Artist in Residence, David Edward Allen and his Topping Totem
Posted: December 12, 2011 Filed under: Artists in Residence Leave a comment »The Kranich Museum’s Artist in Residence program was newly established with the opening of the museum in September 2011 and runs throughout the year. The residency and museum aims to support the development of artists of diverse ages, backgrounds, and disciplines. The program provides an opportunity for artists from around the world to work in a striking, natural environment. The projects developed during the residency are considered for exhibition in the museum.
David Edward Allen, one of the first artists to take part in these scheme told Tom Heaven about what he has been up to in Hessenburg and sent a few snaps from his stay. (For more information about the Artist in Residence scheme, click here.)
How did you come to be involved in the Artist in Residence program at the Kranich Museum? How long were you in Hessenburg for?
I was first approached to do the residency by Khadija and Alex. I spent two weeks at Hessenburg. Dr Bettina Klein was a wonderful host, supplying me with all I needed including fresh salad and vegetables from the garden and eggs from her chickens.
What were your impressions of Hessenburg?
The landscape reminded me of where I spent my childhood in Suffolk. A familiar salt scented wind carried over ploughed fields and underneath great open skies. Whilst there I became very interested in the layers of Hessenburg’s history. Its beginnings as a Ritterhof in the 13th Century. Its development into a Gutshof and small village under the Family Von Hesse. Their changing its original name from Schlichtmühl to Hessenburg in 1840. The Gutshaus’s use during the DDR. And especially all of these things in relationship to the Cranes who migrate in and out of the landscape each year.

The lake is one of the old quarries along the road to Saal. It was used formerly to excavate clay for making bricks. There are four of them. Apparently, according to the local people I talked with, it got closed down after the unification because the subsidies were stopped and it wasn´t making money. Now its a great place to do a little fly-fishing... home to some very large, but elusive, perch and pike!
Can you tell us something about the work that you will be making for the museum?
The work I’ll be making for the museum is a sculpture. A Totem. It’s actually one in a series of Totems that I started working on during a residency in Argentina at the beginning of the year. I see the Totems as both something universal and at the same time specific to a certain place. They tell a particular story of a place. A fictional story. Surreality superimposed upon histories of a place, its people, animals and landscape.
What else have you got on the go at the moment?
I currently have a work in a group show called SOLOS II at OZEAN in the Artelierhof Kreuzberg, Berlin. I am also running a project space in Berlin, together with the Dutch artist Raaf Van der Sman, called the Nationalmuseum: www.thenationalmuseum.de.
My website is: www.davidedwardallen.com
The Kranich Museum Artist in Residence Program
Posted: December 12, 2011 Filed under: Artists in Residence, Uncategorized Leave a comment »The Kranich Museum’s Artist in Residence program was newly established with the opening of the museum in September 2011. The residency and museum aims to support the development of artists of diverse ages, backgrounds, and disciplines. The museum building is one of 2,000 manor houses in the region and was renovated by a team of artists from four continents in response to the existing architectural elements. It houses international contemporary art that explores the crane, a bird that stops on the West Pomeranian planes every spring and autumn on its migratory flight from northern Europe to Spain and North Africa.
The Artist in Residence program provides an opportunity for artists from around the world to work in a striking, natural environment. The projects developed during the residency are considered for exhibition in the museum dedicated to site-specific works that respond to the disarmingly simple theme of ‘crane’ with complex, ephemeral, conceptual art.
The artist in residence program, housed in the former coach house beside the manor, will host a range of writers, composers and visual artists throughout the winter. The Kranich Museum provides a furnished apartment on the museum’s grounds, access to a workshop and studio space. Resident artists have unlimited access to the Kranich Museum building, collection and library. Bicycles are available for use, and the residency program reimburses travel costs from Berlin-Saal-Berlin return.
The Kranich Museum maintains a casual environment, and it is up to the artists to develop their own work schedule. Hessenburg is a small town in a sparsely populated area by the Baltic Sea, and artists may spend a great deal of time alone. A residency therefore ideal for those artists who seek a quiet and sympathetic environment with few distractions. The average residency lasts one to three months; this can be adjusted according to individual needs and the resources of the museum.
To apply for a residency, please send the following to the Kranich Museum at the address below by April 2nd, 2012:
Cover letter / Proposal of a project you would develop during the residency
Resume/CV
20 PDF or JPEG digital files (2 MB maximum file size per image) or other relevant documentation
Please email submissions to info@kranichmuseum.de
For questions about the Artist in Residence program or the submission process, contact Dr Bettina Klein, info@kranichmuseum.de
An interview with artist, Emma Waltraud Howes
Posted: November 8, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized 3 Comments »Emma Waltraud Howes and her Kranich Museum works (‘You Live and Do Me No Harm’, ‘Hollow Bones’ and ‘Crane-rearing Costume’) are the subjects of this final interview in a series of three. It follows interviews with fellow Kranich Museum artists Andy Graydon and Tamara Friebel. Tom Heaven spoke to Emma a couple of weeks ago.
You were involved in the Kranich Museum Project early on and your piece is in the entrance as you walk in. What do you think made your work fit so well within the Kranich Museum project and context?
When I was first approached by Khadija and Alex and started my research, trying to figure out where I wanted to focus the project, I must admit I got slightly overwhelmed. Khadija and Alex had asked me to look at the line between movement and form, what it means to the visual arts, which is what my practice is all about. I started looking at the crane dance of these animals. They train their children through dances, through repetition, and the children copy back these actions, which is a very similar trait to human-animals when we’re teaching our young to eat, or to go to the bathroom, or to walk. We demonstrate these things for them and they play them back. This behaviour is one way of establishing empathy for other animals. I wanted to make a comparison with this somehow. What was nice with this research was that it gave me a wealth of information to go on, and that allowed for this incorporation of movement, but also it lead me to other opportunities to bring in material forms, and this came up when I started to look at rearing and costume rearing techniques (which is a whole other field of research that I could spend the next few years of my life studying), but where you actually have humans dressing up as cranes in order to bring up young cranes that don’t have parental figures around, because cranes are at the moment close to extinction. There are certain breeds of cranes that are close to extinction, and so this is what led to the current work that is in the crane museum at the moment, in the doorway. Khadija and Alex recommended that space for the work, which was perfect for me, as one other line of interest for me when making work is how to incorporate it into the context. That is why I went up to the museum and did most of the filming there on location. Being able to work in that space, working in the archways of the museum itself. It was quite a challenge, because I or Kai Meyer, who I was collaborating on the filming and editing of the work, had ever done any of this video-bending and fitting it to the arches, but also I found it a lucky challenge, because it pushed my work to a different level that I have never gone to before.
So you’ve spoken a bit about the material context. How aware were you of the surroundings, both architectural and the landscape and then also maybe the other artists who were displaying at the Kranich Museum?
My first visit to the museum was a couple of months before the exhibition and everything happened quite fast. I went to visit the museum twice and during that time I spent a lot of time not only exploring the museum, but the area around. I was lucky enough to see some cranes and also meet some of the people who live in the area, and so this was really important to me and helped me reflect upon the work when I came back to Berlin. I was doing a lot of tests and working out more of the conceptual side of the work here in Berlin, but then I was going up to the museum and running around in my gum boots and figuring out how I was going to perform this piece. Unfortunately I didn’t get much chance to meet any of the other artists, because we were always going up at different times. It was difficult to coordinate all of our schedules. I knew that part of the project, what was important to Alex and Khadija, but also to all of the artists involved, was that there had to be a relationship to the museum. The work was to be incorporated into the museum so that there was this real sense that it was a combination of visual art, the historical atmosphere, and how those lines can blur, so that sometimes you can’t be certain if its actually contemporary art piece or the museum itself, a blending of the space. That informed a lot of the installation, especially of the video work. This was important: one, to work with the archways, so that there’s this sense that we’re looking through the museum to another space, but also none of the walls were repainted, the floor and a lot of the details, the textures of that environment were left the same, and so it shows through as another layer, which also, for me, makes the video richer in a sense. I had my hesitations, because I thought you miss the cinematic frames, and they were stunning in themselves, they were another idea altogether, and then once I had put them into the space, cut into these frames, it took me a while to adjust my eye, to accept it for what it had become, but then I learnt to appreciate it. It became a part of the museum, and it really belongs there now for me, so I’m quite happy to see the images and I look forward to going to visit it.
Where does it sit within your general practice?
I come from a background in dance. Because of an injury I actually left dance altogether and I studied visual arts at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. Around that time I was studying Internal Chinese Martial Arts and this was how I got back the use of my ankle and started to incorporate movement, gesture, and dance back into my work. My practice became fully inter-disciplinary. So depending on the project, and what is specific to that project, I change the materials I’m working with. I work a lot with film and video performance, but also material-based works, so working with fibres, and sculptural elements. And then I did a Masters at Concordia University in Montreal, which is what brought me to Germany, as I did an exchange to the Bauhaus Institute in Weimar.
So what’s interesting about this project for me was that it has these three parts. The film part allowed me to work with materials, to build the crane heads which I wear on my hands, and then also the performative element, which was going to the Kranich Museum and running round the fields in this ridiculous costume. What was great was that all the horses were lined up at one point watching, and all the people in the neighbourhood were lined up along the road, all looking at me like I had completely lost my mind. It was fantastic, and so there was this performance element, and then the accompanying sound piece, which is upstairs in the museum, and then the remnants of this whole process, so the costume that is left behind. People can put it on if they want. I don’t think that anyone has yet. So it really for me was a project that allowed me to bring in all of those skills inside one project, which always for me is very exciting. It’s not always that people ask you to incorporate all of these things, but it is my goal to work with all of these elements, to find a way to integrate them into the practice, and find a way to make them inform and support one another.
What else are you doing at the moment?
An exhibition with Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt IT, Fast and Furious: (http://www.goldrausch-kuenstlerinnen.de/2011/index.html). We are opening in two weeks at Halle am Wasser. It is a group exhibition of all the women who participated in this project. I’m showing a new work there, which also incorporates gesture and video with additional subtitles. The project is called An Archive of Accidental Gestures and is a four monitor video installation.
I just got back from Montreal where I was performing for the company kondition pluriel (http://www.konditionpluriel.org/). It’s a French company from Montreal under the artistic direction of Marie-Claude Poulin and Martin Kusch. The company is based in Berlin now. We were performing a project called Interieur, which is a two-hour long performance, made specifically for the new dome, at the SAT (http://www.sat.qc.ca/). It has 360° projections, something like 300 speakers (that could be an exaggeration), which makes the sound move in the space. I was working for them as a dancer and research assistant for the project.
After Goldrausch is complete, I will continue my work in Berlin. I’m currently working on a collaboration with Takako Hesagawa and the Architectural Association in London (http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/). We’re working on a symposium entitled On Dance and the Choreography of space: Dialogues between architecture and performing arts. It is a combination of dance and architecture, looking at movement, architecture, how the body is affected by architecture, and how people move in space. So this is my next track of research, preparing for that. I did a collaboration with Takako Hasegawa, three years ago and ended up going to see the space of the AA, and this place was one of these places… you need the golden key to get in. In the past I have done a series of site specific performance works, where I am outside on the street. I delineate a space to move within with chalk, based on my research into the original Bauhaus school and the work of Oskar Schlemmer. I dance in the space, but then not really dancing. I’m doing everyday gestures, but then collapsing into movement, and then going back to the everyday. Frequently I would get people coming up to me and asking if I needed help. They would say: “Are you sure you’re ok?”, so I couldn’t believe I was in this place. This crazy person off the street and they wanted me to present to all these architects. So I’m very much looking forward to that.
An interview with artist, Tamara Friebel
Posted: October 7, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Tamara Friebel’s I love you is the second of three sound works in the exhibition that are the focus of this series of interviews. They are all related in the way they use spoken languages and their translation to voice intimate stories and desires in the buildings own gestures. In Andy Graydon’s work the walls seem to speak, and for her work, Emma Howes speaks to visitors from the chimney and instructs them how to move around the space. Tamara Friebel on the other hand invites the viewer to sit down in an eddy of domestic furniture within the corridor, and to lean into the tiny speakers concealed within objects like the lute and shells, and watch her film. The voices in her piece are in an indigenous Australian language, Kamilaroi, as well as Australian-English, and local Pomeranian German. The inflexions of pronunciation and translation in these works that include many speakers trying to articulate difficult emotions in another language are heightened to a musical composition in Tamara’s piece.
Khadija Carroll La, Kranich Museum curator and artist, spoke to artist and composer, Tamara Friebel about her piece I love you.
The role of intuition in your compositional process for this piece was central, can you explain a bit how that played out?
I have been spending time hunting down Brolga Birds, the Australian Crane, in rural Victoria, Australia, and it is often that they come in pairs. These birds have an amazingly intuitive way with each other. Their movements seem to be linked with each other, almost in a way that they could have learnt a difficult choreography and have spent years perfecting these moves. This is why intuition, in the sense that it is linked to a palette which explores initial impression and improvisation became a means to trigger my own composition of sound and movement based on this dance of love by the Brolgas. It is effortlessness that one sees when observing the synched choreography of their movements and I was intrigued by this, and the relationship it shares with performance and improvisation. I “re-performed” my filming of the Brolgas in real-time, capturing a film which rendered my own choreography of their sequence – and then recorded some first vocal impressions in real-time, or further intuitions of various individuals and myself observing this filtered-pink world of their intimate gestures. I drew from samples and sound colours that I have been collecting, including a retuned piano, and it is a collision of these samples and intuitions which one hears through the various channels.
There are so many voices interleaved in your soundtracks for this work – from Die Liebenden poem I tuckpointed into the wall around the corner to Kamilaroi language – can you please quote briefly and source each of these? For in my memory they are a stream of intense conversation the way the video is a rapid and jumpy blur of colour.
These multi-channeled voices are drawn from ancient to random sources, representing a myriad of sonic colours that I felt belonged to the dance piece. Brecht’s Die Liebenden, a poem that you have represented behind the wall of this piece, is spoken by a young girl and her mother whose grandfather happens to come from the region where the museum is. There are many first impressions captured, of this same young girl and her twin sister, their mother, who is a soprano singer, a recorder performer, a pianist, and a couple who have been in love for over 45 years! I felt these perceptions need to be heard, as brief moments, as if whispers through seashells, or through an old lute, which used to be played in small chamber music, intimate environments. It is all about intimacy, about sounds and words that maybe shouldn’t always be heard, but which you need to strain to hear, to listen, as if spoken at a distance. My recordings of an old piano, which I retuned according to a proportional system, like the archimedes spiral which informs the shell, were performed as an improvisation to this dance choreography, and have a lightness which can only be found in a small piano built for a family home. There are some emphatic breathing sounds of a Paetzold Recorder and the brief moment of Kamilaroi comes from a longer text I have been working on, as a libretto for a children’s opera, a musical theatre piece which is slowly evolving. These texts have been written in English, and are stories from my own imagination, which are being translated back into Kamilaroi, an ancient Australian dialect. This is an iphone recording that took place in the process of learning this translation, and its aesthetic – gives a hint at the irony of shared communication and the loss of connection with an ancient past, that is part of the loss that we will face if we lose the Brolga Birds altogether. They are already a threatened species in Victoria.
Kamilaroi Text:
There are many dreamers in my family, we are a long, long line of dreamers, we have been born with the gift, and have always learnt how to use the gift.
How did the site specificity of this installation and the objects you found in Hessenburg and the adjacent art works in the Kranich Museum influence the work?
Hessenburg contains a wealth of artefacts in old furniture and an intriguing space which speaks so much through its walls already. This installation rummaged through various objects, and found its voice was best expressed in seashells and objects which were found there. The old lute was an exciting discovery, as it resonated with the chamber music and intimacy I sought after. The shells, so prolific on the coast of the Ostsee are a universal language – and speak their own worlds to whoever listens, resonating with the miniature loudspeaker environment, and sat well between the other sound works of the museum.
It is indeed an important shift from the surrealism of Hadley+Maxwell’s furniture sculptures to our repurposing of the ‘original’ furniture into our installations in the corridor space, which you recognized and responded to.
Yes, watching the curious world of Hadley+Maxwell develop around the Museum, in subtle and latent ways, and a stroke of surreal artifact in others meant I found new meaning with chairs, used as chairs, inviting you to sit down, in a place normally for passage in the hallway. The lute, which becomes a piece of furniture, albeit an old beautiful one, emerges as a static sound box strung with pink electronic wires, hinting at a sad nostalgia, where it becomes something twisted away from its original purpose, resonating again with the notion of surreal artifact. The cupboard which houses the projector offered a silhouette, a way to cast a shadow which frames the film in its own way, present only when the door is ajar. The unique directional quality of Andy’s piece, where voices seem to hang in mid-air, as though you could touch them in points through space and Emma’s directional, guiding voice in the next room, found me wanting to protect my delicate “miniature” sounds, between these works, and enclosing them in shells and a lute was a figurative means to protect their vulnerability.
You note the exact time that you filmed the love birds, edit them from wildlife documentation into an experimental film format – how did it come to the Brolga’s Tears Opera and to the totemic Australian crane in the first place?
I am often intrigued by the rich history that Australia has hidden beneath its first impressions. It is an ancient land, and connecting to that land is part of honouring the ancient laws and traditions that have existed for hundreds of years. I happened to be born in Cohuna, which means Native Companion, the Brolga Bird. This is by chance, but somehow represents the means for me to find connection to an ancient spiritual past, which I was able to draw from to write my libretto. There are so many ancient stories in Australia but it seems it has a purpose and place for new ones to be written – new music to be heard – and so I started hunting down the Brolga Bird and this video sound installation goes back to that lucky moment where I captured their love. It is not easy to find these birds, as they are very shy.
I’m wondering how this piece fits into your practice at present?
I am intrigued by the process of notation and writing scores and the complexity that is demanded by that practice, and the other related world of working as an electroacoustic composer that is offered by recording and manipulating music and sounds, whether it is improvised or sampled and manipulated to gain effects and colour. My projects often sit between these two practices, and examine this practice, critiquing its often separateness, and finding the place where these components merge. “Notation” is constantly examined, in the sense that I look at a choreography of a pair of Brolga Birds, or a hula hoop dancer or a ping pong ball dancing on a harpsichord and I wonder how that can be scripted, how can I communicate and learn from that gesture, in order to work it into a piece, or communicate it to a performer, to re-perform that sound quality according to my artistic vision. The video and recorded material becomes a means to understand and study these components, and in some contexts also becomes a part of the piece, or becomes a means to an end in a composition. In June I wrote a series of études for a hula hoop dancer, Annabel Carberry, where her choreography in essence produced my score, so it demanded that I work as a choreographer with video excerpts of her movements, cut and edited, to define the sound piece I wanted, Deflections. An earlier project this year was a score written for harpsichord and baroque flute, performed with live-electronics, Instant Memory Trace I, a piece that deals with memory and recall of a heard event, inspired in part by studying the sound of ping pong balls within a harpsichord. My projects are always interested in limitations and constraints, in this case, any external materials placed inside a harpsichord have to be extremely light weight, so that they don’t destroy the delicately strung strings. I am in the final stages of a chamber opera, Tzotzil Metamorph, and will be performing an excerpt of this with mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg in Huddersfield, UK at the end of November. This piece is constructed around its own architecture, a glass house which houses the operatic event. In this sense a version of this piece will become its own metamorphic pavilion, housing an installation, of a pre-recorded version of the opera. It is a dynamic project, which finds a curious link between architectural conception and compositional strategies, of which find its only means of representation in an artistic context. Junctures between these fields create fascinating offshoots, and in the end the artistic work is a product of the research.
For further projects see www.tamarafriebel.com or www.myspace.com/tamarafriebel
Aus dem Kinderprogramm “Kranich- Kids” zum Kolorieren und zum Wissen
Posted: September 26, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Für alle, die am Samstag dabei waren und auch für alle, die nicht dabei waren. Hier noch mal das Kranich- Mandala und das Kranich- Quiz… mit den Lösungen. Viel Spaß!
An interview with artist, Andy Graydon
Posted: September 23, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Tom Heaven spoke to Andy Graydon, whose sound installation, Faltungen (Im Westen nichts Neues), is one of the sixteen new works that make up the Kranich Museum collection.
Tom Heaven: What does the visitor hear when they listen to your work?
Andy Graydon: The piece is essentially a narrative. It’s told as one woman’s story in an interview format. It’s essentially a fictionalised interview with a woman who is folding a thousand paper cranes. Her story unfolds over the course of the months that it takes to fold these thousand cranes and as that process goes on you learn more about the last time she was folding a thousand cranes as a wish to save the life of her mother who was sick with cancer. That bleeds into an additional story where she began reading this German novel “Im Westen nichts Neues” in a Japanese translation. It led to an ongoing, lifelong interest in German culture and German language. Partly because the translation was very strange and rendered the world of German language and German culture back to her with a very shifting, strange, almost grotesque perspective, she thought that it was fascinating. That led to her visiting Germany repeatedly, learning German, moving here and then becoming a translator between Japanese and German herself. So that process of migration is also something that the piece is interested in.
TH: It seems in the piece that there are various translations that happen from bird to origami and then from origami to sound and story. Do you think that’s a good description of the piece or how would you describe those themes?
AG: It is a good description of the piece because I’m looking at translation as not so much a rendering of one thing directly into the other, but rather the process of migration and how it loses things and gains things along that process. The way that something is not so much translated as projected out into a new context and into a new set of meanings. Looking at language as a mirror of the process of taking the image of something like a crane and the folded paper of the crane and trying to project it into the wish for something else and using that linguistic process of taking one set of meanings and projecting it into a whole other linguistic cultural context. I’m using that as a parallel or metaphorical relationship to the idea of the wish of trying to impress one kind of desire or one set of meanings into a completely different context.
TH: Your work is a sound installation, can you explain how it works?
AG: It’s a sound installation on two channels that are non-traditional stereo channels. (I’m trying to think of a succinct way of putting this!) It’s on a pair of uni-directional speakers that project very tight columns of sound, rather than loud speakers that project big waves of sound, big arcs of sound. The sound carries across the room in a kind of pattern or lattice as opposed to filling up the whole space, as it normally would on two loud speakers. As a result of the way these two speakers work, the sound is kind of tucked into the room. It collects in the corners. It shoots across the room. You walk in and out of it in a way that makes you almost think you’re hearing voices or hearing ghosts, and that is intended to be a reference to the theme of the piece, of using the image of the crane to look at the way that metaphorical and symbolic meanings are folded into or projected onto objects.
TH: Is the science of sound and development of technology important in your pieces?
AG: In this piece specifically it really is quite important. Just in the phenomenal way you experience the piece; in the way that you encounter it at all because it’s not an ordinary experience of sound. It’s quite ghostly, it’s actually folded into these axes around the room. It doesn’t exist in all places equally in the volume of space and that’s completely a technical feature of these particular speakers. They emit ultrasound and they agitate the column of air along the projection of this ultrasound, so that the sound is kind of happening around your ears all along this column. The sound as your hear it always sound quite intimate, even if you’re hearing the sound bounced off a wall. It feels very vectored and it feels very close. The distance between you and that subject gets complicated. You’re constantly being quite intimate with this story, fazing in and out, so if you stay put, suddenly it’s all around you. But then if you take a step away you’re hearing it in a way that is quite distanced or distancing, so the technology definitely plays a very strong part in the way that the piece is able to function properly.
TH: Are all of your works sound installations and where else can we see your works?
AG: A lot of my work is sound, sound in an installation context. But I was trained as a filmmaker, so I make films as well a video or media installations and sound works. I was just in a festival in Bulgaria, The DA Fest, where I showed a video installation with a very strong sound component. Two shows just opened in the US with video installations of mine: “Data/Fields” at Artisphere in Arlington, Virginia; and “Quasi Cinema”, the exhibition component of Video_Dumbo, part of the Dumbo Arts Festival in New York City. The next thing coming up is in Vienna, the group exhibition “You Are Free” at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, and that will be two sound works. And then at the beginning of November I’ll be in a show at Tape in Berlin called “Navigating Darkness” where I will show a video installation.
To keep up to date on what Andy is up to, check the website: www.andygraydon.net or blog: www.andygraydon.tumblr.com
In the headlines
Posted: September 22, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment »The Kranich Museum has recently featured in the Ostsee Zeitung. Read the piece here… http://www.ostsee-zeitung.de/ribnitzdamgarten/index_artikel_komplett.phtml?SID=a2ad40a88df424715159a162426a195a¶m=news&id=3242274&print=1
Vortrag „Tausend Kraniche“ (24.9.2011, 12.00)
Posted: September 19, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Die in Japan geborene Masako Shono- Sládek studierte an der Universität Keio-gijuku in Tokyo Kunstgeschichte und Ästhetik. Später promovierte Dr. Masako Shono- Sládek in der philosophischen Fakultät der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. Sie war langjährig als Kuratorin des Museums für Ostasiatische Kunst der Stadt Köln tätig.
Nun steht sie dem Kranich- Museum mit ihrem Vortrag „Tausend Kraniche“ (Senba-tsuru bzw. Senba-zuru) zu Verfügung am 24. September 2011 um 12.00. Der Kranich ist der größte und älteste erhalten gebliebene, fliegende Vogel. Mit lang gestrecktem Hals und Beinen gleiten hoch im Himmel die tausend Kraniche.
Diese eleganten und majestätisch erhabenen Gestalten wurden in der ostasiatischen Kunst und Dichtung immer wieder bildnerisch dargestellt und gepriesen. Ihre Natur und Eigenschaften –ihre Langlebigkeit, Wachsamkeit und Klugheit, Monogamie und
ihr Familienband führten dazu, dass die Kraniche in verschiedenen Kulturen eine mythologische und symbolische Gestalt wurden.
Der Kranich galt im alten Ägypten als Sonnenvogel. In Indien wird er für den Vornehmsten aller Gefiederten gehalten. Für die Griechen verkörpert der Kranich die Gottheiten Apollon, Demeter und Hermes. Bei den Römern werden die Kraniche zur Bewachung von Haus und Hof eingesetzt. In China und Korea trugen die Zivilbeamten des vierten Grades ein Hofgewand mit einem gestickten Kranichmuster, als Rangabzeichen.
Der riesen Schwarm des Zugvogels Kranich wird in Japan als glückliches Omen „Tausend Kranich“ bezeichnet. Die mit Papier gefalteten „Tausend Kraniche“ wurden schließlich ein Symbol des Friedens, nach dem ein von der Atombombe beim zweiten Weltkrieg geschädigten Mädchen und ihre Mitschüler mit dem dringenden Gebet zum langen Leben unermüdlich hergestellt hatten.
Die heraldische Kranichgestalt schmückt unter anderen die Flugzeuge der Lufthansa, der Japan Air Line und der chinesischen Xiamen Air. Der Kranich ist der Reitvogel der Unsterblichen. In einer Versammlung von weisen Literaten darf der Kranich nicht fehlen. Wegen ihres sozialen Verhaltens gilt der Kranich auch als Sinnbild für Treue und Familienglück. Ihre spektakulären Balztänze regten volkstümliche- und Bühnentänze an.
Im Vortrag werden diese verschiedenen Aspekte des wunderbaren Vogels an Hand von Bildern, der Kunst- und Kunsthandwerklichen Objekte anschaulich gemacht.
Einweihungs Programm
Posted: September 14, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »für Samstag, den 24. September 2011
! Im Museums- Shop sind jederzeit T- Shirts, Taschen, Postkarten und noch vieles mehr zu erwerben!
Beginn 11.00 Uhr
Einlass der 1. Gruppe á 60- 70 Personen (12.00 Uhr nächster Einlass)
Begrüßung und Sektempfang
Informationsvortrag zur Geschichte und Architektur des Gebäudes
11.30 Uhr Vortrag von der Kuratorin und Kunsthistorikerin Masoko Shono
ab 11.30 Uhr – 18.00 Uhr Kinderprogramm:
- Sei kreativ: Sprechen über (zeitgenössische) Kunst
- Entdecke selbst! (Vogelquiz / Kranich- Quiz)
- Gestalte mit! (Kraniche malen/ ausmalen und basteln)
- Werde Kranich- Kenner und erhalte deine Urkunde!
ab 11.30 Uhr Präsentation von themaorientierten Dokumentationen/ Filmen
ab 12.00 Uhr kulinarisches Angebot von „Alte Schmiede“- Koch Kinsky:
“pfeffrig- blumige Melancholie” (Kranichfleisch mit Pfeffer und Nelken)
oder “brösliges Byzanz” (byzantinische Kranich- Gericht mir Semmelbrösel)
ab 12.30 Uhr werden alle 60 min. Führungen angeboten
ab 13.00 Uhr bieten offene Künstlergespräche die Chance für einen Austausch
ab 15 Uhr Workshop- Angebote:
- Erleben Sie zeitgenössische Kunst!
- Verfolge die Wege des Kranichs/ der Kranichzug
(hauptsächlich für Jugendliche)
- Vogelbeobachtung, eine Kunst?
- Literaturvorstellung in der Bibliothek
♪Für die musikalische Untermalung sorgt am Nachmittag eine Tango- Latin- Gruppe! ♫
♪Anschließend begleitet uns DJ Maxwell in die Nacht! ♫
ZULETZT HALTEN WIR FÜR SIE, ALS ANDENKEN AN DIE ERLEBNISSE
IM KRANICH- MUSEUM, KLEINE PRÄSENTE BEREIT!
Join us!
Posted: September 8, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Join us for our opening on 24th September! It starts at 11am. At 11.30 curator and art historian, Masoko Shono will give a lecture. Lunch from the Alte Schmiede. Tours throughout the afternoon. Food, refreshments and party in the evening until late in the presence of DJ Maxwell.
Accommodation with a 20% discount to Kranich Museum party goers at the Kutschenhaus and Boree Prerow.
http://www.kutschenhaus-hessenburg.de/ Telephone number: 038223/669900



















