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Sharjah 24
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sharjah 24
SAF announces curators of Sharjah Biennial 17
Harutyunyan is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory, Berlin University of the Arts and Nascimento is an independent curator and architect based in Luanda. 'Since 2003, Sharjah Biennial has been a platform for creative experimentation, collaboration and social impact. Rooted in our local context, we have fostered a place of significant regional and international exchange, bridging cultures and shared histories,' says Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation. 'Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento each bring distinct perspectives shaped by their individual practices. Sharjah Biennial 17 will be a space for critical engagement and collective reflection, where their curatorial visions can collaboratively explore new contemporary realities.' Working in close collaboration, the curators will shape the Biennial as a space for critical reflection and experimental exhibition-making, exploring alternative contemporary realities and the imaginative potential of art, through a wide range of artistic projects presented in sites across Sharjah. 'The possibilities and limitations of the biennial form in making visible the uneven temporal rhythms that pulsate beneath contemporaneity are of particular interest to me,' says Harutyunyan. 'I would like to examine the ways in which artworks encapsulate and figurate decaying but undead afterlives of the emancipatory projects of non-capitalist modernity.' For Paula Nascimento, biennials are fundamental spaces to experiment with forms and models of exhibition-making, and as well as places for gathering communities and fostering social and physical transformation. 'I am interested in thinking with artists and in the articulations between artmaking and infrastructure in an expanded way, as well as exploring art's capacity to imagine and propose spaces and other worlds and forms of relations,' she says.
The Mainichi
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Mainichi
Japanese pianists win 2nd, 5th prizes at Queen Elisabeth Competition
BRUSSELS (Kyodo) -- Japanese pianists Wataru Hisasue and Masaya Kamei won the second and fifth prizes, respectively, at the Queen Elisabeth Competition, a prestigious contest for international musicians held in Brussels. The organizers announced the results after the final round ended Saturday in the Belgian capital. First prize went to Nikola Meeuwsen of the Netherlands. Hisasue, a 30-year-old from Shiga Prefecture in western Japan, is currently studying under Klaus Hellwig, a professor of piano at the Berlin University of the Arts. Especially interested in the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, he has performed in both Europe and Japan, according to the organizers. "I am in disbelief. I thought I would become nervous, but I was able to enjoy performing as I tried not to have any regrets," he said. Kamei, 23, from Aichi Prefecture in central Japan, said he was able to "deliver my own music." Of the 12 pianists in the final, four were Japanese. Hisasue and Kamei both performed on Saturday.
New York Times
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Inside the Eccentric Japanese-Inspired Studio of a Beloved Berlin Artist
Entertaining With shows how a party came together, with expert advice on everything from menus to music. Despite recent waves of gentrification, Berlin is still a city full of artists. While some (including Wolfgang Tillmans and Katharina Grosse) are world-renowned, it's another cast of characters who keep the city strange and unpredictable. There's the avant-garde choreographer Florentina Holzinger, for example, known for staging operas with plentiful fake blood, and the 82-year-old fashion knitwear designer Claudia Skoda, who's often seen out at nightclubs. Then there's the artist Oliver Prestele, 52, who can be spotted around town wearing fluffy dog-hair hats and giant wooden clogs. Long obsessed with all aspects of traditional Japanese culture, he is one of the city's most passionate ceramists, a co-owner of some of its most successful Japanese restaurants and a gatherer of people. At the weekly Sunday dinners he hosts at his atelier, one might meet any number of creative Berliners, from the Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vo to the German Japanese classical violinist and artist Ayumi Paul. Located in the Uferhallen, a canal-side complex of artists' studios in the developing Wedding neighborhood, Prestele's 2,000-square-foot, two-floor space contains a glassed-in room that he uses as a ceramics studio and a large open kitchen and fermentation laboratory lined with plants and pottery. Last year, he made soba noodles there every Sunday until he was satisfied that they were perfect. On the second-floor mezzanine, he's installed an irori, a traditional Japanese sunken hearth, where he sometimes cooks nabe, Japanese hot pot. Born and raised in a small village in Bavaria, Prestele moved to Berlin in the 1990s to study product design at the Berlin University of the Arts, where one of his professors, a Japanese sculptor, instilled in him a fascination with Japan. After leaving university, he traveled to that country as often as he could, obsessively teaching himself to cook ramen. In 2001, he built a wooden ramen cart and began serving noodles in different spaces around Berlin's then-gritty Mitte neighborhood. 'Everything about it was illegal,' he says. He soon began catering for photographers including Peter Lindbergh, and in the mid 2000s, Prestele partnered with the Vietnamese restaurateur Ngu Quang Huy to open the ramen restaurant Cocolo, which now has two locations. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
