6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Art is total freedom like Jazz – Talk
with Nadja Abt, Julia Grosse, Thomas Meinecke
(Location: Exhibition Jack Whitten: Jack’s Jacks)

Jazz held a special significance for Jack Whitten. On the one hand, the artist was interested in the aesthetic principles of Afro-American music – such as its rhythms and improvisations – which he transferred to his pictures. On the other, he saw the innovative approaches of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald as a model for his unique style of painting. Accordingly, Whitten’s body of work includes a number of paintings dedicated to these and other figures from jazz history. Whitten wasn’t alone in his love of jazz: other artists also took and take jazz as an important point of reference. Using Whitten’s work as a starting point, this evening’s programme explores the influence of jazz on art and the various reasons for this, while also taking into account the relationship between art and music in general.

7:30 – 9:30 pm
Live Listening Session
from the record collection by Abt, Grosse and Meinecke
(Location: Courtyard of the Museum)

Nadja Abt is an artist and editor at Texte zur Kunst. In her art she focuses on the restructuring of signs, language and literature from a feminist perspective – she currently works on the topic of “Women in Seafaring”. After studying literature, art history and art, she lived in São Paulo for three years and has been researching Brazilian art and cultural discourses ever since.

Julia Grosse is a Berlin-based journalist, art historian and co-founder and editor-in-chief of the art magazines Contemporary And (C&) and Contemporary And (C&) América Latina. Grosse teached at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg and UdK in Berlin and recently launched a critical panel format together with the German journalist and scientific historian Julia Voss, called “The Situation”. Until 2013 she worked as an arts correspondent in London and wrote and co-published several books. Her most recent book was “Ein Leben lang” focusing on the 70 year lasting marriage of her grandparents, Hoffmann und Campe, 2018. She is currently guest lecturer at Institute for Art in Context, UdK in Berlin.

Thomas Meinecke is a writer and author of several novels and stories (including “Selbst”, which was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2016), a musician (with his cult band F.S.K.) and a DJ with his own radio show at Bayerischer Rundfunk as well as regular sets at nightclubs. Meinecke is also the host of the event series “Plattenspieler” at the HAU Hebbel am Ufer theater in Berlin. After numerous sojourns at universities throughout Europe and the USA, he was recently Writer in Residence at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. In 2011/2012 Meinecke taught Poetics at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main and he currently holds the Ricarda Huch lectureship for gender in the literary world at TU Braunschweig.

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