LURIE’S LIFE LINES

Boris Lurie, 1924-2008, visual artist, concentration camp survivor, NO!art founder, New Yorker from Riga. And author: his volume GESCHRIEBIGTES, GEDICHTIGTES blends unembellished narrative, poetry and wicked lightness, unlike most other work that deals with survival in and after the Holocaust. „I acquired the foundations of my artistic education in concentration camps like Buchenwald,“ writes Lurie. He collages images of piles of corpses with pin-ups, attacks fascism, racism and the sexism of consumer society. Without any lachrymosity.

LURIE’S LIFE LINES, made on the occasion of Lurie’s 100th anniversary, combines Lurie’s poetry and prose, voice art, live electronics, cello, brass and percussion. Texts and music grow together scenically, graphically and visually. Lurie speaks, in his New York home full of traces of his trauma. Friends and connoisseurs of his work speak. And Lurie’s disturbing images.

LURIE’S LIFE LINES pays tribute to a great non-conformist who didn’t want to create superficial meaning, but rather outcry and confrontation.

The voice artist and performer Julia Wahren (*1968) studied at the Detmold University of Music; permanent engagements took her to the Deutsches Theater Göttingen and the ETA Hoffmann Theater Bamberg. She has been living in Munich since 2006, making theater, performance, sound and voice art, for example at the Göttingen International Handel Festival, at the Festival Public Art Munich 2018, at Hunter College and at the Deutsches Haus New York City. In 2018 she created the radio play „Desperados or Hitler Goes to the Movies“ for BR and in 2019 the film „Schluss.Ton“. Her multimedia performance LURIE’S LYRICS (together with Rudolf Herz) premiered at the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2022. Julia Wahren performs on stages and in public spaces, with colleagues from various artistic disciplines, such as the conceptual artist Rudolf Herz, Ensemble Horizonte, Così facciamo and the Munich Contemporary Music Group. In her projects she explores the boundaries between genres and forms, improvisation and composition. She has received numerous scholarships and, as an author, the prize of the Göttingen Alexander Foundation.

In the work of Rudolf Herz (*1954), the examination of questions of collective memory plays an important role. His art pursues strategies of aesthetic transformation based on research and critique: „The goal of my works are less appellative messages than stubborn works that invite reflection and seek dialogue. They leap over the boundaries of genres and show breaks and changes of direction.“ Rudolf Herz studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and earned his doctorate in art history at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg. With Reinhard Matz, he was a prize winner in the 1996 competition for the „Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.“ Their proposal: pave a kilometer of highway near Kassel and introduce speed limits of 30 km/h. Herz was a scholarship holder at the Villa Massimo, received the Bavarian Culture Prize, the City of Munich’s Art Promotion Prize and the Hans and Lea Grundig Prize 2021. He is an honorary professor at the Munich Art Academy.

The precursor of the film was a multimedia performance at the Münchner Kammerspiele, premiere in November 2022.

There is a picture by Boris Lurie from 1963 that bears the title „Railroad Collage“. This picture is horrific, bizarre, it spreads nightmares … „Railroad Collage“ is now encountered again, in the Therese-Giehse-Halle of the Münchner Kammerspiele, in the video background of the absorbingly fascinating Music-Theatre performance „Lurie’s Lyrics“ by Julia Wahren and Rudolf Herz. This is not an evening that wants to explain something; it is an evening whose associative power obsesses and haunts you. The music is the sonic correlation to Lurie’s collages. Chirping single notes, large instrumental chants, and immediately one has the impression again that the music could break out into hard rock, played by trombone and cello, rhythmically accompanied by two stone blocks. To this Julia Wahren sings and speaks, sometimes in a kind of Brechtian ductus, sometimes with a poetic vocal sound, in stark contrast to what this is all about … „Lurie’s Lyrics“ is produced in cooperation with the NS-Dokuzentrum and the Boris Lurie Art Foundation in New York, and should definitely go on tour.

Review by Egbert Tholl, Süddeutsche Zeitung Nov 17, 2022

Cast / Crew