https://samwilliamswrites.com/criticism daily 0.75 2024-04-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556558718067-J2RNQMGJ44WFVK5LHAAK/5491-unheimliches-tal-uncanny-valley-%28c%29-gabriela-neeb.jpg Reviews - Playing Real: The Eerie Prognoses of Rimini Protokoll’s ‘Uncanny Valley’ On Rimini Protokoll and Thomas Melle’s posthuman theatre production at Munich’s Kammerspiele (Frieze, 2019) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556558718067-J2RNQMGJ44WFVK5LHAAK/5491-unheimliches-tal-uncanny-valley-%28c%29-gabriela-neeb.jpg Reviews - Playing Real: The Eerie Prognoses of Rimini Protokoll’s ‘Uncanny Valley’ On Rimini Protokoll and Thomas Melle’s posthuman theatre production at Munich’s Kammerspiele (Frieze, 2019) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556558926068-JCVTUSWFKPIVVV76HJ7L/HDK_EL_Anatsui_156.jpg Reviews - El Anatsui and the Institutional Politics of Munich's Haus der Kunst On El Anatsui’s Triumpnant Scale and the Institutional Politics of Munich’s Haus der Kunst (ARTnews, 2019) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556559680318-9X0IF06302R71DDERW11/Carsten-H-llers-SOMA-inst-007.jpg Reviews - The Deers of Perception Review of Carsten Höller’s SOMA at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Cover feature, commissioned for The Guardian’s G2 supplement, 21 December 2010 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556559094324-D4SN45JAYYVBT2QKBSEF/BelarusFreeTheatre.jpg Reviews - The exiled Belarusian theatre company taking on society’s biggest taboos Feature on Belarus Free Theatre's work underground in Belarus, Burning Doors and I Was Always a Lion in London (Huck Magazine, 2016) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556559022484-V28S8XFCZP4GIQUVAENJ/Screenshot+2019-04-29+at+18.30.03.png Reviews - A Postcard from Istanbul A full report on attacks on gallery-goers in Istanbul’s gallery district (Frieze, 2010) At Istanbul’s Galeri Non, Extrastruggle – a collective of one – stages a chess game between political figures. In the gallery entrance is a polyester sculpture of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, painted as a fallen angel, standing on his head and resting on a gilded wing. The other statues are each one colour. Taken together, they spell out the Palestinian flag. In the rear corner of the gallery is a red ‘Turkish Tote’, an unstable stack of Atatürk heads poised on a white star. The other half of the Turkish flag, the white crescent, rests like a machete in the skull of a figure clad in a burka, covered with eyes. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556559113272-D77HU2T2FQSXGCFD7O5U/MASHA.jpg Reviews - Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina learnt young the price paid for standing up to injustice Interview with Masha Alyokhina of Pussy Riot during her perfomance of ‘Burning Doors’ with Belarus Free Theatre at Soho Theatre, London Maria Alyokhina is having nightmares. The worst in her life. She’s been up since 5.20am, writing them down on her phone. “I need to sleep”, she says. “But let’s be honest. It’s not going to happen.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556559462175-T9JMMQNEEQMN4S36HZXI/RHINO.jpg Reviews - Rhinoceros Review (The Stage, 2017) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556559655449-4NJN9CZWZJ5COQNGIGD6/Charlemagne+Palestine.jpg Reviews - Charlemagne Palestine: Tintinnabulations for Tomorrow and Tomorrow Interview with experimental composer Charlemagne Palestine at Berlin’s Transmediale (Frieze, 2009) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556560594986-2P9L63Y6FH6OVZNXI667/Eliason.jpg Reviews - Olafur Eliasson: Innen Stadt Außen Review of Olafur Eliasson’s City: Inside Out at the Martin-Gropius Bau and locations around Berlin (Exberliner, 2010) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556560669895-YMORNLO886G5FCI7Q9S4/10_KenMoody_1983.jpg Reviews - Angels Disguised of Lust Review of Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective at C/O BERLIN (Exberliner, 2010) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1557504309562-9LF6F99Y4SUKZ4E4OJ8T/042617WhiteBearDivineChaos.jpg Reviews - The Divine Chaos of Starry Things Review (The Stage, 2016) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1557629010116-KOKMEG9FLMMHL4ENA6GM/Screenshot+2019-05-12+at+03.39.37.png Reviews - Manifesto, Information, Rules and Other Leaks Review of Angela Bulloch’s Vattenfall Prize Exhibition. Frieze (2011) “Behind the title of Angela Bulloch’s exhibition ‘Information, Manifesto, Rules and Other Leaks...’ is a framing principle: ‘Leaks’ are no longer the backroom business of journalists and informants, but an emerging model of the world. For Bulloch, who defines this exhibition as a continuation of her ‘Rules Series’, begun in 1992, the appeal of leaks is as a system of anti-rules – portals to a pulsing mass of ‘true information’ beyond the posited (sanctioned) information distributed as rules.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556559757348-PKNE8U8JWX7OLUN1XKNS/yoko9_large.jpg Reviews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556559812622-L6ZJ1XV4JHEK0M7S8FXI/tm11_Daito_Manabe_Face+visualizer+2_300dpi.jpg Reviews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556560036412-ABV9256NEHWBUR1ZPTN5/CritcismCrisis.jpg Reviews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556560344587-4B6EZLCY20AHSN604AI3/frontispiece-new-scientific-organon-1620.jpg Reviews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556560944455-K6H7LD6FOJCSN2XEI7FG/Emil+Holmer.jpg Reviews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556560611467-OH9I7THDV2QZUOR0XH94/stuart-brisley-620.jpg Reviews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556561170338-7W3LZIYPKY2IB23MP2R3/Tsar-To-Lenin-1-e1363256580600-940x460.jpg Reviews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556561216403-97SWVBNX0NFKER9AXDZT/Dhalem.jpg Reviews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556561301561-TO9H6DALTSXJOS4M8R7U/TTecotheatre.jpeg Reviews https://samwilliamswrites.com/projects daily 0.75 2024-04-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1710003526412-P8N3GTTJ2W7PYYFURIWW/image-asset.jpeg Immersive London Lens is an augmented reality journey through time that peels back the shining surface of London's Square Mile to reveal the colonial origins of the global financial system. LondonLens turns the winding streets of the City of London into a living repository of history. Using Niantic's ARDK 3.0 technology harnesses the unique storytelling environment of London's Square Mile to reveal the colonial origins of the global financial system and its surprising fragility today. Concluding at the London Stock Exchange, LondonLens reveals how this hidden past structures our world. Interactive augmented reality elements are used to make visible the invisble operation of financial markets at their real-world location. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1710003526412-P8N3GTTJ2W7PYYFURIWW/image-asset.jpeg Immersive London Lens is an augmented reality journey through time that peels back the shining surface of London's Square Mile to reveal the colonial origins of the global financial system. LondonLens turns the winding streets of the City of London into a living repository of history. Using Niantic's ARDK 3.0 technology harnesses the unique storytelling environment of London's Square Mile to reveal the colonial origins of the global financial system and its surprising fragility today. Concluding at the London Stock Exchange, LondonLens reveals how this hidden past structures our world. Interactive augmented reality elements are used to make visible the invisble operation of financial markets at their real-world location. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1711806262846-WHQRZ5O62JTQVIBFA5J3/image-asset.jpg Immersive - Shared Roots: Wisdom of the Stones In SHARED ROOTS: Wisdom of the Stones the player helps a young woman lay down roots in a new land. Stranded at a six-thousand-year-old stone circle in the English Midlands, our heroine must learn to tune into the wisdom of her ancestors overcome the challenges that face her. To access this wisdom, she must solve a series of puzzles. Through playful interactions the player discovers the character's struggle to put her past behind her, lay down roots, and build a life. SHARED ROOTS: Wisdom of the Stones is a 2.5D isometric puzzle game with bespoke score, based on the music of the region. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1710003993657-503KP7QG9CI440LSVSHA/AAE33+Corresponding+with+Ghosts+Rehearsal.jpg Immersive - Corresponding With Ghosts Generational battlegrounds. Class war. High ideals, dirty money, and never enough of the latter. From the birth of mechanical reproduction in 1457 to the death of the gold standard in 1973, the Poetry of Power is an experiment in staging modernity. Performed by Anne Tismer and Paula Kober with music by Sir Henry. Written and directed by Sam Williams. Roter Salon, Volksbühne, Berlin, 2018. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1557546852297-3KXZ8OIZEI12GT1WJG46/Paul+and+Sam+VB+Berlin+reversed.jpg Immersive - Global System Failure: A Boardgame What happens when the global systems that we once thought permanent break down? And what does it mean for cultural production in the 21st Century? An interactive performance designed with Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (2015), presents a simulation of global system failure. Roter Salon, Volksbühne, Berlin, 2017, 2018 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1557540215864-33NUS19XJZ869JF6MH1U/20150718_0784.jpg Immersive - UNMASKED “If we are to remember, we must take things down. Record." Can truth be recorded? An archivist investigates. Women, contemporary and ancient, prisoners, mystics and storytellers arrive to testify? But are they telling the truth? Or do their stories represent another type of myth? Who is recording? And why? UNMASKED uses cultural and historical crosscurrents of magic and myth, history and violence to disclose something of contemporary experience through Finnish national epic, The Kalevala. MORE. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556568769994-83P1Y71MKUG5PVUR9K2A/A+Public+Exhibtion.jpg Immersive - A PUBLIC EXHIBITION Performed at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2013 Drawing on encounter, verbatim and found material, philosophy, and myth, this performance analyses the mediatized relationships between human bodies online and in performance, and between women’s bodies and commodity exchange. The performer executes three composite characters - the ferryman/janitor, Aletheia/the mediator, and the camera/girl. Video feeds of audience and performer are projected onto the middle of three screens throughout the performance. Each screen is 'home' to one of the characters and their belongings, cast off during the performance. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556569443619-MV99ER7PVHUKVH545N9L/ORIGIN.jpg Immersive - ORIGIN: A PERFORMANCE FOR TWO BODIES ORIGIN is based on ancient rituals of encircling objects and bodies with cord, electromagnetism, and Japanese bondage. It considers how performance can create a ‘ritual field’, like an electromagnet amplifying a magnetic field using electric current. It inhabits a tension between spiritual and political realities, questioning what it is to be an individual. What might it mean to testify experience differently? What might be achieved by surrendering our 'selves'? Performed at BuildingBloqs (London, 2013) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556567827963-O4GC21GEFC5SYLNCK86T/Auspeitschung+audience.jpg Immersive - The Scourging (Die Auspeitschung) Pavillion, Volksbühne, Berlin (2010) Die Auspeitschung was a performance installation commissioned for the Volksbühne Pavillion at the memorial for Christoph Schlingensief. “Just as meaning and sorrow are manifested in different eras as different feelings every person must encounter in their own way, so too are punishment, mourning and salvation. Visitors from the future can cut themselves into the video, and so travel back in time to take part.” https://samwilliamswrites.com/esaysreportage daily 0.75 2025-03-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1709939563377-PBUIEVHF73MC70FFN2ZT/image-asset.png Essays + Reportage - Raising the Dead: Rituals for a New Theatre Raising the Dead: Rituals for a New Theatre is an essay for US theatre journal HowlRound on how the collapse of liberal democracy is reconnecting theatre with its origins in ritual experience. Written at Tampere International Theatre Festival (August 2019). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1709939563377-PBUIEVHF73MC70FFN2ZT/image-asset.png Essays + Reportage - Raising the Dead: Rituals for a New Theatre Raising the Dead: Rituals for a New Theatre is an essay for US theatre journal HowlRound on how the collapse of liberal democracy is reconnecting theatre with its origins in ritual experience. Written at Tampere International Theatre Festival (August 2019). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1709941125350-6B09SMN874GYZK2454JR/RevolutionReloaded.jpg Essays + Reportage - Revolution Reloaded: Lessons from Moscow Revolution Reloaded: Lessons from Moscow was a catalogue essay commission for HOME Arts Centre’s season of film, art and theatre on the 2017 centenary of the Russian Revolution. (See p22 of PDF) HOME Manchester's newly-published book, exhibition, film series and theatre programme explored how the visionary avant-garde art, film and theatre that inspired the Russian Revolution were betrayed by its political reality. This essay, written shortly after I returned from Moscow uncovers the legacy of the Revolutionary avant-garde and the politics of art in Russia today. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1742214250126-SDZQ98FLRHMN3VZ9DUPC/image-asset.jpeg Essays + Reportage - "Newness is Old-Fasioned": Battle at the Volksbühne Berlin's Volksbühne Theatre has been in turmoil since the announcement of its new artistic director Chris Dercon, outgoing director of London's Tate Modern. Sam Williams explores the controversy and what it says about theatre, the city and the global crisis in political ideology. Commission for Exeunt, a magazine dedicated to in-depth and experimental writing on theatre https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1709944021733-2J3O1O75NJMS7ASO6RO8/image-asset.png Essays + Reportage - Uncanny Valley: Rise of Robot Theatre Playing Real: the Eerie Prognosis of Robot Theatre is an essay for Frieze Magazine on Uncanny Valley - a theatre production by theatre collective Rimini Protokoll. The production, which puts a robot protagnist onstage, explores the potential of artificial intelligence to destabilize our understanding of what it is to be human by having the robot ‘play’ a famous writer known for his excavation of subjectivity. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556560036412-ABV9256NEHWBUR1ZPTN5/CritcismCrisis.jpg Essays + Reportage - Criticism in a Time of Crisis This essay, commissioned by the International Association of Theatre Critics makes two arguments: 1. For theatre criticism to engage with the new kinds of audience experience being birthed to make sense of a changing world. 2. For theatre to deepen its engagement with critical discourse to develop the new kinds of audience experience required to re-situate theatre at the heart of everyday life. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1709942715233-RY0L4N850TXXR991Y1Z1/image-asset.png Essays + Reportage - A Struggle in the House of Art Investigative essay for Tribune, the British political magazine founded by George Orwell. It explores how the rise of nationalist isolationism is reshaping the global art world, holding art institutions hostage and summoning the ghosts of history at Munich's Haus der Kunst, which was built by Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1710002216356-IBRFPS02VYKSUUY8EX0S/image-asset.jpeg Essays + Reportage - Climate Circus: COP15 Climate Circus is one of several pieces of written and photo reportage commissioned while embedded for two weeks with climate protestors at the Copenhagen Climate Conference. It reflects the gonzo style and subcultural focus of the commissioning publication. This event was the birthplace of the Climate Justice Action Network that shapes activism today and the first of the wave of global protests that dominated the 2010s. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1710027326318-6AUG98J5H3YGMBUNBYPN/image-asset.jpeg Essays + Reportage - Sin City - Inside Berlin's Underground Sex Scene Sin City is a longread piece of reportage on Berlin's underground sex scene - from sex clubs and strip clubs to sex as experimental artform https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1710027942863-OCATUWQB8T1L13HAZH5O/image-asset.jpeg Essays + Reportage - Gang attacks on galleries in Istabul Firsthand report on turf wars between local gangs and attacks on gallery goers in Istanbul. The exhibition at which attacks occurred is used to contextualize political tensions in Turkey. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556561301561-TO9H6DALTSXJOS4M8R7U/TTecotheatre.jpeg Essays + Reportage - From Radical Conservatism to Radical New Theatre An essay on emerging theatre forms for Camden People’s Theatre https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556560344587-4B6EZLCY20AHSN604AI3/frontispiece-new-scientific-organon-1620.jpg Essays + Reportage - Trading Brass with Brecht: Towards an Ecorealist Theatre Towards an Ecorealist Theatre - Brecht, Bacon and the New Age A paper delivered to the International Brecht Society at the Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus for Baustelle Brecht – Working with Brecht 23 June 2017 https://e-cibs.org/issue-2-2017/#williams https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1563573887031-06ZH9D6VC9SEEJ56VCB3/Wuerzel-FuellungII.jpg Essays + Reportage - A Whole New World “Veronica Brovall's sculptures are born into a wasteland stuffed with dead-ends. Rejecting the invitation to disentangle those them, she harvests them. Necessarily, her materials are familiar, domestic and manufactured. Assembling them, she disengages them from their present forms – tyre, chair, plaster bandage – to elicit their natural origins – oil, metal ore, earth – and reveal a secret geology of experience.” Essay commission https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1742214715167-WG1WWA7ZIONOP2NKRYE2/fuck-off+VB.jpeg Essays + Reportage - Newness is Old-Fasioned: Battle at the Volksbühne Berlin's Volksbühne has been in turmoil since the announcement of its new artistic director Chris Dercon, outgoing director of London's Tate Modern. Sam Williams explores the controversy, and what it says about theatre, the city and the global collapse of narratives of progress and resistance. Commissioned by Exeunt: https://exeuntmagazine.com/features/berlin-to-london/ https://samwilliamswrites.com/interviews daily 0.75 2024-07-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556559812622-L6ZJ1XV4JHEK0M7S8FXI/tm11_Daito_Manabe_Face+visualizer+2_300dpi.jpg Interviews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556559812622-L6ZJ1XV4JHEK0M7S8FXI/tm11_Daito_Manabe_Face+visualizer+2_300dpi.jpg Interviews - The Revolution Will Not Be Facebooked Interview with Stephen Kovats, outgoing director Berlin’s radical net-art festival, Trasmediale. Conducted in the year when uprisings spilled across the net and the globe. Exberliner (2011) Each February, netizens gather in Berlin to plot the digital world as it emerges from the internet. From the Haus der Kulturen der Welt's pregnant oyster, hacktivists rewire the mechanism within, while the tech-art vanguard displays art projects that illuminate the secret chambers within its architecture and activists plot how to take on Web Inc. Transmediale artistic director Stephen Kovats is packing up his laptop following this year's fest after five years at the helm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556559113272-D77HU2T2FQSXGCFD7O5U/MASHA.jpg Interviews - Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina learnt young the price paid for standing up to injustice Interview with Masha Alyokhina of Pussy Riot for Huck Magazine Maria Alyokhina is having nightmares. The worst in her life. She’s been up since 5.20am, writing them down on her phone. “I need to sleep”, she says. “But let’s be honest. It’s not going to happen.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556559757348-PKNE8U8JWX7OLUN1XKNS/yoko9_large.jpg Interviews - 'I have so much love because the whole world hated me' Interview with Yoko Ono on magic, science and poison for the opening of ‘Das Gift’ at Haunch of Venison, Berlin. Exberliner (2010) Yoko Ono’s solo show opened last month at Haunch of Venison with a polysemous title, Das Gift, and a bullet hole in a shattered glass pane. On one side, a rank of army coats sway darkly from invisible threads. Ono posed behind it, while the paparazzi stood in for the firing squad. A large blank canvas on the wall, slashed by Ono, is equipped with exhibition-sized needles and thread for visitors to sew up the gashes. In the next room, maps invite people to stick traumatic locations with pins. Upstairs, visitors record themselves smiling. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556560611467-OH9I7THDV2QZUOR0XH94/stuart-brisley-620.jpg Interviews - 'I often take my trousers off to reduce the notion of male power' Interview with Stuart Brisley, at the opening of Measurement and Dvision, at Exile Gallery Berlin. Exberliner (2010) British performance artist Stuart Brisley is having his first German solo exhibition in almost 20 years: four key works, including the ground-digging “Survival in Alien Circumstances” (Documenta VI in 1977), and the body-starving “10 Days”, which was originally performed in Berlin. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1719096016526-MAV2TFV2RMB2DPG6C3CA/image-asset.jpeg Interviews - Interview with Rufus Wainwright Speaking to the uncategorizable Canadian singer-songwriter-composer at Saddlers' Wells about his new opera, the death of his mother, and the dark female energy inside us all https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1557627713360-2ZFZLX1FRPGI6EB1S6QZ/Schipper.jpg Interviews - Esther Schipper: 'We are the army of invaders.' Interview with Esther Schipper, founder of the Berlin Gallery Weekend, a model that has been copied around the world. One of the first to build Berlin’s gallery scene after the fall of the wall and a member of the selection committee of Art Basel, her eponymous gallery is one of the most influential in the world. Exberliner (2010) As the Gallery Weekend she helped found enters its seventh year, Esther Schipper leaves Mitte for the ‘no man’s land’ of Schöneberger Ufer. One of the young internationals who arrived in Berlin soon after the fall of the Wall, Schipper opened her first gallery on Auguststraße, taking on artists such as Angela Bulloch, Carsten Höller and Liam Gillick, who later went on to claim international renown. Since then, Auguststraße has become home to the Biennale, and Mitte is now a global hub for contemporary art. Is it the end of an era or a new beginning? For Schipper, it’s all history. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556560944455-K6H7LD6FOJCSN2XEI7FG/Emil+Holmer.jpg Interviews - 'Colours build up atmosphere, like notes in music' Interview with Swedish painter Emil Holmer for the opening of his solo show at Galerie Michael Janssen. Exberliner (2010) Mixing traditional media like charcoal and oils with spray paint, scraps of porn found on the street and South African tabloid headlines, Emil Holmer's Dead Letters paintings are neon horror stories that slot discrete figurative elements into an abstract whole. As he prepared his first solo show here in his adopted hometown, the Swedish artist describes how Johannesburg inspired paintings he calls “visual machines” and the anonymity of being an artist in Berlin. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1557626767158-F09ZG51AC5YP498LQ4FO/Vera+Mercer.jpg Interviews - 'Reportage is finished now. I don't regret it.' Interview with pioneering new realist photographer Vera Mercer at the opening of Joie de Vivre and Vanitas, a retrospective at Berlin’s Kommunale Galerie (2010). Born into a theatre family in Berlin in 1936, Vera Mercer was a trained dancer before she moved on to photography and Paris. She became immersed in the Nouveau Réaliste movement of the 1960s and documented the film stars and avant-garde artists who thrived in the French capital at that time. Mercer then found new inspiration in markets across Asia, where she lived for five years and started taking pictures of food. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1557625155804-GFIXOV57P7FNFIYN3RPP/IMG_6616Childish_couch_child%27s+arm.jpg Interviews - 'Resistance is always late. If it’s on time, you don’t need it' Interview with British punk painter Billy Childish at the opening of his exhibitionThe Soft Ashes of Berlin Snowing on Hans Fallada’s Nose at Neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Exberliner (2010) With his army of pseudonyms Billy Childish trampled contemporary art stereotypes, and they melted – slowly, but obediently – underfoot. His paintings resemble works by the artists he loved and learned from – Van Gogh, Bacon, Munch. He dropped out of art school, worked as a shipwright, spent years on the dole in Chatham in Kent, and made novels, volumes of poetry, thousands of paintings and hundreds of punk rock records. He co-founded the Stuckists before leaving. He started the Art-Hate and British Art Resistance movements. This year his work enjoyed great success in June at Art Basel – art’s commercial summit – when gallery Neugerriemschneider chose him as its only artist. The Soft Ashes of Berlin falling on the Hans Fallada’s Nose is his first solo show at the Berlin gallery. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1556561216403-97SWVBNX0NFKER9AXDZT/Dhalem.jpg Interviews - Imagine there is a Heaven... Interview with German sculptor Björn Dhalem at the opening of The Theory of Heaven [Die Theorie des Himmels] III - Focus Imaginarius at Guido Baudach Galerie, Berlin. Exberliner (2010) Informed by science, Dahlem’s work explores its fertile gaps. Die Theorie des Himmels III – Focus Imaginarius pokes fun at Kant and proposes more imaginative solutions: handmade planetaria are assembled from geometrical figures, overlaid with religious icons and pieced together from everyday objects. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1557626153003-2PZGX7WHOZ30WLSDRTJ1/DeRooij.jpg Interviews - 'I was interested in how scapegoating unifies a group' Interview with cross-artform Dutch artist Willem De Rooij at the opening of Intolerance at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Exberliner (2010) Berlin-based Dutch artist Willem De Rooij investigates ‘non-referential art’. Hung on a temporary wall in the darkened glass cube of Ludwig Mies Van de Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie are paintings of fighting birds by 18th-century Dutch artist Melchior d’Hondecoeter. Set back further are feathered masks and capes – 19th-century ceremonial objects brought to Europe from Hawaii. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1557627123259-2N4W4BXSOVV2VA5LLORK/Mancuska.jpg Interviews - Ján Mančuška – Theater X Ján Mančuška was born in Czechoslovakia, a country that no longer exists. As the title of his solo show – Everything that really is, but has been forgotten – implies, he’s now trying to resurrect something. Theater X is a kind of cross-dressing party for forms and media, choreographed by a twisted algorithm. “Cinematography” is presented as a sculpture based on technical drawings; theatre appears as video – actors lose their voices, characters seem to turn into letters and stories become intersecting lines. Why? It’s political, Mančuška explains... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1557627240736-C8XKLTJ55E6SAPZS12SI/Mathew+Hale.jpg Interviews - Mathew Hale: 'Living here abstracts everything' Interview with Mathew Hale at the opening of Wacht Schatz at Wentrup Galerie. Exberliner (2010) British multimedia artist Mathew Hale came to Berlin before the hype hit – 10 years ago – with his partner, the visual artist Tacita Dean. The centrepiece of Wacht Schatz, Hale's third solo exhibition for Wentrup Gallery, is a slide projection. The images cross-fade from a contemporary newspaper photograph of the recovered corpse of Rosa Luxemburg to a page-three model that appeared on the adjacent page. The slides then move from an oil painting of a young woman (Lilo) in a rowboat to a series of trysts with Courbet-style images of female genitalia. It’s a love affair between “Lilo and Miriam” or “Frau Münze and Frau Münz”, with commentary by Astrid Proll, who drove a getaway car for the Rote Armee Fraktion and is now a photographer. “A coin has two sides,” she says. “Heads. Tails. We pretend not to know each other.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1722405152573-XDAVXEDBC4MF71QQU5RA/image-asset.jpeg Interviews - Exile Gallery - Summer Camp - Curated by Billy Miller Review of a 'double-bill' group show, which traced the continued influence of 1970s subcultures and New York's DIY underground into the 21st Century mainstream. 'Downtwon' culture included cult film, music and experimental literature, as well as zines, magick and queer culture. The show was curated by writer and artist, Billy Miller, editor of the hardcore gay-erotica magazine Straight to Hell. The show included art works by 1970s luminaries such as Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle (pictured) as well as contemporary artists. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1722405781030-S116EL8R5VMFFDOFGSCL/image-asset.jpeg Interviews https://samwilliamswrites.com/about daily 1.0 2025-09-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/0be2fbb7-7779-4200-9b0b-1a3ad3ca2a5a/WILLIAMS_SJ_PORTRAIT_2018.jpg About I am a narrative and experience designer based in London, creating interactive worlds at the intersection of play, storytelling, and culture. Through my company Studio Zero and in collaboration with videogame and XR studios, I design interactive worlds that charge player experience with depth and relevance. Drawing on contemporary and ancient approaches to story from cultures across the globe, I create experiences that resonate across generations and borders, inviting players to imagine new futures through opportunities for connection, action and transformation My independent projects have been presented at Berlin’s Volksbühne, London’s Young Vic, Camden People’s Theatre, and the Edinburgh Festival. Awards include an AHRC Scholarship, the Kone Foundation Saari Fellowship, and a National Theatre Playwriting Bursary. In 2024, I joined Games London’s UK government-backed Gamechanger accelerator and trade mission to Helsinki, and I am a founding member of the Arts and Tech Network at Somerset House. My journalism and has appeared across Europe, the US, and the Middle East for outlets including The Guardian, BBC World, Politico, ARTnews, and Palestine Note. I have taught interactive narrative design at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Austrian Cultural Forum, and London Film Academy and published academic papers on emergent narrative aesthetics. https://samwilliamswrites.com/contact daily 0.75 2024-03-11 https://samwilliamswrites.com/editorial daily 0.75 2024-05-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1713362324278-MMX358SMS6DCGZR21MVH/Screenshot+2024-04-17+at+14.06.00.png Editorial https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1713362325021-LQNZ3QIIE36FZS1A8U5U/Screenshot+2024-04-17+at+14.06.23.png Editorial https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1713362321685-544NQ3UVC1OU1SHFCB5J/Screenshot+2024-04-17+at+14.06.38.png Editorial https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1713362321686-PUOR5495Y4IMD8D0XL4J/Screenshot+2024-04-17+at+14.07.00.png Editorial https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1713347061704-GZ1LZFWOUXHTCJ7194ZQ/Screenshot+2024-04-17+at+09.19.49.png Editorial https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1713347059670-A0N3ZISFYWHKN4AR0FAZ/Screenshot+2024-04-17+at+09.20.14.png Editorial https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1713347059219-9SLFAKLUZEFRBL7IGHEP/Screenshot+2024-04-17+at+09.20.33.png Editorial https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1713347330247-COR0RCW11BEFK3SJ40KX/Screenshot+2024-04-17+at+09.15.12.png Editorial https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1713347330271-S2QC2YBIS9JIZKWHALJH/Screenshot+2024-04-17+at+09.15.54.png Editorial https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc725a3ebfc7f63778940ac/1713347331905-H1JFG2BABYEH0TV8QS7H/Screenshot+2024-04-17+at+09.16.10.png Editorial