GERMAN FOR ARTISTS
Concept: Stine Marie Jacobsen
Editor: Ida Bencke Graphic
Design: Pieterjan Grandry /modem.ws
Soft cover
Pages 174
ISBN: 978-3-943196-31-3
September 2015. ENGLISH/GERMAN
German for Artists is a hybrid pocket grammar book and an artist's humorous reflections on the more philosophical aspects of the German language. Written by the Danish artist Stine Marie Jacobsen, the book offers a critical and very humorous linguistic introduction to the vibrant and international cultural scene in Berlin. The book looks at contemporary art through the optics of language teaching, educates the reader about art and German grammar at one and the same time.
German for Artists offers an insight into the basic German grammar by using well-known people on the international art scene to visualise the rules. The book is designed for artists, curators and other art enthusiasts who dream of learning German. It is an easily portable book offering grammatical first aid and ready-to-use phrases, that will help your understanding of the language in the German art world. A must for all "nicht-so-gut-deutsch" - speaking cultural workers in Germany's capital! The book offers advice to help art people in different typical social and practical situations in the Berlin art world.
Stine Marie Jacobsen (b. 1977), is a conceptual artist working to decode individual and collective violence through participatory means. Focusing on language, gender and psychology, she uses film as a starting point to create performative experiments and platforms for new ways of looking at ethics, identity, fear and trust. She lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin, graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts with an MFA and a BFA from CalArts, the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, USA.
Some of her notable solo shows have been at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2012, Berlin, Kohinoor, 2010, Copenhagen, District Kunst- und Kulturförderung, 2014, Berlin, Galway Arts Center, 2014, Galway, Ireland and Overgaden institute of contemporary art, 2015, Copenhagen, Denmark. Selected group shows consist of Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, Momentum Biennale 2013, Moss, Norway, Either Or Nikolaj Kunsthal, 2013, Copenhagen, Idyll Turku Biennale, Turku, Finland, The 10th OPEN International Performance Festival, 2009, Beijing.
In order to give participants a collaborative and dialogical space, Stine creates open structured sociocultural and participatory projects with clearly defined themes. With a focus in themes such as film, language, gender, violence, death, taboos, anonymity, psychology, the artist conducts performative experiments and creates platforms for critical thinking and new ways of looking at ethics, identity, control, fear and trust.
Over the years Stine has conceptualised and worked on a number of participatory projects that are within these parameters, like for example Direct Approach, where participants are asked to retell their most violent film scene memory and choose whether they would play victim, perpetrator or bystander and why. Stine has organised and facilitated many Direct Approach workshops in Germany, Ireland, Colombia and Denmark. In 2014 the project was a 6 month workshop at District Kunst- und Kulturförderung in Berlin in collaboration with social work organisations Gangway and Streetcollege and was jury selected for Berlin Art Week.
Another example is Mann beißt Hund (a remake of the Belgian film C’est arrivé près de chez vous), without actors. Alongside the use of film as a law system, with lawyers the artist also organised court cases with teenagers, where real lawsuits were rejudged and in workshops rights in private and public space were reflected on and discussed.
In 2015, Stine was awarded an innovative educational grant from Node curatorial studies in Berlin and in 2016 she will receive a peace fellowship and professional Conflict Resolution certificate from the Rotary Club.