It’s hard to be down when you‘re up Michel Auder über Daniel Knorr

08.03.2017 / 19:00 – 21:00
With Michel Auder

The Berlin Sessions at DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program

Lecture in English

Michel Auder (* 1954 in Soissons, France) has since the early 19670s been continuously filming people and occurrences from his life and thus accumulated comprehensive archive material that is constantly reworked and extended. Well-known are his films edited in the 1990s from the surroundings of the Warhol-Factory and the Chelsea Hotel, as well as his artists’ portraits such as Annie Sprinkle (1981-84), Cindy Sherman (1988) or Alice Neel (1976/82’, 2000).
Ever since his arrival in Berlin in 2016 for his one-year scholarship in the framework of the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Program, Auder has been filming the encounters with the befriended performance and conceptual artist Daniel Knorr (* 1968 in Bukarest, lives in Berlin). Knorr often works with the creative processes of destruction and transformation through which he repeatedly balances out the discrepancy between the symbolic and the real.
Many Berliners know him for his flag installation on the roof of the Nationalgalerie as part of the 5. Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, with which he took up the subject matter of the aesthetics of abstract art and the idea of the National (Nationalgalerie, 2008). For the last abc art berlin contemporary he presented a one-man-bunker from World War Two as a walk-in sculpture. The Rumanian Pavilion that he presented at the 51th Venice Biennale remained empty. Besides some signs of usage from former exhibitions only the title of the work, European Influenza (2005), as well as the subsequently wide public discussion and reception of the project exist.

The Berlin Sessions

From February 2017 onwards, KW Institute for Contemporary Art will organize a series of monthly public talks in collaboration with various institutions and organizations located in Berlin. The series entitled The Berlin Sessions will explore the fabric of cultural producers in the city by inviting one Berlin-based speaker to give a presentation on another cultural producer that he/she finds inspiring. The goal of the lecture series is to highlight the work of Berlin-based creatives from the perspective of their peers; to map connections between the various producers and fields and to strengthen the existing networks between locally based artists, authors, musicians, performers, researchers and other creative producers. Every month, a series of lectures will be hosted and co-organized in collaboration with a different institution in Berlin, such as DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Berlinische Galerie, among others. The series will travel and will be hosted by the partner organizations at their premises and at KW.

Photo: Michel Auder