Artist Talk/Performance
Art und Weise: Raphaela Vogel & The Better People of Szechwan

Artists in Conversations: Procession 33b

Fri, 01/12/2024
19:30 - 22:00 Goethe-Institut New York

Based on past music, Juliane Liebert, Daniel Roth, and Raphaela Vogel present new and existing lyrics and melodies for both ears. The performance will be interluded by an interview-style exchange between Raphaela Vogel and Elisa R. Linn.

Raphaela Vogel and The Better People of Szechwan – that’s Juliane Liebert, Daniel Roth, Raphaela Vogel and guests (Elisa R. Linn and Diedrich Diederichsen). They preserve the nearly lost work of the Jewish-German author Erich Hopp (Miss Germany Tango) and venture into the dubious humor of the of the end-punk band, Die Kassierer. In Procession 33b, they hiss outrageous chansons, clatter piano clusters, and reveal horrendous half-truths by and about grown-up men singing backwards, all accompanied by a harmonium and a large thunderous brass object (stolen from the Einstürzende Neubauten). Brutally pedagogic Brecht ballads and a waterproof world view give the band a unique status in Berlin's unsettled cultural life. Who else would you trust to sing the rhyme Amazon Should go Bankrupt to the tune of Urmel aus dem Eis?

This performance and talk coincides with Raphaela Vogel’s (ex-The Fistfuckers) New York debut at Petzel Gallery, featuring a poly-retrofuturistic temple of countless cameras referring to themes by Erich Hopp.



Raphaela Vogel's artistic practice opens up an enigmatic world within a variety of themes, materials and techniques, ranging from paintings on animal hides to expansive spatial installations, video- and sound sculptures. Evading categorization, her works are designed in a way, that everything occurs equally – the self-made, the found, the composed and the referenced alongside fictional narratives. Her works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at De Pont Museum Tilburg (NL), Haus der Kunst Munich, Kunsthalle Basel (CH), the Nam June Paik Art Center, Gyeonggi-Do (KR) as well as Fondation Cartier, Paris (F), or the 59th Venice Biennale (IT) among others.

Juliane Liebert is a writer and journalist, among others for Der Spiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Die Zeit. She writes prose and poetry, was a lecturer in poetry at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, and has published several books, including lieder an das große nichts (2021), Hurensöhne! On the Beauty and Necessity of Ranting (2020), Scheiß auf das Weltall (2017), and Der Körper ist ein billiger Koffer (2016). Liebert lives and works in Berlin.

Elisa R. Linn is a writer, exhibition maker, educator, and graduate of the Whitney ISP. She co-directs the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg and teaches at Leuphana University. She has held the interim professorship of the chair of Art Theory and Mediation at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. Since 2012, she has run the curatorial and artists project km temporaer with architect Lennart Wolff. Recently, they curated KP Brehmer’s first posthumous exhibition in New York at Petzel Gallery and Maxwell Graham.

Daniel Roth is a poet and contemporary artist. After studying at the HfS Ernst Busch, Berlin, he made a brief excursus into the world of chart music. He is the founder of the Wolf Cinema in Weserstraße, Berlin, and starred in the film Las Vegas (ZDF). Today Roth pursues his career as an interdisciplinary artist.

Friedrich Petzel is the founder of Petzel, a contemporary art gallery with locations in New York City’s Chelsea and Upper East Side neighborhoods. Representing over 40 distinguished international artists working across a diverse range of media, genre and artistic style, Petzel also operates the joint exhibition space Capitain Petzel in Berlin in collaboration with Cologne’s Galerie Gisela Capitain.