In October 2015, the Federal Cultural Foundation released Magazine #25 featuring works by the artist and designer Kostas Murkudis. It was inspired by the exhibition “At Close Range. Kostas Murkudis and the MMK Collection” funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation at the MMK Museum for Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main.
In his opening piece, the author/dramaturge John von Düffel highlights the various facets of Murkudis’s works and describes the “crossing of boundaries” as his “true work”. Niklas Maak pays tribute to the architect Gavina for his pioneering role in Italian furniture design and his influence on Kostas Murkudis.
In his essay “Why Study Ukrainian Culture?” the writer Jurko Prochasko uses his homeland of Ukraine as an example of the West’s woeful ignorance of “unauratic” countries. Europe’s borders are not only the subject of Prochasko’s essay, but also that of the “Munich Welcome Theatre” at the Kammerspiele which explores the current issues of asylum and migration. We interviewed the project’s director Björn Bicker who explains how art can serve as a “constant and peaceful staging of encounter” and theatre as a model project for an open society.
The writer and playwright Peter Weiss is well-known for his novel "Aesthetics of Resistance", in which he explores the relationship of art and politics. Lesser known, however, are his films. In anticipation of a festival dedicated to Peter Weiss at the HAU in Berlin in 2016, Florian Wüst reviews some of Weiss’s most significant films in this issue of our magazine.
