Photo: Lindsey Appolis
Music & Talk
Monday, 12 September 2022, 6 pm
Artist talk with Garth Erasmus (Khoi Khonnexion)
Moderation: Stefan Schneider (mapstation)
Accompanied byPeter Thiessen (Kante)
Afterwards there will be music by and with the panelists.
Kunsthaus Hamburg
Free admission.
Garth Erasmus is a visual artist, musician, audio artist, activist, community worker and instrument maker. He studied visual arts at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. In the 1980s, he was part of the artistic anti-apartheid movement and helped establish several organizations emerging from the townships that saw art as a weapon of political work. Erasmus co-founded the influential artist group Vakalisa and Greatmore Street Artists Studios. Erasmus creates his works against the backdrop of the present and history of South Africa’s indigenous population, the KhoiSan, to which he belongs. He challenges the hegemonic constructions of the “coloured identity”, which are based on exclusion and continue to impact society, even after the end of apartheid. Through his exploration of pre-colonial history, he re-appropriates indigenous knowledge by transforming the musical bow of the KhoiSan – central to his work and found in ethnological museums – into an electrified hypermodern tool. As a musician, he plays in several improvisation and free jazz ensembles and is co-founder of the activist music and poetry group Khoi Khonnexion. His work has been exhibited internationally and is part of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, USA, as well as the Artscape Theater and the Robben Island Museum, Cape Town.
Stefan Schneider lives in Düsseldorf. From 1988 to 1993 he studied photography with Prof. Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, graduating as a master student. Since 1994 he has been working in the field of electronic music. He is a founding member of the bands Kreidler (1994 – 1999) and To Rococo Rot (1995 – 2014). Musical collaborations include Joachim Roedelius (Cluster), Dieter Moebius (Cluster), Bill Wells, Arto Lindsay, Sofia Jernberg, Natascha Sadr-Haghighian, Katharina Grosse, and Susanna Gartmayer. He publishes solo works under the name mapstation. He has released album productions on labels such as Mute, Domino, City Slang, Staubgold, Bureau-b, and TAL. At the invitation of the Goethe Institute Nairobi and UNESCO, he has produced extensive field recordings of traditional folk music in Kenya since 2011. In 2016, he launched the record label TAL. Schneider is also active as a curator (RUHRTRIENNALE 21 and 22 – WEGE PROJEKT – audio guide through the city of Duisburg and its inner harbor. THEATER DER WELT Festival, Düsseldorf 2021 – Nine music events with musicians from Japan, Greece, Kenya, USA, Belgium, Venezuela, Brazil. HOMBROICH : RAKETENFESTIVAL 2022 – Festival for electronic and experimental music on the Museum Island Hombroich, Neuss. MANCHMAL ARTET ES AUS in MUSIK – an exhibition about Conrad Schnitzler (1937 – 2011) at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf).
At the centre of Peter Thiessen’s work is the relationship of sound and music to language. With the lyrics, he explores various states of the “in-between”, the ghostly, the spectral and the zombified. For Sand !Hū Sand he has developed a series of musical pieces dealing with the largest known pile of sand: the planet Mars. Using the materials occurring on Mars – sand, metal, dry ice and water – he has composed a speculative soundtrack in which the agency of inanimate matter becomes audible. Thiessen is the singer, songwriter and guitarist of the Hamburg band Kante and was the bassist of the band Blumfeld from 1997 to 2002.
The event takes place in the context of the exhibition Sand !Hū Sand, which can be visited at Kunsthaus Hamburg until October 2, 2022. In this exhibition, visual artists and musicians in international collaboration deal with the material sand and examine its relationship to the traces of colonial history and revolve around their different approaches to the world. The artistic works, for the most part created for the exhibition, consist of ephemeral materials such as fabric and sand, the sounds of dry ice and conversations on journeys. Performances, workshops, talks and concerts will be held within the setting of this expansive installation, but during the exhibition this is also the setting where rehearsals, productions or improvisations take place. Besides a new cycle of sand paintings, the exhibition features a number of musical bows that Garth Erasmus created partly in South Africa and partly in Hamburg.
FURTHER EVENTS
Guided tours
Thursday, 22 September 2022, 6 pm
Music & Talk
Monday, 12 September 2022, 6 pm
Garth Erasmus (Khoi Khonnexion), Stefan Schneider (Mapstation), Peter Thiessen (Kante)
Mineral Performances
Thursday, 15 September 2022, 6 pm
Tsarab mâs (Dust’s Standing) by Xhoes
Null (Mars & Moon) Dry ice-Performance by Peter Thiessen, with Glen Arendse, Garth Erasmus, Ruth May
Digging Deeper by Nik Duric
The Cosmology of the Bow
Saturday, 17 September 2022, 2 pm
Bow-making workshop (Garth Erasmus)
Lecture: Musical bow of the Khoisan (Glen Arendse)
Bow Ensemble Improvisation
Sand Concert
Saturday, 24 September 2022, 8 pm
Khoi Khonnexion (Kapstadt)
Kuru (Windhoek/Berlin/Hamburg) – Special Guest: Renu Hossain
Kreidler (Düsseldorf/Berlin)
Songs aus The House of Falling Bones (with members of Khoi Khonnexion & Kante, Nik Duric, Ruth May, Xhoes)
Kindly supported by
