4 April 2022

Reminder
TOMORROW: 18th Academy Discussion
Russia and Ukraine – artists talk about war and peace

With Sergei Loznitsa, Svetlana Lavochkina, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Volker Weichsel and Jeanine Meerapfel. Moderator: Claudia Dathe

Tuesday, 5 April, 7 pm
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin
Press tickets at presse@adk.de, Tel. 030 200 57-1514. Reservations requested.

It’s war in Europe. Artists in Ukraine are in immediate danger. Protest measures targeting the Russian government are preventing Russian artists from engaging in international cooperation. How are those working in the arts sector in Ukraine, Russia and other European countries responding to these experiences? Filmmaker and Akademie President Jeanine Meerapfel will discuss this with her guests at the Akademie der Künste on Pariser Platz tomorrow, on 5 April.

With
Svetlana Lavochkina, writer
Sergei Loznitsa, filmmaker
Jeanine Meerapfel, filmmaker and President of the Akademie der Künste
Sasha Marianna Salzmann, writer and dramatist
Volker Weichsel, political scientist and editor of the journal Osteuropa
Moderator: Claudia Dathe, literary translator

Svetlana Lavochkina, born in 1973, grew up in eastern Ukraine and now lives in Leipzig. She is an author and translator of Ukrainian and Russian poetry. Lavochkina writes in English, and her texts have been published in numerous journals and anthologies in the USA and UK. In 2013, her novella Dam Duchess was awarded the Paris Literary Prize. Her novel Zap was shortlisted for the Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize in London in 2015. Her novel Die rote Herzogin (Voland & Quist) is set in Zaporizhzhya in south-eastern Ukraine and was published in German two days before Russia launched its war of aggression.

Sergei Loznitsa: The Ukrainian filmmaker was born in Belarus in 1964, grew up in Kiev and moved to Moscow in 1991 to study directing. He has lived mainly in Germany since 2001. He has made over 20 documentaries, including Maidan (2014), and four feature films. For Donbass he was awarded the Prix Un Certain Regard in Cannes in 2018. For his latest documentary Babyn Yar. Context (2021) about the massacre in which German Nazis and their abettors shot over 33,000 Jews in a gorge near Kiev in September 1941, he processed material from German, Russian and Ukrainian archives.

Jeanine Meerapfel was born in Buenos Aires in 1943 and has been President of the Akademie der Künste since 2015. The filmmaker has made numerous films, including the documentary In the Country of my Parents (1981) and the feature film The German Friend (2012). Her cinematic essay Eine Frau (A Woman) will have its German premiere at DOK.fest München in May 2022. It deals with such topics as emigration, remembrance and forgetting. In 2020, she initiated with the Akademie der Künste the "European Alliance of Academies", which brings together over 60 art academies and campaigns for democracy and the freedom of art.

Sasha Marianna Salzmann, born in 1985 in Volgograd, lived in Moscow until 1995 and currently lives in Berlin. She has received various prizes for her plays, which are performed internationally, including the 2020 Berlin Art Prize. From 2013 to 2016 she was resident playwright at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin (until 2015 also artistic director of STUDIO Я). Her debut novel Ausser sich was awarded the Literature Prize of the Jürgen Ponto-Stiftung and the Mara Cassens Prize in 2017 and was shortlisted for the German Book Prize. Her novel Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2021. On 11 May, she will receive the 2022 Preis der Literaturhäuser.

Volker Weichsel, born in 1973, studied political science and Slavic languages and literature in Mannheim and Kiev; he obtained his PhD with a thesis on national political traditions and European political strategies in the Czech Republic. He is editor of the journal Osteuropa. In addition, he translates from Russian, French, English and Czech into German, including Artur Klinau: Minsk. Sonnenstadt der Träume (Suhrkamp 2006) and Valentin Akudovich: Der Abwesenheitscode: Versuch, Weissrussland zu verstehen (Suhrkamp 2013).


Event details
18th Academy Discussion
Russia and Ukraine – artists talk about war and peace
Tuesday, 5 April 2022, 7 pm
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin
In English
Admission free: donations requested for the Ukraine-Hilfe Berlin e.V. initiative Tickets can be booked in advance online. Donations can be made on site via donation boxes in cash or via the website www.ukraine-hilfe-berlin.de.
Press ticket reservations: 030 200 57-1514, presse@adk.de 

To minimise the risk of infection, attendance of the events at the Akademie der Künste will require proof of vaccination, recovery or a negative test (3G) until 30 April 2022. On-site testing will be available.

See press release of 29 March 2022