Villa Aurora Events Archive
November 2025
Villa Aurora X O-Town House Exhibition "Whispering Bells"
O-Town House
Info
In January of 2025, the Palisades Fire came within feet of Villa Aurora. Miraculously, the house survived, allowing us to continue our work promoting intercultural exchange and fostering dialogue in arts and culture.
Located at the former home of Jewish-German writer Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta, Villa Aurora is dedicated to preserving the legacy of artists and intellectuals who found refuge from Nazi persecution in Los Angeles. For the past 30 years, Villa Aurora has been an artist residence, a place where exile and expression meet, where history and contemporary events converge. During the process of rebuilding, we are working with local partners to present our artists’ work within the city.
At O-Town House, Villa Aurora has found a temporary home away from home. A magical place located in the Granada Buildings, built in 1927 Spanish Revival Style echoing Villa Aurora’s architecture on the other side of Wilshire Boulevard. In addition to that we have found a kindred spirit and true inspiration in the founder and curator of O-Town House: Scott Cameron Weaver.
This group exhibition at O-Town House gallery is our kickoff anniversary show with works of artists spanning thirty years of our residency program. At the same time, it is the beginning of an annual exhibition series that will promote future fellows’ works in Los Angeles.
The exhibition Whispering Bells takes its name from the drought-tolerant flower species known as fire followers. The dry, bell-shaped flowers play a rustling song when caught in the wind. Its seeds are triggered by burnt material to start a new life cycle.
Whispering Bells offers a glimpse into the rich artistic legacy created by almost 500 resident artists since 1995 with works by Villa Aurora alumni Achim Mohné (2000), Klaus Pockrandt (2016), Sarah Szczesny (2021), Joram Schön (2024) and Fern Liberty Kallenbach Campbell (2024).
Together with O-Town House, this anniversary show celebrates old friends and new partners: international alliances showcasing our role as transatlantic bridge-builders and local connections anchoring our resident artists in Los Angeles.
Whispering Bells is curated by Friedel Schmoranzer and Scott Cameron Weaver. The exhibition is funded by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany, with generous support from our long-standing partner, Saxony-Anhalt Arts Foundation.
About the Artists
Achim Mohné's interdisciplinary, media-artistic research into the extension of photography and its paradigmatic change through digitality is constantly evolving with new media and their apparatuses. In multimedia installations, sculptures, performances, sound and video works, interactive 3D visualizations with augmented reality or in VR game engines, as well as sculptural translations between digital and real space, works in public space and publications, he calls for a critical distance to the authenticity of the post-photographic image. His complex interventions address media-immanent issues of surveillance, manipulability, artificial intelligence, and virtuality, and examine our interaction with the world in terms of pressing social, technological, geopolitical, ecological, or cultural issues, with a particular focus on nature and environmentalism.
Klaus Pockrandt focusses on graphics, typography, exhibition and illustration as a freelance designer of visual communication, artist and teacher.
Co-founder and partner of the design studio atelier42 / visual communication furák, girod, pockrandt gbr
He holds a guest professorship for creative and artistic basics and drawing at the Department of Design Burg Giebichenstein art academy Halle.
Sarah Szczeny’s method of dissecting, distorting and separating images, such as cartoon film elements, characterizes her collage, painting and video work.
She examines the conditions of painting by stretching the medium’s boundaries through experimental interventions – for example by using gif and loop techniques as well as sound effects -, a multidimensionality is created that gives the painting character of movement and thus locates it in the tradition of cartoons. In this process of animation of collages, which is so essential for her work, Szczesny combines formal studies and citations of pop culture and art history.
Joram Schön, born and raised in Berlin-Moabit, is an artist and filmmaker. He studied fine arts at UdK Berlin in the class of Thomas Zipp. He has participated in several group, duo, and solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad. In his drawings he combines nature and urban observations. He preserves urban change in his critical questions about topographies and architecture. He is currently doing his master's degree at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KMH), combining the mediums of drawing and filmmaking to realize autobiographical short stories.
Fern Liberty Kallenbach Campbell, born in New York, grew up in Berlin, and lives and works in Halle (Saale). She studied communication design at Burg Giebichenstein and completed her bachelor's degree in 2021 with a focus on illustration in the class of Prof. Georg Barber. In 2023 she completed her diploma in textile art in the class of Prof. Caroline Achaintre. Fern processes her personal and digital reality in the form of tapestries. Here, the boundaries between good and evil become blurred, as well as the boundaries between self-medication and addiction, chaos and harmony. The dining table is a recurring element in her works.
Visit + Location
O-TOWN HOUSE
672 S. Lafayette Park Place, Suite 44 / 43
Los Angeles, CA 90057
T: +1 213 263 9428
home@o-townhouse.art
Hours:
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday 12 - 6 pm and by appointment
Please contact us if you would like to come by at another time!
Street parking available and at Wii Spa with car wash included.
Access to the building at the gate by using the call-box to call O-Town House from its menu (Dial: 044). Take the stairs immediately to the left.
The gallery is accessible by elevator. If you need assistance please let us know.
Intersection with Rebecca Racine Ramershoven
18th Street Arts Center (1639 18th Street. Santa Monica, CA 90404)
Info
Intersection with Rebecca Racine Ramershoven
Tuesday, November 4th | 5PM – 7PM
18th Street Arts Center
1639 18th Street. Santa Monica, CA 90404
Free + Open to the Public
These gatherings are dedicated to gathering our community around good food, conversation, and art. Please stop by for a bite and chat with our community and spotlight artist Rebecca Racine Ramershoven.
Participants
Rebecca Racine Ramershoven lives and works in Cologne (Germany) and Thessaloniki (Greece). As a Black German visual artist, Racine uses photography, video, and objects in her work to explore issues of race-related representation, the meaning and power of community, and sociocultural questions and possibilities. The examination and integration of political and historical contexts play an immense role in her conceptual approaches. In 2024, Racine received the Villa Aurora Residency Fellowship from Kunstsalon Köln and will be able to start her residency this year thanks to the cooperation of 18th Street Art Center and Villa Aurora.
Partner
This event is a cooperation with 18th Street Arts Center
Weimar Under the Palms. Pacific Palisades, German Exiles, and the Invention of Hollywood
Thomas Mann House (1550 N San Remo Drive, CA 90272)
Info
In the early twentieth century, Pacific Palisades was home to America’s most modern film studio of the time as well as the proposed site of the world’s largest Christian center. But by the end of the 1920s, the Los Angeles neighborhood had become the refuge of the rich and beautiful as German and Austrian filmmakers, among them Salka and Berthold Viertel, settled there. They were soon followed by cultural and intellectual giants of the Weimar Republic who were fleeing Europe, such as Max Reinhardt, Hanns Eisler, or Max Horkheimer. These great minds turned Pacific Palisades into a “Weimar under the palm trees.” Though many were successful in exile—including Vicki Baum, Thomas Mann, and Lion Feuchtwanger—others felt as if they were in a “sun prison” far from home.
Recounting a story of glamor and great minds, Thomas Blubacher tells of the history of German-speaking exiles that is still alive there today, going on a foray through the film industry, taking us on a journey to this special place which was so recently devastated by fire. Many of the homes in this book have now gone, but Marta Feuchtwanger’s Villa Aurora and the Thomas Mann house still stand as a testament to luck, resilience, and history.
Thomas Blubacher will read from the English translation by Elisabeth Lauffer, followed by a Q&A moderated by Claudia Gordon, Director of Villa Aurora.
Participants
Thomas Blubacher has written over thirty books and has worked as a theater director in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. A specialist on theater and film of the 1930s, his books include biographies of the siblings Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn, Gustaf Gründgens, Oscar Wälterlin, Ruth Landshoff-Yorck, and Ruth Hellberg. He has also written essays and travel features, and has published a bestselling book on cruises and several historical crime novels.
Partner
This event is a cooperation with Brandeis University Press
Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims
Now Instant Image Hall (939 Chung King Rd, Los Angeles, CA 90012)
Film Information
Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims is a film and research project by artist, filmmaker, and writer Arjuna Neuman and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva. Since 2016, the duo collaborates on a series of films, that each follow a classical element (water, earth, wind, fire) to help us reimagine the world speculatively and reparatively. Their ‘elemental cinema’ merges poetics and critical theory, to propose a poignant and emotional take on the ethical-political challenges of the global present, through human and non-human perspectives. Part documentary and part personal essay, their films transform our ways of seeing, knowing and being. The third film in their series, Ancestral clouds Ancestral claims follows the wind and what it carries -from dust to clouds, ideas, stories and voices- as a guide and an analytical framework.
Filmed in Chile, in the Atacama desert it explores the entanglements and overlaps of historical events, past present and future, in this site.
Taking us on a visual journey through the ALMA large array facility, an international astronomical observatory, and the lithium mines of the Atacama, the film shows how material trajectories are deeply entwined with the pursuit of foundational ideas from the enlightenment, their mutation into aspects of modern neoliberal authoritarianism and their dissemination.
Timeless, plural, and untamable, the wind in virtue of the memories, particles, and ancestral claims it carries, acts as a prism that reveals that which is hidden in plain sight: the pillars of Western thought that sustain colonial legacies of inequality, racial exclusion and human extractivism.
Co-produced by Kunsthalle Wien.
Participants
Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, New York University. Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Unpayable Debt (2022), Dívida Impagável (2019), and Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007). Her articles have been published in journals such as Social Text; Theory, Culture & Society; philoSOPHIA; Griffith Law Review; Theory & Event and The Black Scholar, among others. Her artworks include the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy (2018) and Soot Breath /Corpus Infinitum (2020), with Arjuna Neuman and Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, with Valentina Desideri. She has taught at UC San Diego, University of British Columbia, and Queen Mary-University of London and visited Birkbeck-University of London, University of São Paulo, Université de Paris VIII and is currently an Adjunct Professor at Monash University Architecture, Design, and Art and a faculty at the European Graduate School.
Arjuna Neuman is an artist and writer. He has presented solo mid-career surveys at MACBA in Barcelona, Munch Museum in Oslo, and Belkin Gallery in Vancouver and forthcoming at Kunsthalle Bern. He has presented solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Vienna; CCA Glasgow; Showroom Gallery, London; TPW Gallery, Toronto; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; MAAT, Portugal amongst many others. He has participated in the Berlin Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, Bergen Assembly, the 56th Venice Biennial, Qalandia Biennial, Ural Industrial Biennial, Hacer Noche in Mexico and many other large group exhibitions. He has been included in film festivals such as Berlinale, Images Festival, Docsliboa, Third Horizon. In 2024 he won the Artist Moving Image prize at Les Rencontre International Festival; in 2024 he was a fellow at Villa Aurora and in 2022 a fellow at the Flaherty Seminar. His work is kept in the Belkin Collection, Kunsthalle Bern Collectors Circle; IAC Lyon and Platform UK. He has a forthcoming monograph published with Archive Books. As a writer, he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings and e-flux. He is the founder of Archive of Belonging, a platform and resource list supporting migrants and refugees.
He was a fellow at Villa Aurora in 2024.
Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator born in New York and based in Los Angeles. Their novel Use Me At Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timeline (X Artists’ Books, 2023) uses speculative fiction to address current and future social conditions from a techno-critical point of view. Current curatorial projects include The Sky Is Always Falling: HIV/AIDS Activists Unleashing Power in Los Angeles Then and Now for the 2025 ONE Institute Circa Queer Histories Festival. They are a consulting curator for the Metabolic Studio and a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Art at UCLA.
In 2024 they co-curated the Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial and the Getty PST Art exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption(2024–25) at UCLA Art Sci Center. Recent curatorial projects include Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2022), Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate with Warren Neidich, Renée Petropoulos, and Christina Strassfield at Guild Hall, East Hampton Main Beach, New York (2022) and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica State Beach, California (2023), and eX-aMEN-ing Masculinities with LA Freewaves at Los Angeles State Historic Park in 2022.
Vikram’s book Decolonizing Culture(Sming Sming Books, 2017) helped initiate a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. They are a contributor to art periodicals including Artforum, Art in America, Artillery, X-TRA, and publications from Paper Monument, Archive Books, Heyday Press, Routledge, Wiley, and Oxford University Press. They hold an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from NYU.
More Information
Tickets cost $15 and can be purchased here.
Doors open at 6:30 pm and the film screening begins at 7:00 pm with a runtime of 49 minutes. A conversation with Arjuna Neuman and Anuradha Vikram will follow the film.
Please note: seating is limited. Box Office opens thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Online ticket sales will be honored up until 15 minutes after the scheduled showtime. In-store ticket purchases are subject to availability, first-come, first-served. All Sales Final.
Partner
This event is a cooperation with Now Instant Image Hall.
Villa Aurora X Lookout FM Radio - Episode 11 of "if the house could speak"
Radio LOOKOUT FM
In January of 2025 the Palisades Fire came within feet of Villa Aurora. Miraculously, the house survived, and with it the radio transmitter that broadcasts from there throughout the Santa Monica Mountains and the beaches below.
This series explores the voices, past and present, that reverberate at Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger’s former home. For the past 30 years, Villa Aurora has been an artist residence, a place where exile and expression meet, where history and contemporary events converge.
During the process of rebuilding and awaiting our artists’ return, we will be broadcasting newly produced, archival and historical footage for you to listen to and maybe wonder: Is this really only a house or, like Carl Jung suggests, can the composition of a room induce the realization of new truths?
Each episode of if the house could speak will be broadcast on a loop for 24 hours with no interruption starting at 12 PM Pacific Daylight Time. For our listeners across the world, that corresponds to 7 PM Coordinated Universal Time and 9 PM Middle European Time.
Episode 11
Weimar Under the Palms. Pacific Palisades, German Exiles, and the Invention of Hollywood
Recounting a story of glamor and great minds, Thomas Blubacher tells of the history of German-speaking exiles that is still alive today, going on a foray through the film industry, taking us on a journey to this special place which was so recently devastated by fire. Many of the homes in this book have now gone, but Marta Feuchtwanger’s Villa Aurora and the Thomas Mann house still stand as a testament to luck, resilience, and history.
Thomas Blubacher reads from the English translation by Elisabeth Lauffer, followed by a Q&A moderated by Claudia Gordon, Director of Villa Aurora.
About LOOKOUT FM
LOOKOUT FM is a West Coast terrestrial radio home for the broadcast of "transmission art:" experimental audio composition, modern serials, data sonification, radio plays, multi-day compositions, and radio-centric performances. Their licensed stations in Burbank, Hollywood, and Pacific Palisades function as FM exhibition spaces where radio art is presented without regard to constraints of time, structure, or commercial consideration.
