Pfingsten, or Pentecost, is all about the spirit, and, coupled with the idyllic weather, this weekend sees Berlin’s spirits elevated beyond its usually grey, grubby self. Starting off at .HBC tonight, local label PAN will be celebrating Heatsick’s release “Déviation” alongside a roster that’s equal parts London and Berlin. Joining his live performance will be NHK’Koyxen, Lee Gamble and Geoff Mullen presenting warped rhythms and beats, barely containable inside a time-signature. But Saturday and Sunday take things out in the open, where Wax Treatment goes back to its ancestral roots with its Africa Special, presenting talents including Appleblim, Shackleton, Mark Ernestus and the Analog Africa Soundsystem.
Just let the sun drag you out, and the music pull you in.
If you’re not up to speed with US-based punk music, tonight’s your tip at Festsaal Kreuzberg. The Spits have been around for more than a moment, but have stayed fresh while taking punk to its essentials of angular rhythms enhanced with DEVO-styled synths. Originally from Seattle, these gut-busting dudes will invigorate and compel you to mosh your neighbor when they play only one of two shows in Germany this evening. Backing them up will be the no-less-impressive mostly girl group Hunx and His Punx, originally from San Francisco. Their homoerotic pop-punk will remind you that a glam, gay frontman is the true talent behind their trashy sexual antics.
Check out the event here.
Faux Images is a regular meeting, which provides a platform for showing and exchanging work and networking for the Berlin animation and motion design scene.
At each meeting, local and international film-makers, designers and artists from related disciplines are invited to present their work through lectures and screening.
At tonight’s Faux Images VI meetup guests can expect the learned musings of David Lewandowski (of Tron and Walking to the Store fame), Thorsten Fleisch (Super 8 experimental films) and Cypheraudio from Toronto.
Faux Images VI | Tonight, 20:00 at LEAP, Berlin
Konzept86 is a new Berlin-based concept store with a focus on emerging fashion designers. Through an innovative and sustainable fashion concept, designers sell and hire out their creations directly to the public. Konzept86 transforms seasonal fashion into a sustainable practice by allowing buyers to discover designs at a fraction of the price, and then share them with friends.
Konzept86 works on different levels: it makes designs more accessible to the public by enabling customers to buy or rent items directly from the designers. It also acts as a designer’s very own sales and presentation space in the heart of Berlin.
Konzept86 becomes officially accessible to the public on Wednesday May 16 with an opening party, where their international roster of designers will be unveiled to the Berlin fashion scene. To attend, state your case by mail to rsvp@fiermanagement.com by Tuesday May 15.
Konzept86 Opening Party | May 16, 18:00 at The Wye, Berlin
According to the United Nation, by 2050 the global population will reach over nine billion. That’s a lot of people. And a lot of mouths to feed.
On Tuesday 15th May, Protein is hosting a forum event that will explore how we might solve the problem, from entomophagy and aquaponic urban farming, to super GM crops and lab-grown meat.
They’re inviting three experts to come and discuss how we might be eating in the next few decades. These include experimental culinary artist and occasional jellymonger Sam Bompas, the team behind Ento, an RCA project looking at how insects can be introduced into the Western diet, and Sam Henderson, co-founder of aquaponics-based urban farm initiative Farm:Shop.
So snag a ticket for the forum and find out if you’ll be adding insect muesli or in-vitro steak to your shopping trolley in 2050.
The “secret universe” series at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin presents the work of American artist Morton Bartlett. Central works of his oeuvre are fifteen semi-life-sized dolls, twelve girls and three boys. It took him up to a year to create each of the figures, and he designed various costumes and wigs in order to stage the dolls in true-to-life situations. He inserted them into various real-life moments, and breathed life into his creations through skilled photography.
His work was created for private use and was never exhibited during his lifetime. The dolls, approximately 200 black-and-white photographs, drawings, color slides and costumes were first discovered in 1993.
Morton Bartlett | May 11 - September 23 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
For his fourth solo exhibition at Paris’ art: concept, Lothar Hempel presents a spanking new series of paintings that mix oil-colour, crayon, collage, acrylic, print, stains, drips, scratches, sheddings, smears and splatters. These intriguing paintings are filled with unintentional signs that result from the multiplicity of the layers applied by the artist, who tells an unknown story: The Story of The Old New Girls…
Vernissage: May 12, 18:00 | Exhibition: May 12 - June 23
“The ability to easily capture and reproduce not only the visual characteristics of the Gods, but also their patterns of movement and their sound, has wide applications for godders in the field. The most active times of the year for godding in temperate zones are during the spring or fall migrations when the greatest variety of Gods may be seen.”
Tonight from 20:00, ten days into Berlin’s Month of Performance Art, Kalle von Karl leads a performance and new media happening called ‘Films About Being God’ at the Kreuzberg Pavillon on Skalitzer Straße.
Thu, May 10 2012 | 20.00 | Kreuzberg Pavillon | Berlin
After dinner no one wants to go straight to sleep or to stand in line for a club at 1.30 in the morning for the chance to start dancing at 3. “The Early Bird” idea is simple: it’s an after dinner party that starts at 9pm and ends at 2am. In between, the bass will boom, the vodka will flow and people will dance and kiss. They’ll still will have a headache and smoke-smelling clothes, but they’ll be reasonably on time for work in the morning.
Thu, May 10 2012 | 21.00 | What?! Club | Berlin
There are simultaneous parties around the world this Friday, all in honor of Her Royal Majesty. Not because we’re all (literally) raving Royalists, but rather in celebration of the literary and arts magazine of the same name. Issue 12 is coming out and you can join the revelry in a city of your choosing: be it Berlin, Paris, London, New York, Halifax or Toronto.
The new edition includes Alice Munro’s first ever written story, as well as stories, poems, paintings, drawings and photographs, from established and emerging international artists. Berlin’s launch party is in Idrawalot with live music, art, readings, exotic photo booths and other such festivities.
Hold on to your 3D goggles and space boots, dear readers, Festsaal is presenting this rare night of outer limits-psychedelia, musical futurism and awe-inspiring visuals on May 15th. Oh yes.
Parisian Synth Magician dÉbruit tops the bill with a no holds barred sonic assault filtered through dark Congolese sound systems, Downtown L.A. block parties gone wrong, haze filled Kingston recording studios and freaky Tunisian backstreet souks all powered by a fat hip hop engine.
The afro-psychedelic enigma they call Sensational will be serving up his abstract flavors that defy explanation. His off-the-wall lyrics and lazy approach to beat-making destroy all preconceived notions as to what music should be. He’s one of the most unique musicians of the past two decades. On May 15th he meets Koyxeи for a mindbending masterpiece of raw, bouncy and chest-caving beats, spectral textures, gruff, marble-mouthed self-aggrandizement and unparalleled grit.
We’ve got 2 pairs of tickets on offer for this one. Get your pleas in early by tweeting us @unlike.
Adaptability and flexibility are not only terms that you come across when speaking of company strategy or one-size-fits-all tools and utilities, but also a kind of necessary architecture that’s required in the wake of disasters. Take the Goethe Institut in Santiago, Chile as an example. Their main offices were so damaged by a recent earthquake that they had to be closed in order for reparations to go ahead. So instead of puttering about, they enlisted the architectural bureau FAR to design a temporary, scalable space fully capable of hosting lectures, screenings and housing extra staff. Tomorrow, at .HBC in Berlin, architects from FAR will present their design as both a temporary solution and schema for future design projects.
Make a note of the name, Konrad Smolenski, winner of the 2011 Views Prize for young Polish art. It’s considered Poland’s most prestigious art award and has Konrad’s name on it courtesy of his uniquely original works including videos, installations, and performances—where he’s known for playing with a defused, stringed up and jacked in missile. No joke.
Here’s one of his most recent works—OSCILLATIONS: A visualization of a punk gig in full throttle played out on an oscilloscope—is currently showing at Cleopatra’s Berlin until March 30th.
You might be reminded of other great architectural wonders when considering the sheer space required when housing Zeppelins; Peter Behren’s AEG Turbine factory, the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller and, of course, the ego-shattering heights of super-tall skyscrapers in modern Arabian peninsular emirates. Officially the fourth largest structure on earth in terms of volume, this former hanger in Brandenburg, Germany actually counts as the world’s largest structure that does not require load-bearing supports of any kind. Its conception dates to 1996, when the company Cargolifter AG was “floated” on the markets to develop a heavy lift airship, yet the company came crashing down, á la Hindenburg, in the ensuing blue chip crash of the early 21st century. Forced to sell their structure to the kitschy Tropical Islands concept, the building now functions as an amusement park. A trip here is well worth it, if only to bask in the rays of technical grandiosity that arises out of the promise of lost causes.
