WBEZ | Goethe-Institut Chicago

Reconciling Lives - German-Jewish Dialogue

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 11:22:00 -0500

The evening will be opened by Chair of the Association of Israelis of Central European Origin, Ambassador (retired) Reuven Merhav, who will give the keynote address, followed by a panel discussion and presentation of the book “Reconciling Lives”. Panelists include Ambassador Reuven Merhav, author and photographer Alvin Gilens, AJC Chicago Board Member Phil Dunn and German ARSP volunteer Pia Kulhawy, who will discuss the current status and future of German-Jewish Dialogue and Reconciliation.

The Jewish-American author Alvin Gilens presents his new book “Reconciling Lives”. This book features the stories of young German volunteers sent by Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (ARSP) to the US, Great Britain, Czech Republic and Israel, and the relationships they built with Holocaust survivors during a year of service. When Alvin Gilens first learned about ARSP over twenty years ago he found a healing force that moved him deeply. Hearing the powerful stories from German volunteers about their experiences of reconciliation with survivors of Nazi Germany, he recognized that those are stories that must be told.

The event is organized in collaboration with the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, AJC, the German Consulate Chicago and supported by the German Information Center USA.

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP with Denise Eiserman:

1-312-263-0472 or email: info@chicago.goethe.org

Literaturlenz: Reading with Authors from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria Event

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:46:00 -0600

Hallo, Grüezi, Servus! Literature from the three German-speaking countries.

Each year Literaturlenz brings together the Goethe-Institut Chicago, the Consulate General of Switzerland in Chicago and the Consulate General of Austria in Chicago for an evening of readings in German. Each author represents a unique voice in contemporary German-language literature. In 2013 we welcome Silke Scheuermann from Germany, Ulrike Ulrich from Switzerland, and Cornelia Travnicek of Austria. The readings will be followed by a discussion in English moderated by Susan Harris, Editorial Director of Words Without Borders.

Our Literaturlenz writers will also visit the University of Illinois at Chicago (February 27), the University of Wisconsin-Madison (February 28), and DePaul University (March 1) for readings with German students and faculty

Silke Scheuermann, born in 1973, lives in Offenbach. She studied Drama and Literature in Frankfurt, Leipzig and Paris. Her poems, short stories and novels have been translated into various languages. She was member of the Jury of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. For 2012/2013 Silke Scheuermann will be holding a Poetics lecturing post in Wiesbaden.

Ulrike Ulrich, born 1968 in Düsseldorf, lives in Zurich. She studied German Literature and Language and afterwards worked in Computational Linguistics. In 2010 Luftschacht Verlag published her first novel fern bleiben, which will be followed in february of 2013 by her second novel Hinter den Augen. She is the editor of a literary Anthology on Human Rights and a member of the Zurich-based group of authors “index” (www.wortundwirkung.ch). Ulrich has received numerous awards and stipends, including the Walter Serner-Prize 2010, a Zurich Literature Prize 2010, and the Lilly-Ronchetti-Prize 2011 for Hinter den Augen. In 2012 she received grants from both Pro Helvetia and the canton of Zurich.

Cornelia Travnicek was born in 1987 in St. Pölten, Lower Austria, and lives in Traismauer and Vienna. She studied Sinology and Informatics at the University of Vienna and now works as a researcher at the Center for Visual Reality and Visualization. She has received several prizes and awards for her publications, including third place in FM4 radio station’s 2009 Wortlaut Wettbewerb - the most important prize for young talent in Austria - for an excerpt from her novel ‘Chucks’. She also won the audience award in the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize competition 2012 for her text ‘Junge Hunde’.

Susan Harris is the editorial director of Words Without Borders. With Ilya Kaminsky, she coedited The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.

Please RSVP with Denise Eiserman:

1-312-263-0472

Mail Symbolinfo@chicago.goethe.org

Sound Installation: From the Musical Impulse to the Public Sphere

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 15:05:00 -0500

Artists and curators discuss their work in the field of sound installation and, in particular, how their musical practice translates into an architectural form in public space. These artists' musical practice is very often an experience that relates their own bodies to an instrument or system, which then reaches an audience in real time. How do they translate these immediate corporeal musical interests into sound installation, a mediated form that uses recorded sound rather than live sound, creating an architectural experience for an audience that is often ambient and ambulatory?

Michael Thieke is a clarinetist and composer from Berlin who has been exploring the intricacies and subtleties of his instrument in a number of musical contexts in collaborative and solo situations. Working primarily in the context of rigorous improvisation, he is extremely active with numerous CD releases, concerts, and other projects. Most recently his investigations have expanded into the realm of installations in which the instrument is expanded into space through multichannel playback.

Coppice (Noè Cuellar and Joseph Kramer) is a Chicago-based duet of musicians and sound artists who use bellows and electronics. Since its formation in 2009, Coppice has produced original compositions for stage, fixed media, and performed installation settings, often focusing on decentralized presentation modes, such as multichannel playback, distributing performers throughout a space, etc. Coppice has appeared at a number of U.S. venues and festivals, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and internationally in Iceland, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

Ethan Rose is a sound artist and composer who utilizes methods of interactive composition to explore qualities of materiality, transformation, and perceptual experience through processes of reduction and repositioning. In his performances, installations, film scores, and recorded compositions, Rose’s practice often addresses the position of sound and music within the larger intersections of worldly experience. By inviting a visibly embodied presence into his works, he creates immersive, multisensory experiences that expand out from a notion of the purely sonic.

Amelia Ishmael is a Chicago artist whose practice includes critiquing, historicising, teaching, and curating other artists’ practices. Her areas of specialization include light and sound waves and their intersections in contemporary art. Her recent projects include curating the traveling art exhibition Black Thorns in the White Cube and serving as co-editor and curator of pages for Helvete, a journal of Black Metal theory. She contributes a column on art and music to Art21.com, and her writings have previously appeared in WIRE, ArtSlant Chicago, Art in Print, and Art Papers. She received a B.F.A. in photography and new media from the Kansas City Art Institute and a master's degree in modern art history, theory, and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Moderator Lou Mallozzi is an artist, curator, and educator. He is cofounder and executive director of Experimental Sound Studio, a nonprofit sonic arts organization, where he has organized concerts, exhibitions, festivals, radio broadcasts, and other cultural programs, presenting the work of over 500 artists in the past 25 years. His own art practice in the realm of sound includes installations, performances, improvised music, radio works, and sound design for cinema, which he has presented widely in the U.S. and Europe. He is adjunct full professor in the Sound Department of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Americanization of the Grimms' Fairy Tales: The Many Fortunes of Persecuted Snow White

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:52:00 -0500

Americans (if not most people in the world) tend to view the Grimms' tales in all their forms—books, films, theater and popular culture—as American. Translated and adapted first by British writers, the Grimms' tales were changed into entertaining and moral tales for children during the course of the nineteenth century. There were no great signs of Americanization. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, American writers, illustrators, playwrights, and filmmakers began to experiment with the tales and radically transform them into American stories, whether produced for young or old. Any allusion to Germanic qualities or characteristics of the Grimms' tales was minimal. Essentially, any credit to the Grimms and their original designs and intentions were more or less effaced. Nevertheless, the Grimms' tales did become a kind of exotic brand that connoted fairy tale, and fairy tale was associated with children's culture. The most significant American adaptation of a Grimm tale was Walt Disney's animated film, Snow White, in 1937. Other Grimms' tales were also fully Americanized and altered according to American "global" norms and standards.

Professor Jack Zipes examines the historical process of the globalized Americanization of Grimms' fairy tales with a focus on Snow White and the consequences the process has had for understanding the intentions of the Brothers Grimm and the meaning of the tales that they collected and edited.

The DEFA Film Snow White will be screened following the lecture!