May 2024

Lorenz Kienzle, born in Munich, studied photography in Rome and Berlin. In earlier projects and publications, he dealt with East German industrial culture. In 2006, he began a long-term collaboration with the U.S. sculptor Richard Serra. Since 2010 he has been working on several projects on fictional and real places in the work of Theodor Fontane and Alfred Döblin. Since 2018, he has also been dealing, in his curatorial work, with the estates of East German photographers. Lorenz Kienzle lives and works in Berlin.  

His planned project for his stay at Villa Aurora, "Döblin in Exile in L.A.," adds important biographical aspects to Kienzle's photographic-artistic work "Döblin and the Metropolis." Kienzle intends to photograph real and fictional places in Los Angeles and connect them with quotes from Döblin. His project is based on Döblin's extensive correspondence as well as biographical notes. Together with his already existing work, he wants to create an exhibition that is filled with the voices of the author and his fictional characters and that reflects on the social and political upheavals recurring in our time.

Lorenz Kienzle is Villa Aurora Fellow of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

Mert Moralı is a Berlin-based composer from Izmir, Turkey. His current art and research practice focuses on the relationship between prosthesis and corporeality and on how this relationship is conditioned by space and its socio-political connotations. He studied theory and composition at Bilkent University and composition and electroacoustic music at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin.

During his residency, Mert Moralı intends to create a compositional platform to explore the extent to which the performing body can resist archiving, cataloging, and death. He will address the question of how the dead work of artists is recycled in the form of recordings through collaboration with the living for the purpose of capital accumulation. In his work, he aims to connect this recycling and accumulation to the temporal-spatial conditions of the sites in Southern California.

Eva Müller is a freelance cartoonist, writer, and artist. She lives and works in Hamburg. Her stories are published internationally, presented in multimedia readings at festivals, cinemas, literature houses, and museums, and have won several awards. She is also an activist and cultural worker, most recently as co-founder of the Comics Union under the umbrella of documenta fifteen.  

As part of her project at Villa Aurora, Eva Müller is planning a graphic novel that will shed light on the lives of the four women killed by Fritz Honka: Frieda Roblick, Gertrud Breuer, Anna Beuschel, and Ruth Schult, who are virtually unknown. These reconstructed biographies are representative of many biographies of women in the FRG of the 1970s, who often fought hopeless battles for their existence.

Laurie Schwartz is a composer, intermedia artist, and curator whose work considers sound, movement, and visuals as materials of composition in the broadest sense. Incorporating field recordings, fragments of conversation, choreography, or video in counterpoint with instrumental, vocal and/or electronically processed sounds, she probes the space between music composition, experimental theater, and performance art. She is initiator and curator of the series itinerant interludes that presents performances at exhibition openings in galleries and museums.

During her time at Villa Aurora, Laurie Schwartz will develop two intermedia projects: clouds & colloquies, a performative installation centering on the theme of precarity (environmental, societal, and political) and the furies, a multimedia work (episode #3 of her performance series Outtakes from the Dangerous Women Files) focusing on the witch as feminist archetype and disrupter.

Karosh Taha was born in the Kurdish city of Zaxo. She lives and writes in Cologne and Paris. Taha studied English and history at the University of Duisburg-Essen and, in addition to her work as an author, initially worked as a high school teacher. She has received numerous prizes and scholarships for her works. Her latest publication is available in English.

In Los Angeles, Karosh Taha will work on a novel that tells of the doppelganger theory of the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. One can speak of a myth, a political conspiracy theory, an urban legend, or targeted propaganda, but in the reality of the novel there is the doppelganger and his wife. To live up to the original, the doppelganger has to give up his own self – but when the copy is so convincing that even the secret service cannot distinguish between the two men, the question arises how people are supposed to maintain their individuality when the most powerful man in the country is merely reduced to an effigy by the self-created regime. On a formal level, the novel challenges the construct of the narrative by working with different styles and voices and by offering an intertextual examination of intelligence documents and religious texts.