BERLIN.- For the first time, the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House association presents an exhibition of its art fellows at Haus Kunst Mitte - House for Contemporary Art in Berlin-Mitte: Ali El-Darsa, Silke Fischer, Anna Haifisch, Antje Majewski, Lukas Schilling, Sonya Schönberger, Siska and Clemens von Wedemeyer.

The exhibition Rooms with a View brings artistic ideas and inspirations from Los Angeles to Berlin and provides an insight into the projects created by the fellowship holders of Villa Aurora. The eight artists lived in Los Angeles for three months in 2022, developing new artistic approaches and perspectives. Through the works on display in the exhibition, the fellows engage in a dialogue with each other and present their different artistic perspectives on California – from billboard advertising to the Hollywood film industry, from reflections on the Pacific Ocean to the earthquake risk in the metropolis of Los Angeles. At the same time, the artists also raise questions about topics such as social change, migration, and exile. For the exhibition, the artists further developed their artistic approaches in Germany, thus deepening their cross-Atlantic perspective.

Ali El-Darsa responds to the history of Villa Aurora in his video work The Image Remains the Same. His stay led him to question his relationship to the history of exile
prevalent in the villa. Each day he captured the landscape and the view of the Pacific Ocean on video to preserve his experience as tangible and real. For him, water became an allegory of longing, of exile and refuge, and of failed and completed journeys. Water as image, as audiovisual documentation, as a reminder of hope and demise. It made him think of the many unfinished sea journeys that have taken place in recent years from Lebanon after the country's economic collapse. The Image Remains the Same is a collage of personal video footage and public accounts that Ali El-Darsa continuously adds to.

Silke Fischer has artistically documented her experiences during her stay in a photo diary. In no judgement_ no ego_no fear she associatively combines her own impressions of the city, the landscape, and the people, which she captured in snapshot-like photographs, with quotations from legendary films that refer to Los Angeles as their subject. In this way, she created a photo diary that spans 84 days and that could also be a screenplay.

Anna Haifisch has also chosen the notational form of the diary to process the flood of images and the abundance of visual impressions. For her, the opportunity to spend her days without time or deadline pressure was an excellent experience and resulted in the series Ready America consisting of 48 large-format pencil and ink drawings showing everyday objects, warning signs, advertising posters or full store shelves.

Antje Majewski used the time of her fellowship to travel across the country. In her project A Journey Reversed she retraced the route that a family member, an artist and
German emigrant, took from Bremen to New York, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles between 1847 and 1849. He was one of many travelers during the California Gold Rush. Using four letters that have survived and that are also presented in the exhibition, Majewski traces her ancestor's journey in a film while also exploring the changes to the landscape caused by migration and land grabbing, industrialized agriculture, and fossil fuel extraction. In addition to the film footage, Majewski’s installation includes watercolors that she created on her journey across the country.

After arriving at Villa Aurora, Lukas Schilling discarded his original project ideas for sculptural and kinetic sculptures and instead realized the film project You are the help until help arrives inspired by the city and the people that frequently have to deal with natural forces such as earthquakes, droughts or fires. In the film, fictional and real situations are shown in slow motion and set in relation to each other. The cross-fading of the scenes and the slowing down of the movements create spaces for thought.

During her residency, artist Sonya Schönberger studied the estate of Marta Feuchtwanger who lived in Villa Aurora until her death in 1987. While the estate of Lion Feuchtwanger has been intensively researched, Marta Feuchtwanger’s personal estate was stored in two small boxes. The artist asked herself: What remains of a person after their death? How do we preserve memories, how is history documented and presented?

Siska shows a Work in progress that explores the archaeology of Hollywood and the phenomenon of Arab fetishism in the film industry. The video work is based on the 16mm films and the research he started in L.A. During his residency at Villa Aurora, he also took photos that, printed on T-shirts, find their way into the exhibition. The photo series playfully reflects on the American merchandise culture as well as the myth of Los Angeles as the city of dreams.

Clemens von Wedemeyer contributes the video installation Off Grid to the exhibition. The work reflects on the utopia and resistance of contemporary alternative
lifestyles in digital capitalism, referring to dome formations built at the Burning Man festival in the USA.

For the exhibition, Schönberger has selected two works dealing with biographical ruptures against the backdrop of political and social upheaval. Her photo series Weißenfels portrays the battered facades of abandoned houses in Weißenfels, a town in Saxony-Anhalt that has a unique stock of old buildings due to its historical significance as a residential town in the 17th and 18th centuries. Until German reunification, it was an important location for the textile industry in the GDR. After the liquidation of the factories, the people moved away and the houses have been left to rot ever since. Through her glass sculptures from the seven-part series The party is over Schönberger again reflects on the economic upheaval in the former GDR and the loss of everyday places as places of remembrance after German reunification.

In display cabinets, he presents newspaper clippings, sketches, and cyanotypes on the representability of human social relations as network structures linked by dots and lines: Social Geometries, work in progress. These recent works were created during his residency at Villa Aurora in 2022 and further developed in 2023. They refer to a longer-term preoccupation with the representation and digitality of human group dynamics.

Die Villa Aurora is an artist residency in Los Angeles. For more than 25 years, it has been a place of inspiration and artistic creation for fellows in the fields of film, literature, composition, and visual arts. Villa Aurora's mission is to promote cultural exchange between Germany and the United States and to contribute to an open society by engaging with issues such as migration and exile. This thematic focus originates in the history of the house: During the Nazi era, the writer Lion
Feuchtwanger and the salonist Marta Feuchtwanger found refuge in the United States. In 1943, they purchased the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, which soon became a meeting place for German-speaking exiles: their guests and visitors included Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann or Alma Mahler-Werfel.

The Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House association is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. Together with a network of renowned partner institutions, including the Berlin Senate, the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, the Musicboard Berlin, the KunstSalon Köln, the Kunststiftung Sachsen-Anhalt, and the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (German Academic Scholarship Foundation), it awards up to twenty-four fellowships annually to artists working in visual arts, composition, film, and literature. In addition, it awards the annual Feuchtwanger Fellowship to writers and journalists who are committed to freedom of speech and expression in their home countries, as well as the Michael Ballhaus Fellowship to an outstanding cinematographer.

Haus Kunst Mitte
Rooms with a View: Crossatlantic Narratives - Villa Aurora Fellows 2022
October 14th, 2023 - November 5th, 2023
Curator: Dr. Anna Havemann,
Artistic Director at Haus Kunst Mitte