Ole Aselmann: Berlin-Beijing - Performance

Berlin-Beijing from Ole Aselmann with Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, Konstantin Lom, Achim Sieg and Pedro Pinto

The cooperation between donaufestival and Kunsthalle Krems, which celebrated a successful start with last year’s festival contributions by Franz Graf and Christian Jankowski, will continue this year.
The theatrical power to deconstruct the iconography of the modern age is also the driving force behind the performative works of Ole Aselmann, artist-in-residency at the Kunsthalle. At the Factory, he will design a large-scale room installation, subsequently expanding it into a playful arrangement of different performances. As part of his exhibition, “Berlin-Beijing”, he will negotiate the artistic practice of travelling as a performative deconstruction of the myth of Europe, for which he will even involve the visitors.  
In these fast-moving times, characterised by migration, in which the “traditional orders” of religion and custom disintegrate, it is up to the individual to assure themselves every day of themselves, their identity and religion. Today, travelling, as an attempt to orientate oneself in the globalised world, often also serves as an initiation. For a certain period of time, the traveller detaches themselves from their own culture, going off to foreign places to return as a person with many new experiences.
Travelling is also one of the underlying constants in the work of Ole Aselmann, born 1979 in Hamburg. In 2005, the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin graduate, as a “modern pilgrim”, embarked on a hike from Upper Bavaria across the Alps together with a sheep. His experiences on this trip, its early termination as well as the return to the flock were documented by Aselmann in the video, “Aufbrechen mit Emma”. On his early travels, Ole Aselmann “worked” his way “through the culture of the Western world” and in 2008 staged his reflections on it in the room installation, “Messias Wirtshaus”, in the form of a hybrid-cathedral architecture. Led by the question of a possible alternative to the target-driven, improvement-seeking, forward-pushing Western individualism, Ole Aselmann then decided in 2009 to walk from Berlin to Beijing in several hops in order to explore the Eastern culture. This approach is spiritually akin with Joseph Beuys and his “Eurasia” metaphor which describes the symbiosis between the Western and the Asian cultural circle as a vision for a new image of humanity. The installations of the scholarship holder, who was selected by Christoph Schlingensief for the Akademie Schloss Solitude, document the travel experiences of the artist at the respective exhibition sites for the art context.

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opening hours during donaufestival:
28/4 10am - 6pm, 29&30/4, 05-7/5 10am - 6pm 10am - 9pm