CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Canvas Berlin: Europe's New Capital of the Visual Arts
Panel Discussion

Weill Recital Hall
Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 4:30 PM

Panelists:
Klaus Biesenbach
Tacita Dean
Thomas Demand
Julie Mehretu
Michael Kimmelman, Moderator

With its vibrancy and eccentricity, Berlin has become the center of Europe’s cutting-edge visual-arts scene. Some of today's most ingenious artists join MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach to discuss the German capital as creative breeding ground.

Presented by Carnegie Hall in partnership with the American Academy in Berlin.

The Berlin in Lights festival is made possible by a leadership gift from the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.

Major funding has also been provided by Mercedes and Sid Bass, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from Martha and Bob Lipp, Fundación Mercantil (Venezuela), and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional funding provided by Axel Springer AG, GWFF USA Inc., and the Jerome Robbins Foundation.

Panelists:
Klaus Biesenbach
Tacita Dean
Thomas Demand
Julie Mehretu
Michael Kimmelman, Moderator
KLAUS BIESENBACH
Klaus Biesenbach is Chief Curator of MoMA’s Department of Media and also serves as the Chief Curatorial Advisor at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, a MoMA affiliate, where he has curated various exhibitions. He is the Founding Director / Chairman Emeritus of KW (Kunst-Werke) Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Mr. Biesenbach founded the Berlin Biennale in 1996, was a member of the International Jury of the 1997 Venice Biennale, co-organized the “hybrid workspace” of the 1997 Documenta X in Kassel, and co-organized the 2002 Shanghai Biennale. He has organized numerous international touring exhibitions of contemporary art and has edited and contributed to several major monographic and thematic catalogues. He curated the exhibition Berlin Alexanderplatz: An Exhibition that will be on view at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center from October 21, 2007.

TACITA DEAN
Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, Kent. After graduating from Falmouth School of Art in 1988, she studied in Athens for a year before completing her postgraduate degree at The Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1992. Though trained as a painter, she now works in a variety of media. She is best known for her compelling 16mm films, in which the specific qualities associated with filmmaking are of central importance. Ms. Dean’s films are haunted by architectural relics that seem to embody outmoded or bankrupt beliefs, but at their time of execution promised much. In their formal qualities, her films reference other art forms, painting especially. Ms. Dean also works with video, sound, drawings, and objects. Her work occupies a place between fact and fiction. It is pervaded by a sense of elusiveness, a search for something that exists as much in the imagination as anywhere else.

Ms. Dean has had many solo exhibitions, including Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (1997); ICA, Philadelphia, with US tour (1998); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2000); and MACBA, Barcelona (2001). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions and in 1998 was short-listed for the Turner Prize.

Ms. Dean had a solo exhibition at Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery from March to June 2007. The Tate Modern has recently devoted a room to a display of her work held in its collection, and she was also included in the São Paulo Biennale. Her work was recently the subject of an exhibition at the Guggenheim, due to her winning the Hugo Boss Prize. Ms. Dean’s work has also been included in many group exhibitions both in Britain and abroad. The largest exhibition of her work to date was shown at Schaulager, Basel, from May to September 2006. A major monograph on her work was published by Phaidon Press in 2006.

Ms. Dean is currently on the Berliner Künstlerprogramm / DAAD residency in Berlin.

THOMAS DEMAND
Known for his immaculate photographs of environments elaborately constructed out of cardboard and paper, Thomas Demand draws on source material from historical, political, and media images. The resulting work divests the photographic images of obvious referents, reducing the real to a generic form and leaving in its path a certain tension between the uneasy, institutional blankness of each photograph and the loaded cultural background that often informs it. Highly stylized and subversive, Mr. Demand’s photographs eerily evoke a sterilized existence and enable an elision of boundaries between the imagined and the real.

Born in Munich in 1964, Mr. Demand attended the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, the Düsseldorf Art Academy, and Goldsmiths’ College in London. Mr. Demand represented Germany at the 2004 São Paulo Biennale, and his work was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He currently lives and works in Berlin.

JULIE MEHRETU
Julie Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970 and lives and works in New York City. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997, a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kalamazoo College in 1992, and studied at University Cheik Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal. She is represented by The Project in New York City and carlier | gebauer in Berlin, Germany.

Ms. Mehretu is a recipient of many awards, including the MacArthur Award (2005), the American Art Award granted by the Whitney Museum of American Art (2005), the 2002 Penny McCall Award, and the Berlin Prize: Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship at The American Academy in Berlin, Germany (2007).

She has shown extensively in international and national exhibitions. Upcoming shows include Julie Mehretu: City Sitings at The Detroit Institute of Arts (2007) and Reflexive Drawings at the Simon Fraser University Gallery, in British Columbia, Canada. Mehretu’s most recent group exhibitions include New Directions in American Drawing in Columbus and Savannah (2006–07) and Comic Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006–07). She has permanent public collections across the country, including at the Brooklyn Museum (New York), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC), Philadelphia Art Museum (Philadelphia), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of the New York Times, is, starting this fall, based in Berlin, writing a column for the paper on culture and society in Europe. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, a concert pianist, and the author, most recently, of The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, which became a national bestseller.