FRANKFURT, GERMANY.- The international event KULTURZONE06, the first of its kind, will take place in the Forum of the Messe Frankfurt from 12 to 16 July 2006. The following pages present the program in detail. Organized jointly by Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Messe Frankfurt, KULTURZONE06 will involve 120 internationally renowned scholars, journalists, visual artists, writers, actors, and designers. On five consecutive days, from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m., five highly charged and controversial subjects of today’s cultural reality will be presented and discussed in lectures, panels, installations, and performances. Further information and tickets on www.kulturzone.com.

The five themes of KULTURZONE06 are: “Waves, Trends, and Early Warning Systems,” “Everything Thinks, Except Human Beings,” “Good-bye, Subculture; Hello, Success Culture,” “Rethinking Spirituality: The Return of the Religious,” and “Me, Inc., versus the ’Hood: The Culture of Community.” The goal is to develop different perspectives and points of view on the cultural discourse and to offer a forum for exchange of heterogeneous approaches.

KULTURZONE06 will take place in the Forum of the Messe Frankfurt and its Agora, the open space in front of the exhibition hall. It will offer not only a conference with lectures and panels but also a Culture Club with performances; readings; art, music, and film events; and a Children’s Academy with numerous workshops for all ages. The whole site will become an open, lively platform for information, discussion, and events, transforming it into a place for encounters.

The idea to have a large cultural event was the consequence of Messe Frankfurt’s desire to increase its commitment to art and culture. “Our task as a company,” explained Dr. Michael Peters, Managing Director of Messe Frankfurt GmbH, “is to create value, for our clients, our shareholders, our employees, and the people of the region. In addition to a market and product orientation, the company has a social orientation as well. Economic values are not enough, for the economy is not an end in itself. Enduring values are created above all by culture, and culture itself is the most enduring value. For that reason we see our economic success as carrying with it a special obligation to show a commitment to culture. By creating this unique cultural conference we are not only creating a placing under a single tent all of Messe Frankfurt’s previous cultural commitments.

We are also offering intellectual orientation in our society, marked as it is by change at a breakneck pace and offering the leaders from all cultural fields an opportunity to articulate their ideas on the topics of our time.”

“Culture constitutes an important connecting element as regards the various events and activities of Messe Frankfurt,” says Michael von Zitzewitz, Chairman of the Board of Management, Messe Frankfurt GmbH. “Just think of the Musikmesse and its award, the Fine Art Fair Frankfurt, the Luminale, the new Design Annual, our support of the Hessian State Prize for Arts and Crafts, the ‘Nacht der Museen’ program and the Rheingau Musikfestival, and – last, not least – the Book Fair as a guest event. Linking all these approaches in a certain way, KULTURZONE06 is aimed at establishing a cultural brand.”

The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, according to its Director, Max Hollein, “pursues the task of being a seismograph and mediator of contemporary perspectives and highly charged themes. With its exhibitions and events, it has frequently provided stimulus and a well-grounded voice in current discourses. This position is being expanded in the project KULTURZONE06 thanks to the spaces offered by Messe Frankfurt and its extensive competence as an organizer of large events. With the Culture Club and the Children’s Academy as integral elements, KULTURZONE06 is setting off on new paths and thus encouraging a dialogue that goes beyond a scholarly panel.”

The conference is, according to Dr. Martina Weinhart, the curator of KULTURZONE06 and a staff curator at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, “an important and necessary platform for discussing current themes of contemporary society in an open forum, beyond any ideological monopolization. As the current debates over cultural identity, community, and youth culture show, culture, its production, agents, and fields of action are an important mirror and epistemological instrument for the existential questions of our time. Culture is a living process that has to be questioned repeatedly. In that spirit, the conference is designed to be interdisciplinary, networking art with the scholarly fields and debates in which interest is strongest at the moment.”

With KULTURZONE06, a cultural project is initiated in Frankfurt that looks beyond the region to the international scene. At the same time, however, the conference represents an opportunity to residents of the region to join in a diverse dialogue with the protagonists of that scene right here in Frankfurt.