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.