Der Tagesspiegel, 17.03.2006

Bosnian film director Jasmila Zbanic, who won the Golden Bear at Berlin's Berlinale film festival last month for her film "Grbavica" about the mass rape of Bosnian women by Serbian soldiers, is rapidly making enemies in Serbia reports Jan Schulz-Ojala. "Her speech at the award ceremony which was heard around the world in which she protested that Karadzic and Mladic were still walking free eleven years after the end of the war, has made her the target of influential and radical Serbs. The Belgrade tabloid Kurir described her appearance at the 'Propaganda festival Berlinale' as a 'moral lynching of Serbia'. It also featured a subtle comment by rock musician Bora Corba on the number of women victims (which the UN officially put at 20,000 years ago): 'For God's sake, how could our soldiers manage all that physically?' The overwhelmingly hostile media resonance was so extreme that the premiere of 'Grbavica' on March 6 at the Belgrade film festival threatened to fall through. Radical Serbs tried to prevent the screening but the 2000 viewers booed them out of the cinema."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17.03.2006

In an interview with Swantje Karich, the painter Luc Tuymans (more) criticises the latest work by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra in which he filled a former synagogue near Köln with car exhaust fumes. "My painting 'Gas Chamber' shows the chamber as the memorial it is today. You cannot paint what you have not experienced." Tuymans is unable to read any deeper meaning in the work. "In Sierra's work a crucial step is missing, namely the attempt to formulate an artistic idea out of the culture of seeing, observing and analysing. He remains so banal that one is almost tempted to believe he wants to tell us about how tasteless the handling of the topic has become."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17.03.2006

Sonja Zekri is amused by the dirt-cheap Ukrainian political thriller, "Killing Julia" by Yuri Rohosa. An advisor and devoted campaigner for Julia Tymoshenko, Rohosa is again rallying behind the politician in the run-up to the Ukrainian elections at the end of March. Zekri sees a spiralling cult of personality. "What Yuri Rohosa believes is that Julia Tymoshenko - the beautiful Julia with her golden plaits, the Joan of Arc of the Orange Revolution, once the third most powerful woman in the world but who was hounded out of office in autumn by the scar-faced President Yushchenko - he believes that this Julia needs help." As far as Zekri is concerned, the book has a painfully simple message and she's surprised at how avidly Ukrainian readers are snapping it up.


Frankfurter Rundschau, 17.03.2006

Ursula März has read Necla Kelek's new book, "Die verlorenen Söhne" (The Lost Sons). She has mixed views: "Necla Kelek has a point. She is right when she sees integration as a demand made on Turks and not just as a support line from the German state. Even so, her book, "Verlorene Söhne" is problematic. It's not because of the controversial and partial manner in which she disregards the numerous, successful biographies by Turkish born men living in Germany, only to concentrate on the failures. Kelek says that if you write about the homeless you leave out the descriptions of those who are lucky enough to live in a flat." What annoys März is the "hint of sentimentality which pervades the book, bordering on the manipulative. Necla Kelek doesn't just tell the lifestory of five Turkish prisoners. She dramatises and makes a literary feature of the fact that the stories are told in a prison and of her own emotional state as a listener and visitor."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17.03.2006

Brit Art according to the catalogue of the Tate Triennial in London is no longer about "irony, wit or caricature but new narrative structures within hegemonial codes." For Alexander Menden, the show which was curated by Beatrix Ruf of the Kunsthalle Zurich is "based on hollow claims alone. Jonathan Monk's 'Twelve Angry Women' being a classic example. Monk acquired twelve anonymous pencil portraits at a flea market in Berlin and stuck coloured thumb-tacks on them as earrings. This act of idle-minded appropriation art is compared with Robert Rauschenberg and Marcel Duchamp in the catalogue. Monk apparently 'questions ideas of authenticity' and 'all the usual 'expectations of truth and originality in art.' Heard it all before, you might counter, if you weren't so busy yawning."