Au Revoir Simone is an electronic dream pop band from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, formed in late 2003. The group is composed of Erika Forster (vocals/keyboard), Annie Hart (vocals/keyboard), and Heather D’Angelo (vocals/drum machine/keyboard). The band’s name comes from a line Pee-wee Herman says to a minor character (named Simone) in Tim Burton’s 1985 film, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Visit their official site.
Catch him at:
06/06 – Luxembourg, LU @ Rockhal
06/08 – Nyon, CH @ Caribana Festival
06/09 – France, FR @ Montereau Festival
06/11 – Paris, FR @ Olympia
06/12 – Lille, FR @ L’Aeronef
06/14 – Amsterdam, NL @ Heineken Music Hall
06/15 – Brussels, BE @ Ancienne Belgique
06/18 – Copenhagen, DK @ Falconer Salen
06/20 – Berlin, DE @ Citadel Music Festival
06/23 – Mainz, DE @ Zollhafen/Nordmole
06/25 – Clermont Ferrand, FR @ Cooperative de Mai
06/26 – Bordeaux, FR @ Fete le Vin
06/29 – Bonn, DE @ Kunst!Rasen
06/30 – Dresden, DE @ Filmnächte am Elbufe
07/01 – Munich, DE @ Tollwood Festival at Olympic Park
07/05 – Trencin, SK @ Pohoda Festival
Laylah Ali was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1968 and received a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The precision with which Ali creates her small, figurative, gouache paintings on paper is such that it takes her many months to complete a single work. She meticulously plots out every aspect of her work in advance, from subject matter to choice of color and the brushes that she will use. In style, her paintings resemble comic-book serials, but they also contain stylistic references to hieroglyphics and American folk art traditions. Ali often achieves a high level of emotional tension in her work as a result of juxtaposing brightly colored scenes with dark, often violent subject matter that speaks of political resistance, social relationships, and betrayal.
Text by Boshko Boskovic
Marlies is a Dutch fashion designer known for her lingerie line Undressed. The Marlies Dekkers brand (stylized in print as “marlies|dekkers”) has established 1000 points of sale worldwide – Marlies Dekkers stores are located in cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Paris, Bangkok, Berlin and Cologne.
Some awards she’s won:
Dutch Bodyfashion Award (1994)
ELLE’s Innovator of the Year Award (2004)
Grand Seigneur (2005)
Marie Claire Prix de la Mode (2008)
Arturo Herrera was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1959, and lives and works in New York and Berlin, Germany. Herrera’s work includes collage, works on paper, sculpture, relief, wall painting, photography, and felt wall hangings. His work taps into the viewer’s unconscious—often intertwining fragments of cartoon characters with abstract shapes and partially obscured images that evoke memory and recollection. Using techniques of fragmentation, splicing, and re-contextualization, Herrera’s work is provocative and open-ended. For his collages, he uses found images from cartoons, coloring books, and fairy tales, combining fragments of Disney-like characters with violent and sexual imagery to make work that borders between figuration and abstraction and subverts the innocence of cartoon referents with a darker psychology. In his felt works, he cuts shapes from a piece of felt and pins the felt to the wall so that it hangs as a tangled form, resembling the drips and splatters of a Jackson Pollock painting.
Text by Boshko Boskovic.
The quote: “Guitarist Kral and filmmaker Poe, two of the many Eastern Europe-derived transplants who shaped the East Village’s bohemian heyday, collaborated on Blank Generation, which is essentially a home movie from the CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City crowd. The bulk of the film, and the obvious and enduring draw, is the performance footage, but there’s also sketched-out street vignettes and rehearsal-space mugging (say, by Debbie Harry in leather pants, surrounded by her identically attired, posing harem of bandmates).”
The quote: “Loaded, “Sweet Jane” was part of Lou Reed’s ascension as leader of the group without John Cale, and was the biggest hit of their career. There are two distinct versions of Sweet Jane with minor variations, spread over its first four releases. The first release of “Sweet Jane”, in November 1970, was a version recorded earlier that year and included on Loaded. In May 1972, a live version (recorded August 1970) appeared on The Velvet Underground’s Live at Max’s Kansas City; the live song had an additional bridge that was missing from the Loaded release.”
Teeth & Tongue is Jess Cornelius, plus long time collaborator Marc Regueiro-Mckelvie and Damian Sullivan. With a combination of hypnotic 505 drum-machine beats and slow, bent-out-of-shape guitar lines, the songs weave themselves throughout heartbreak and simmering discontent.
Nikki S Lee is a Korean American artist and filmmaker based in New York City. Lee is most known for observing particular subcultures and ethnic groups, and adopting their general style and attitude through dress, gesture, and posture. She introduces herself as an artist spending several weeks participating in the group’s routine activities and social events while a friend or member of the group photographs her with an ordinary automatic “snapshot” camera. From schoolgirl to senior citizen, punk to yuppie, rural white American to urban Hispanic, Lee’s personas traverse age, lifestyle, and culture. Part sociologist and part performance artist, Lee infiltrates these groups so convincingly that in individual photographs it is difficult to distinguish her from the crowd.
Text by Boshko Boksovic
Mark Bradford was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1961. He received a BFA (1995) and MFA (1997) from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Bradford transforms materials scavenged from the street into wall-size collages and installations that respond to the impromptu networks—underground economies, migrant communities, or popular appropriation of abandoned public space—that emerge within a city. Drawing from the diverse cultural and geographic makeup of his southern Californian community, Bradford’s work is as informed by his personal background as a third-generation merchant there as it is by the tradition of abstract painting developed worldwide in the twentieth century. Bradford’s videos and map-like, multilayered paper collages refer not only to the organization of streets and buildings in downtown Los Angeles, but also to images of crowds, ranging from civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s to contemporary protests concerning immigration issues
Text by Boshko Boskovic