Berlin Documentary Forum 2

May 30, 2012
Film
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Amidst the in-between — Documentary films from Japan [PDF]

Screening and conversation – Eduardo Thomas with Günter Nitschke OV, English subtitles

Eduardo Thomas will present a fragment of his ongoing research into the Japanese concept of “ma” (a structuring absence), screening short films by Matsumoto Toshio and Ito Takashi and a feature film by Kawase Naomi. In conversation with Günter Nitschke — an iconoclastic Kyoto-based architect and urban planner — and the filmmakers, Thomas will address this specifically Japanese concept, which challenges such binary distinctions as space/time, inside/outside, emptiness/fullness, and foregrounds the spaces between elements. The three filmmakers have employed strategies like unusual montage techniques, off-centre framing and abstract electronic
music to examine traditional subjects in distinctly non-traditional ways.

  • Matsumoto Toshio: “Ginrin”, Japan 1955, 35 mm, 16 min
  • “The Song of Stone”, Japan1963, 16 mm, 24 min
  • “Atman”, Japan 1975, 16 mm, 12 min
  • “Sway: Yuragi”, Japan 1985, 16 mm, 8 min
  • “Engram”, Japan 1987, 16 mm, 12 min
  • Ito Takashi: “Spacy”, Japan 1981, 16 mm, 10 min [Link]
  • “Ghost”, Japan 1984, 16 mm, 6 min
  • “Venus”, Japan 1990, 16 mm, 5 min
  • “The Moon”, Japan 1994, 16 mm, 7 min
  • “Unbalance”, Japan 2006, video, 5 min
  • Kawase Naomi: “Tsuioku no dansu”, Japan 2002, Beta Sp, 65 min

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, June 2, 2012, 12 noon – 4 pm.

The Berliner Philharmonie right now!

March 11, 2012
Music
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The Digital Concert Hall is actually reserved for concert broadcasts by the Berliner Philharmoniker. Occasionally the orchestra makes exceptions, especially when youth orchestras are invited to perform. This season, we are broadcasting several concerts by such ensembles. In addition to the National Youth Orchestra of Germany and the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, you can now hear the Waseda Symphony Orchestra from Tokyo in the Digital Concert Hall – for free!

The orchestra, which was founded in 1913, is made up of students from the highly respected Waseda University. It has had a long association with the Berliner Philharmoniker. At the International Youth Orchestra Competition in Berlin in 1978, the Waseda Symphony Orchestra was awarded the Herbert von Karajan Gold Medal. When, one year later, Karajan was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University, he conducted the orchestra in an open rehearsal to mark the occasion. Since then, there has been a lively exchange between the Waseda Symphony Orchestra and the Berliner Philharmoniker, who recently worked with some of the members of the youth orchestra when they made a guest appearance in Japan in November 2011.

The man responsible for the orchestra’s high artistic standard is its conductor of many years, Masahiko Tanaka. In this concert he conducts a programme that provides ample opportunity to experience the “almost shameless precision” (Der Tagesspiegel) of the Waseda Symphony Orchestra. The focus of the concert is Richard Strauss with his brilliantly orchestrated tone poems An Alpine Symphony and Till Eulenspiegel, followed by a concerto for Japanese drums and orchestra by Kazuki Yutani.

This guest performance by the Waseda Symphony Orchestra is dedicated to the memory of the victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan on 11 March 2011.

http://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/play/2955

Metamorphosis of Japan after the War – Photography 1945 – 1964

March 9, 2012
Photography
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Museum für Fotografie
Fri 9 March – Sun 17 June 2012

Metamorphosis of Japan after the War.
Photography 1945 – 1964

An exhibition organized by the Japan Foundation in cooperation with the Art Library – National Museums in Berlin, kindly supported by the Japanese-German Center Berlin.

In the years following the Second World War in Japan, photography played an important role in the development of a new national identity. From the shock of the atomic bomb to the country’s re-emergence at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, important photographers documented the birth of a new Japanese nation. This exhibition includes 123 photographs, as well as books, magazines and exhibition catalogues featuring works from 11 leading representatives of Japanese photography of these years.

In the mid-1950s a group of photographers came to the fore who started to move away from the sombre photo journalism that depicted the misery of the years immediately following the war. Affiliated with the Vivo photography agency, these photographers examined the consequences of the massive modernisation process that gripped the country, but also took a closer look at the trauma of the atomic bomb, in a series of ambitious book projects. Since exhibitions of Japanese photography in Europe are rare, this show sheds light on a culture of photography that until now has received little attention and has only found a wider audience through contemporary works.

The exhibition also features a special room of American photographs, recently presented as a generous donation to the Art Library’s Collection of Photography, depicting the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima and the atomic tests in the American deserts and islands in the Pacific. The selection is augmented by photographs by Yosuke Yamahata, who documented the destruction in Nagasaki in August 1945, just one day after the nuclear attack.

Presented by:
Art Library – Collection of Photography
Japan Foundation

Danger zone Japan – One year after Fukushima

March 2, 2012
Theater
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Danger zone Japan – One year after Fukushima

Opening with Hans-Thies Lehmann and Jürgen Schmid
18.00 – 23.00 – admission 20/9 €

Opening
with Hans-Thies Lehmann and Jürgen Schmid

Lectures
by Akira Takayama and Chiaki Soma

Polylog
Texts from Japan by Nis-Momme Stockmann

After the catastrophe
a personal report by Sachiko Hara

Party with DJ Taku Oro

sold out /
remaining tickets at the box office

Deutsches Theater
Schumannstraße 13 A
10117 Berlin
Telefon: +49 30 28441-0
service@deutschestheater.de
www.deutschestheater.de

Ishimoto Yasuhiro at Bauhaus Archiv Museum of Design

January 18, 2012
Photography
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Katsura Imperial Villa. Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro

18 January – 12 March 2012

Katsura Imperial Villa, which was constructed in the 17th century and is located in the environs of Kyoto, held great fascination for many European architects who travelled to Japan, including Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut. Ishimoto Yasuhiro numbered among the very few people who were allowed to photograph the villa’s interior rooms and spaces. The exhibition features black-and-white photographs taken by Ishimoto in 1954. Born in 1921 in San Francisco and trained in the tradition of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, Ishimoto portrayed the centuries-old imperial villa within a modernist approach, thus documenting a new view of traditional Japanese architecture. The exhibition is a cooperation with The Japan Foundation.

[Source]

Simon Fujiwara

January 10, 2012
Art
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Simon Fujiwara, 29, operates as an archeologist, private detective, and stunning dramatist of his personal life and family roots. While his spectacular cross-disciplinary activities are almost impossible to pin down, much of his work revolves around the written word, with heavy doses of installation-and performance-based expression. What’s more, nothing from Fujiwara’s autobiography—or his flair for fictionalizing parts of it—is off-limits: Coming out, sexually obsessing over the father, the sordid nature of the Franco dictatorship, the found effluvia of strangers, and even first experiences with abstract expressionism all become potent material in his theater of objects and desire. In the past, the U.K.–born artist of Japanese and British descent has created a museum of incest and claims to have traveled to the Amazon merely to track a person whose possessions he happened to come across at a flea market. Having just performed a piece in New York for Performa, Fujiwara is gearing up for a major solo show at the Tate St. Ives in January titled “Since 1982.” Ironically, St. Ives is in the artist’s hometown, so the exhibition is sure to carry some heavy emotional baggage (Fujiwara intends to incorporate a number of previous pieces into the show). But he has no plans to move back to where he came from. “I first came to Berlin on a theater tour with my university in 2004 and fell in love with it,” recalls Fujiwara, whose studio is in Kreuzberg. “At the time it was so much cheaper, so I managed not to have to get a job and concentrate on my work.”

[Source]

Yutaka Makino – The Conditions of the Process

December 19, 2011
Art
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We experience sound with our entire bodies, Yutaka Makino once explained. The ear is only a part of the physiological apparatus with which we perceive sound. In his works, Makino creates situations that demand that the visitor go beyond raw acoustics. In particular, space is a crucial element in his work. Also in his new work, The Conditions of the Process, the effects of light and space are arranged on equal footing with the acoustics of the piece: darkness and silence, light and sound.

The Conditions of the Process addresses concepts that were developed in the 70s by artists such as Robert Irwin. In these works situations are illuminated from a phenomenological perspective. The borders between the frames, the circumstances external to the work, and the work itself are permeable. The visitors, says Makino about the central idea of his work, experience situations not as a collective but as an individual. Makino himself reinforces not the shared qualities but rather the differences of experiences instead, not to position the visitor of the exhibition at the middle of a certain experience but the possibility of an experience in general. The visitor is an existential part of this situation: without him/her The Conditions of the Process is incomplete.

Text by Björn Gottstein

Yutaka Makino was born in 1976 in Japan, and in 2010 he was a guest of the DAAD artists-in-Berlin program. Active primarily in the field of computer music, Yutaka Makino also uses installation and performance to explore the various dimensions of human perception. On the basis of his investigations into spatial perception and new methods of sound synthesis, his works make use of concepts inspired by his current research into areas such as phenomenology, experimental psychology and complex dynamic systems. Makino’s recent installations and performances provide environments in flux to experience shifting modes of perception

10.12.11 – 21.01.12 @ Daadgalerie.

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