Cultural Calendar: Top highlights for your schedule

The ARTS.21 team lets you in on their own personal highlights: all the events that will be especially worthwhile.

Begemann is Back!

At last: after a break of one year "Bernd Begemann und die Befreiung" will be on stage again. Fans in Germany can look forward to their long-awaited tour in 2007, and in Hamburg they will be in heaven, because Begemann and Band will be playing in the Knust on two Fridays every month. The concept is simple but brilliant: every night an album from Begemann‘s rich and varied back-catalogue will be played live, making this a year-long "best of" show. Here are a couple of titles you should remember when St Valentines comes around: "Du bist mein Süden" ( You are my South) and "ich habe nichts erreicht, ausser Dir" (I’ve achieved nothing except for you). How’s about going to Hamburg for a great Friday night?
Maik Meuser

Summer Marathon

Art-lovers will wear out quite a few pairs of shoes just walking through all the great exhibitions coming up in Europe. At the beginning of June you’ll need to do some quick city hopping too: the big exhibition of great French painting of the 19th century from the Metropolitan Museum of Art will open in Berlin and only a few day’s later the Venice Biennale will start, where sculptress Isa Genzken will be representing Germany in the national pavilion park. Then in quick succession there’ll be the Art Basel fair, the sculpture park in Münster and the documenta in Kassel. How on earth is one supposed to survive all that? I for one am starting a fitness programme right now: Yoga, tea and lots of art books. I’ll report back when the summer’s over.
Melanie Matthäus

One Hundred Days of Art

When I was eighteen I spent four days on a dusty campsite in the city of Kassel. Kassel of all places! A rather drab city in the middle Germany, where there is usually very little to write home about. But this was during the documenta, the massive contemporary art show that takes place every five years. I found art all over the city and I even got to see my heroes Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. Ever since then I’ve been a documenta-aficionado. In 2007 the documenta12 will be organised by Roger Buergel, it’s been a long time since a German last held this prestigious post. Buergel may be a bit demanding but he is fired with romantic ideas. He says that his favourite pastime is "dreaming", he also loves asking questions: What is essential life? Is modernism today’s antiquity? It is still his big secret which artists will be invited to Kassel. The only detail that has already been leaked is that the famous Spanish chef Ferran Adrià will be coming. See you in Kassel! (June 16 – September 23, 2007)
Andrea Horakh

Autumn Prize

It’s a paradox: Berlin is the city where countless artists from all over the world choose to live and work, but there aren’t many real opportunities for the public to see the work created here. The bi-annual Prize for Young Art of the Nationalgalerie seeks to put contemporary art in the spotlight. Four artists who are based in Berlin are shortlisted. They are invited to create a single work, which will then be exhibited in the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin’s museum of contemporary art housed in a historical train station building. The winning work then becomes part of the city’s art collection. The artists nominated for 2007 are: Jeanne Faust, Ceal Floyer, Damian Ortega and Tino Sehgal. All four of them are conceptual artists of world-renown. This promises to be a very exciting Autumn indeed. (September 14 – November 4 2007)
Bettina Kolb