Episode #3

Alma Feldhandler and Julia Friedrich

In episode three, the painter Alma Feldhandler, born in a small town near Paris in 1996, talks to Julia Friedrich, Collection and Exhibition Director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Feldhandler’s melancholic and somehow nostalgic paintings are characterised by a light colourfulness and maybe remind of works by Charlotte Salomon. Her images evoke memories of the history of the department stores, hospitals and tailor shops run by Jews in Berlin during the Weimarer Republic.

For her show in Berlin, Feldhandler was inspired by the photographs, paintings and artefacts from the Jewish Museum’s collection in Berlin. For this reason the painter met Julia Friedrich to talk with her about the “templates” she used from the Jewish Museum and what fascinates her so much about them.

Episode #1

Jimmy DeSana

The first episode of this podcast is dedicated to the life and work of the Queer American photographer Jimmy DeSana, who was working in New York during the 70s and 80s and sadly died of an AIDS related illness in 1990 at the age of 39. For the opening of his exhibition on 3 November 2023, we hosted a panel talk in the Berlin gallery with AA Bronson, Antje Krause-Wahl and Christian Liclair, which we recorded as the first episode of this podcast.

Despite his recognition in artist circles in New York during his lifetime, Jimmy DeSana’s work was long overlooked. It was only last year that the Brooklyn Museum staged his first in-depth museum show under the title Submission. DeSana’s first institutional show in Germany will open at KW in Berlin in July 2024.

DeSana was a prominent figure in different scenes – such as No wave music, club culture, performance art, the Pictures Generation and mail art – and he also became a chronicler of this Queer New York subculture in the 70s and 80s through his photographs.

Episode #2

Silke Schatz and Rita Kersting

The second episode of our podcast Listening to Art is dedicated to the work of Cologne-based artist Silke Schatz (b. 1967). Her exhibition Vanishing point is currently running at our Berlin gallery and will remain on view until 2 March 2024.

For this episode, Silke Schatz met Rita Kersting, Curator and Deputy Director of Museum Ludwig Cologne, for a walk in the village of Manheim, near the Hambach open-cast mine.
Since August 2021, Schatz has been visiting Manheim (a roughly half-hour train journey from her home in Cologne) once a week to conduct her artistic field research. Manheim will be the last place in Germany in the history of lignite mining to be excavated.

When the artist talks about her work in this village, with its 1,000 years of history, one quickly realises how existential her preoccupation with this place is – and the question of how the massive intervention that open-cast mining is, and what it means for nature, in particular, but also for people, can be depicted at all. When Schatz is in Manheim, she makes cyanotypes of the plants, takes photographs and sound recordings, sculpts traces of urban structures and tree bark in clay, organises walks and picks apples and pears to make jam and juice, thereby creating an archive of a place that is disappearing.

In the podcast, Schatz and Kersting talk about her work on site and also discuss why, for the artist, Manheim is a focal point for the major problems of our present day as they relate to climate change and our relationship with nature. They debate how Schatz came to do this research, activism, the pull of Manheim, ruderal vegetation, Brueghel and the racing driver Michael Schumacher.