Thirty years after their separation, performance artists Marina Abramović and Frank Uwe 'Ulay' Laysiepen (1943-2020) agree to meet, for the first time on camera, for a raw and honest conversation about their life, art and legacy.
Things fall apart, but they are also reassembled and given new life, in an enlightened form. Meet the New York based artist and filmmaker Bill Morrison in this interview about his haunting experimental collage films 'Decasia' and 'Light is Calling'.
“I want to show things how they are.” Meet Maria (Masha) Alyokhina of the Russian activist movement Pussy Riot, who has been protesting against the regime of Vladimir Putin through public, colourful and non-violent actions for over a decade. “The system pretends to have a serious face. That’s how they want the fear to go inside you and paralyse you. And we believe that the smile and humour break this fear.” Maria Alyokhina describes today’s Russia as a totalitarian regime and the development since 2012 as “the road to hell”, reaching a low point with the attack against Ukraine in 2022.
Emil Nolde was a Nazi – and so what, asks contemporary German artist Daniel Richter. “It’s a moralistic debate. A debate, that mirrors the moralism and bigottery of a generation that seems to think, that the world is a moral playground.” Emil Nolde’s relationship to the Nazi-regime in the Third Reich has given rise to immense discussions within the last months. For decades the broader public had a picture of Nolde being one of the “entartete” artists as well as being prohibited painting by the Nazi-regime. Though this on the surface is true, it was the result of a great disappointment to Nolde. For years, he had strived to become “the” artist of the Thrid Reich, praising his own art as true, German, anti-French and anti-Jewish. Possible competitors within the German art world like Max Pechstein he actively denounced to the Nazi authorities.
Another Kind of Knowledge is the result of a conversation that started in 2017 with the renowned Danish architect Dorte Mandrup, who for years has been an established figure in the Scandinavian architectural world, and is increasingly achieving prominence on an international level. In this portrait film, Mandrup herself unfolds the cornerstones of her practice—predicated on the synthesis of place, history, materiality, and sculptural—resulting in a consistent articulation of the contemporary. Her buildings always speak about a place. But who is Dorte Mandrup? What has shaped her approach to architecture? How does she go about her projects? While revealing something about Mandrup's inner and outer landscapes, Another Kind of Knowledge is a fascinating story about the essence and conditions of architecture today.
