Villa Aurora Events Archive
January 2016
Eclectic Salon
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Los Angeles, CA 90272)
Information
Celebrating the Diversity of L.A. Musical Landscape
Tuesdays@MONK Space und Eclectic Salon present: Varied Trio
Program
Lou Harrison was not the first composer to write for violin, piano & percussion, but he did create its most lasting and beloved work, the Varied Trio, from which the current ensemble takes its name.
This program takes the Varied Trio as a point of departure and inspiration for the evening, featuring pieces from every decade since the composition of Lou’s masterpiece. Composed two years after the Varied Trio, Paul Dresher combines a minimalist sensibility with Harrison’s lyricism in his stunning Double Ikat. Japanese composer Tochi Ichiyanagi wrote the engaging and rhythmic dance piece Trio Interlink in 1992 for the same performers that premiered Harrison’s work. The concert will also feature two duo works from the first decade of the 21st century: Don Womack’s An Infinite Moment, based on fleeting images of “things that cannot last but will always be there”, and Three Movements for Violin and Vibraphone, LA Phil principal timpanist Joseph Pereira’s insightful take on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Rounding out the program is the premiere of Tristan Koster’s virtuosic and vivacious Memory Fragments, commissioned and written for the trio.
About Varied Trio
Three of Los Angeles’ premiere chamber musicians--Yuri Inoo, Aron Kallay, and Shalini Vijayan--form the Varied Trio, a fearless chamber ensemble dedicated to the music of the here and now. Explorations in color, rhythm, and melody are born from the unique combination of violin, piano, and percussion. The trio’s repertoire ranges from icons of the genre, such as Lou Harrison’s Varied Trio, to new works created specifically for the group by the leading composers of today.
Salon Sophie Charlotte 2016
Berlin
Information
More than 100 participants dare to find answers to these questions at “Salon Sophie Charlotte 2016”: Astrophysicists, art-historians and human rights theorists, writers, filmmakers and theologians, mathematicians and future-scientists. The salon is dedicated to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Around 1700 he founded – together with Electress Sophie Charlotte – the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The visionary thinker Leibniz keeps encouraging us until today to have new visions. It was he who gave the impulse to ask for the “best of all possible worlds”.
For this event, all rooms of the academy building located at the Gendarmenmarkt will be open to debate artistic-scientific contributions on the topic of alternative worlds: For children and adolescents as well as, for lovers of amusing research and serious science, for fans of science slams and paternoster-performances.
Empires and Better Worlds
About 20 years ago, her fellow writer Ingo Schulze, raised in the GDR, travelled in the opposite direction towards Russia, where he spent some years to estalish a newspaper. Hoppe and Schulze will compare notes on the East-West-Relationship over the change of time: Two opposing empires that each give an idea of a better world.
Partner
An event of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in collaboration with Villa Aurora.
Welcoming Reception
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Los Angeles, CA 90272)
Information
James Gregory Atkinson is a German-American artist. He holds a degree in Photography and Design from Lette-Verein (Berlin) and is currently studying at Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste. Since 2014 he works together with Frankfurt based artist Helen Demisch on common projects. Passing his studies at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City (2015) Atkinson will be graduating from Städelschule in 2016.
Atkinson's artistic practice unfolds in a multidisciplinary way. He uses various media like painting, photography or film. Atkinson is interested in contemporary identity models and their representations in the media. His artistic itinerary often starts with found material harvested from mass media or from everyday phenomena. In his work, Atkinson reactivates his source material and entangles it with his persona when appearing in various roles in his own photographs and films. Atkinson highly values the collaborative act. In the past he worked together with musicians, theorists and artists in various constellations. Hence, his artistic work emerges in a broad spectrum of forms, ranging from the White Cube to live Rap concerts.
Atkinson is a grant of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.
On January 26th he is going to talk about his new project in LA at Villa Aurora.
Martina Kieninger was born in Stuttgart. She studied chemistry and molecular biophysics in Stuttgart and got her PhD from Heidelberg University. She teaches chemistry at the Universidad de la Republica Oriental del Uruguay in Montevideo.
In 1996, she received the Internet Literaturpreis by DIE ZEIT, followed by a number of residencies, including the 2016 writers residency at Villa Aurora.
She wrote several novels Die Leidensblume von Nattersheim (2005), Sängerin an der Lampe (2007) and the 8-volume science reader for children Kinder entdecken die Naturwissenschaften (Children Discover Natural Sciences).
Her novel Tango Tumpamaro about "Angst" is to be published in 2017. She is currently working on the ParrentsBaffleBook employing microwave, bitcoins, internet, natrium and Hip Hop.
On January 26th she will read an excerpt of her novel desoxyriboli.
Born and raised in Berlin, Anja Marquardt is an alumna of the University of the Arts in Berlin and New York University's Graduate Film Program. Her debut feature, She's Lost Control, had its world premiere at the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival and won the Berlinale Forum's top prize, the C.I.C.A.E Art Cinema Award. It was also included in the 2014 New Directors/New Films showcase at Lincoln Center and MoMA. She's Lost Control was also a 2015 Film Independent Spirit Awards Nominee for both, Best First Feature, and Best First Screenplay. The film had a theatrical release in the U.S. and Canada (Monument Releasing), Germany (Arsenal Distribution), and France (Zootrope) with an upcoming release in Hong Kong (Edko), and is still traveling the international festival circuit.
Marquardt has several projects in development and is spending her time at Villa Aurora writing and preparing her next feature film.
On January 26th she will show an excerpt of her film, She's Lost Control, currently available on Netflix.
Watch the trailer here.
Alwin Lay graduated from Düsseldorf Academy (class of Christopher Williams) and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Recent exhibitions includes his solo show in 2015 at NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (Catalog) and participations in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Kunstverein der Rheinlande und Westfalen Düsseldorf, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg.
Although the meticulously staged artworks of 1984 born artist Alwin Lay are especially founded in the medium of video, photography and installation, a sculptural origin cannot be denied. Even so, Lay’s works are not a mere reflection of the relationship between photographed image and sculpture as they deliberately play with intuitive expectations that form the contexts of our everyday experiences. Similar to the methods of a magician, Lay uses these everyday situations as a foundation for the manipulation of their physical, temporal and aesthetic laws. The result is an array of strange or absurd, humoristic interludes. Lay intentionally creates seemingly surreal moments and sequences, in which antecedents and anticipated outcomes are interrupted by narrative vacancies. At the same time Alwin Lay’s simulations create a space of contemporarneity in which the beholder can only linger and experience the present moment.
On January 26th he is going to talk about his recent works.
Check out his work here!
Lotus Eaters
WEISS BERLIN (10719 Berlin)
Information
The exhibition Lotus Eaters addresses the fictions of good living and its relations towards the aesthetics of apathy. In their material form, they are embodied questions: What kind of memories do objects hold under which influences? Can an abstract sculpture be a aneasthezied gesture? Can an object suffer from depression? Can it flee? The works in Lotus Eaters refer above and beyond the myth of uprooted Lotophagen up to Topoi, substances and figures of alternative culture of life such as Robert Bootzin or Henry Miller’s memoires, Big Sur and the oranges of Hieronymus Bosch: “Some say, they don’t want to dream away their lives. As if life itself wouldn’t be a dream, a very real dream, that you cannot wake up from! We fade from one dream state to the next: from the dream of sleeping to the dream of being awake, from the dream of life to the dream of death. Everyone that ever had a good dream, would never complain about wasting time. If anything – he is happy about taken part in a reality that enhances and increases everyday reality.”
Elif Erkan (*1985, Ankara) lives and works in Los Angeles. Erkan graduated from HfBK Städelschule Frankfurt am Main, where she studied with Willem de Rooij. Her works where internationally shown, for instance at WIELS Centre d’art contemporain (Brussels), at Portikus (Frankfurt am Main), the Maison des Arts (Brussels) and Villa Aurora (Los Angeles).
Lotus Eaters is the first exhibition of Galerie Weiss Berlin. The presentation of American contemporary art is the gallery’s focus. Weiss offers residencies for artists in Berlin, especially from Los Angeles and New York. The artists represented are, among others, Elif Erkan, Alex Becerra, Evan Nesbit, Stanya Kahn, Eric Mack, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Buck Ellison, Allison Miller, and Keith Mayerson.
Partner
Lotus Eaters is a collaboration of Galerie Weiss Berlin and Villa Aurora.