Art
Curator: Ece Pazarbaşı
Annika Hippler: „The sound of plants“ (Fergitz) „green glow“ (Pinnow)
Annika Hippler’s work deals with the connection between art and science. For the “Spooky Distance” exhibition at the UM Festival, she will present a kinetic installation in the boathouse in Fergitz in which acoustic signals from plants are transformed into movements.
Annika Hippler (born 1978) lives and works in Berlin. She studied fine arts at the Berlin University of the Arts and at the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig, among others with John M. Armleder. She has presented her works, for example, at the Rudolf Scharpf Gallery of the Wilhelm Hack Museum, the Musée de la Ville in Tunis, the Emami Art Center in Kolkata, the Contemporary in Istanbul and the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai. Annika Hippler has received several awards for her artistic work.
Brad Nath: Dogoids; Ranger, 2023
Dogoids: Kunstfell, Stahl, Schaumstoff, verschiedene GrößenTails, 2023, Pelz, Stahl, verschiedene Größen; Ranger: fünf archivierte Digitaldrucke in besonderen Glasrahmen, je 30×30 cm
“Dogoids” are dog-like creatures that Brad Nath has abandoned in various locations in the Uckermark region of Germany. The sculptures defy classical notions of bodies. They appear as advanced robots and at the same time appear like mammals from a prehistoric time. This paradox activates cross-species relationships between humans and animals.
Brad Nath is working to develop new forms of empathy between humans and their environment. Through his material research, live performance, music composition, and sound-sensitive built environments, Brad seeks to amplify collaborative performances that occur between buildings and their inhabitants. Through his work, he seeks to expand our capacity for attentive listening, sensitive designing, empathetic constructing, and performative inhabiting, for not only are we building this world, but this world is building us. Brad studied architecture and music at Cornell University in New York and has been living in Berlin since 2018.
Mö: Tree Study, 2023
Vintage school desk and chair, printed booklet, 95 x 76 x 84,5 cm
In her poem “Flower” the Korean poet Kim Chun-Soo writes that a flower becomes “the” flower as soon as you study it and give it a name. Based on this idea, the Mö Kollektiv, in dialogue with the “breathing sculptures” by Andreas Greiner, places a school bench at one of the trees, inviting visitors to sit, look, observe and study the tree. A booklet designed by the artists helps to get to know the tree by writing, drawing and thinking. This is how a tree becomes “the” tree.
Mö means “mountain” in ancient Korean and is the collective vision of two artists, Y-ul Suh (KR) and Kristina Malmefjäll (SE), who explore the intersection of creativity and functionality. Collective Mö incorporates practicality and purpose into their artistic practice. Their creations aim to enrich our lives by transforming objects and spaces into interactive environments for people and nature. Collective Mö is based in Berlin.
Andreas Greiner: Niels Äpfel, 2023
2 Sibling apple trees, breathing sculptures, 250 cm tall at planting
Andreas Greiner has been carrying out various tree planting projects since 2019, which he calls “breathing sculptures”. In this way, the artist repeatedly reflects on the relationship between art-making and climate change. Especially for the UM Festival under the theme CONNECT, Andreas Greiner is planting two trees in different locations, which originate from a mother tree. The work is named after Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.
Andreas Greiner was born in Aachen in 1979, he lives and works in Berlin. He designs time-based sculptures that contain dynamic and uncontrollable variables. His creative goal is to push the boundaries of classical parameters in sculpture. The content of his work focuses on the anthropogenic influence on the evolution and form of nature. He is part of the artist collectives A/A and Das Numen. In 2019, Greiner co-initiated the project waldfuermorgen e.V. – a participatory forest where children and families plant trees on an area of about three hectares on the upper outskirts of Goslar. Since 2022, Andreas Greiner has been Professor of Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts in Kiel.
Kyoco Taniyama: Hearing each other <A> <B> <C>, 2023
mixed media, dimension variable
Branch objects is what Kyoco Taniyama calls the source material of her multimedia installation, which she presents in the Glass House in Pinnow and in Fergitz. She deals with the idea of being and non-being, with the social sphere and the biosphere, and shows the dependence in which man irrevocably stands to nature.
Kyoco Taniyama creates site-specific installations of sculpture, photography, video, and sound. Born in Japan, she lives and works in Berlin and Tokyo. Her exhibitions in recent years include: Neuköllner Kunstpreis 2022 (group exhibition, Galerie im Saalbau, Berlin, Germany 2022), “Sound from the Golden Age” (solo online, Harris Gallery | University of La Verne, CA, USA 2021), “Stone will flow, leaves will sink” (solo, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany 2019), “Rainy Alley” / “I’m here” (Setouchi International Art Festival, Kagawa, Japan 2010/2013), and others. She has also developed various artworks for public spaces in Japan.
Art + Music
Curator: Ece Pazarbaşı
Zeynep Ayse Hatipoglu & Robert Lippok: gölge gibi/like a shadow
Zeynep Ayse Hatipoglu is a cellist, composer and improviser. Her practice focuses on electroacoustic compositions, cello performances and sound installations through collaborative, interdisciplinary and improvisational methods. She often combines traditional Turkish music with experimental and contemporary sound perspectives. For UM Festival 2023, Zeynep Ayse Hatipoglu will collaborate for the first time with composer and musician Robert Lippok.
Robert Lippok is a German avant-garde artist and composer and longtime player in Berlin’s experimental music scene. In 1983, together with his brother Ronald Lippok, he founded the dissident punk band Ornament und Verbrechen, inspired by industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle. An open platform for exploring jazz, electronic and industrial concepts with like-minded comrades-in-arms from the East German underground, the group remained active until the mid-1990s, when it was replaced by the brothers’ next and best-known collaboration, the palindromic To Rococo Rot. Founded by the Lippok brothers and Düsseldorf bass guitarist Stefan Schneider, the post-rock/electronic band was dedicated to acoustic explorations and improvisations of all kinds. Known for his expansive imagination, inventive rhythmic reflexes and layers of fuzzy sounds, Lippok’s solo work is equally wide-ranging – from the funky, glitchy, twisted techno record Redsuperstructure for Raster-Noton (2011) to set design for operas, gallery exhibitions and collaborations with artists of all stripes.
In their first collaboration, Zeynep Ayse Hatipoglu and Robert Lippok will jointly compose a special score derived from movements of various “particles” and their entanglement with each other.
Viola Yip: Bulbble, 2019
for multichannel electro-mechanical DIY instrument with lightbulbs and relays
Viola Yip is an experimental composer, performer, improviser, sound artist and instrument maker from Hong Kong. She explores relationships between media, materiality, space, and our musical bodies in experimental music. Bulbble is a DIY electronic instrument that creates music from the pulse-timbre continuum of acoustic sounds generated by relays. Relays are electrically operated switches that can activate other circuits. Using knobs, dials, relays, and light bulbs, Viola also explores the sonic and performative relationships that result from these relationships.
With her DIY electronic instruments, Viola Yip has performed at the Cycling 74′ Expo, Women Between Arts at the New School, DiMenna Center, Look and Listen Festival in New York City, Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, Klex Festival in Kuala Lumpur, QO-2 in Brussels, Active Listening Festival in Berlin, and Sonic Arts Research Center at Queen’s University Belfast, among others. She is currently working on commissions for the Dara String Festival (Berlin), Seanaps Festival (Leizig) and Vertixe Sonora Ensemble (Spain). She lives in Berlin.
Music
Curator: Gudrun Gut
Baal & Mortimer: Live
Baal & Mortimer is the solo project of musician Alexandra Grübler, which she founded in 2014 in Düsseldorf. Muusically she deals with questions of resistance, autonomy and identity. She moves in spaces between sound and image, language and body. After the release of the commissioned piece Earthrise on the Düsseldorf all-female label HEAVEN in 2018, the debut album Deixis, completed in London, was released on Bureau B in summer 2020. Grübler studied art and philosophy and now lives in Berlin. She has collaborated with Black Merlin, Musiccargo, and Rupert Clervaux, and was a 2018 mentee of Laurel Halo in Berlin’s Amplify program.
“Baal & Mortimer is a master of seduction, enchanting, coming very close, dancing around us and dancing with us, embracing us and offering the most beautiful comfort.” (Musicboard)
Ensemble Quillo: LandQultour
As an ensemble for contemporary music with production and concert location in Falkenhagen in the uckermark, Quillo tours the region with the “smallest art hall” in Brandenburg. Here there is room for avant-garde chamber concerts with works of the most diverse styles and compositional techniques. Since its founding in 2004, the ensemble has seen itself as a cultural mediator in rural areas and is continuously developing formats to shape society with the means of contemporary art, to enable encounters and to provoke communication. Already present in 2021 at the UM Festival “UM_WEGE”, this time you can follow the KulturBus on a “LandQultour”.
(4 performers and 3 people technique + 1 accompaniment).
Elke Horner: Glockenspiel
Elke Horner is a percussionist living in Berlin and Himmelpfort. She has mastered the art of polyrhythmics and creates complex compositions beyond the boundaries of musical temporality with instruments such as glockenspiel and percussion. From short, tonal melodies, chord arpeggios and long-sounding chords, she creates minimalist motifs consisting of a combination of the numbers 2, 3 and 4.
With her music she creates illusions about speeds and plays with different patterns of perception of time and rhythm.
Post Neo: Live
Post Neo is an experimental electronic pop duo from Berlin and Mexico City. Nicole Luján and Pauline Weh oscillate between technoid beats and a melancholy that is found in slower and dreamy vocal & synth passages. Post Neo took part in the 2022 residency program of Musicboard Berlin at Sternhagen Gut.
“Dark green and made to disappear under: fluffy world escape.” is how Tobias Stosiek of BR describes their EP do you? – Post Neo are newcomers to remember.
Modularturm Klangkarussell
A giant modular synthesizer: an interactive sound installation that invites automated improvisation.
Thomas Fehlmann: DJ
Thomas Fehlmann founded the band Palais Schaumburg with Holger Hiller. From 1990 to 2017 he was part of The Orb. Since then, he has also played regularly at the Berlin club Tresor and produced his music with various Detroit techno greats such as Juan Atkins. In 1995 Fehlmann and Gudrun Gut developed the DJ project Ocean Club, from which a radio show emerged. Among other things, he produced an Erasure album and remixed cross-country from Einstürzende Neubauten to Apparat to Sigur Ros. He releases his own albums and singles on the Cologne-based Kompakt label. Fehlmann is a local UM Festival activist who will close Saturday night in Pinnow with multigenerational music.
Music + Literature
Curator: Gudrun Gut + Ute Koenig
AnniKa von Trier: Gerade jetzt! Brandenburger Brief
AnniKa von Trier describes herself as a wordsmith. With her playful, humorous and socio-political lyrics and songs to the accordion, she moves between the urban Berlin everyday life of a digital bohemian and the radical devotion to the beauty of nature. She is connected with the Uckermark by her Brandenburger Brief, in which she – in the name of Bettina von Arnim – has artfully interwoven 459 Brandenburg place names… Singing is for her the liveliest way of communication, the dialogue with the accordion her means of expression.
AnniKa von Trier is a performance artist, singer, accordion player, song, radio play and book author. In the early 90s, the performance artist found an accordion on an East Berlin street as Palma Kunkel – Die singende Tellerermiene. The beginning of a great friendship. Since 1994 she has been touring professionally with her own productions internationally between the Adelaide Cabaret Festival in Australia, the Goethe Institute in New York and the most beautiful gardens and manor houses of the Uckermark. In 2015, Alexander Verlag Berlin published her Diary of a Hospitant – Volksbühne Berlin 1992/93, which describes her beginnings as a musician in addition to her theater apprenticeship as an assistant dramaturg and director at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Since 2016 she can be experienced as AnniKa von Trier with her urban songs Gerade jetzt!
Thies Mynther und Veit Sprenger: Die deutsche Meisterin im Apnoetauchen / Mickeymousing
An executioner is more afraid of the upcoming execution than the condemned man and spends a sleepless night. A female doctor treats broken hearts with the methods of surgery. A man lives in the forest, but thinks it is a two-room apartment in Berlin-Neukölln. A nurse guides a visitor through a hospice for dying gods. A star chef cooks for himself. A sports diver encounters her inner ghosts under water. Gutenberg puts himself under the printing press while trying to write an autobiography. Craftsmen erect a sundial on the sun and get into a dispute about its usefulness. Two aliens exchange rules of etiquette while devouring humanity… Veit Sprenger’s stories are written while walking, in the subway, in the waiting room, at the airport or on the train, in a restaurant, in the back seat of a car, at the cinema, at a concert, in line at the counter or in front of the supermarket checkout. They breathe everydayness and draw their impact from their unexpected turns into the fantastic.
Composer Thies Mynther and theater maker Veit Sprenger have been working together in internationally successful music theater productions since 2010. With their music machine “The Cybernetic Nightingale” they have already been guests at the UM Festival 2021. This year, Veit Sprenger will read a selection of his unpublished texts for the first time and will be musically accompanied by Thies Mynther.
Literature
Kuratorin: Ute Koenig
Antonia Baum: Siegfried
“In forty-five minutes I would set the table, make breakfast, pack the bag, fill the washing machine, write my list for the day, and then wake Johnny, help her get dressed, braid her braids, make sure to buy Persil later. Johnny’s name was actually Johanna, but we said Johnny. Alex had been sleeping on the couch. He’d been doing that more often lately when he’d been drinking or smoking too much, but that night I’d been the reason. My breathing, which had just calmed down a bit, started going faster again, everything was back.”
Siegfried is the stepfather of the protagonist in Antonia Baum’s novel of the same name: a woman who checks herself into a psychiatric ward in the morning. Life, the relationship, the children, the work – everything seems too much all at once. And she wonders what role Siegfried plays in her world.
Antonia Baum, born in 1984, is a writer and author for DIE ZEIT. Her books – the novel Tony Soprano Doesn’t Die, the memoir Still Life, and a personal inventory of Eminem’s work – have received great media response. The author will read from her novel Siegfried, published by Claassen in March.
Slata Roschal: 153 Formen des Nichtseins
“No matter how well they disguise themselves, the first-generation Russian speakers, their soft pronunciation, their rounded vowels, their clothes give them away. I could work as a detective and find them by the way, fellow travelers, passers-by, speakers, mothers in kindergartens, in music schools, in playgrounds, no matter how good your German is, I know who you are, you know who I am.
In the streetcar, parents speak German to their children so as not to be considered foreigners, to show how well they have assimilated, triggered in the German-speaking environment, and I sit there laughing to myself – I immediately hear out the Russian accent, see that the mother wears a chain of red gold they can’t fool me.”
With her debut novel 153 Forms of Non-Being, Slata Roschal approaches questions of identity, migration, femininity, and being with her protagonist Ksenia as a writer and scientist, Jewish, German, and Russian.
Slata Roschal, born in 1992 in Saint Petersburg, is a German writer and literary scholar. Her debut novel 153 Forms of Non-Being was published by Homunculus Verlag in February 2022. It was on the SWR bestseller list and was nominated for the German Book Prize. The novel received numerous other awards in 2022 and 2023.
Patrica Klobusiczky
Patricia Klobusiczky, born in 1968, lives freelance in Berlin and works, among other things, as a moderator of literary events and translator.