their video essay “Taumelnde Leere” (“Tottering Void”) was created in Rome in 2020/21. It is an attempt to find positions and opinions to match a world clouded by the pandemic and climate change, and in need of repair. “Tottering Void” joins two young protagonists on a night-time wander through the streets of Rome, deserted due to the Covid-19 restrictions. They explore the city following the principle of Guy Debord’s dérive, playfully looking for ideas and actions that could influence reality. They are accompanied by three gigantic sculptures: Angela Merkel (the former German chancellor), Mario Draghi (Prime Minister of Italy) and Dutty Boukman (an 18th-century Haitian freedom fighter). Their instruments consist in an oversized megaphone, imagination, openness and their own bodies.

The protagonists use the megaphone to ask questions of the city’s sculptures. Their exploration starts at dusk on the outskirts of Rome, and ends at dawn in the city centre, at the history-steeped Capitoline Hill – where religion and power have reached a crowning point for millennia. The two young people look down on the city, which echoes back silence. They let the hopelessness sink in. Facing this yawning abyss, their inner being starts to open up to the world around them.