Until his death, the Art Brut artist Julius Klingebiel was a victim of sociopolitical exclusion due to his illness of paranoid schizophrenia. Specially commissioned works by Clemens Gadenstätter, Yu-Hui Chang and Ye Shen are dedicated to him and the complexity of the subject matter. 

The project »EINGESPERRT« [Imprisoned] is partly dedicated to the fate of a social outsider: The German artist Julius Klingebiel (1904–1965) was an »other«, an outsider who was considered ill. He suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was therefore admitted to several psychiatric clinics from 1939, later he was a patient in the Göttingen State Hospital. Klingebiel was considered incurable, was forcibly sterilized according to the National Socialist Hereditary Health Act, but even survived the Nazi killing campaigns. Starting in 1951, he painted all the walls of his cell in the Göttingen Custody House. Today the »Klingebiel Zelle« is regarded as a solitary work of Art Brut. Further information about Julius Klingebiel can be found here.

Two contemporary Asian compositions, whose points of departure could not be further apart geographically, combine in the program »EINGESPERRT« (thanks to the mutual contextualization with Clemens Gadenstätter's Klingebiel work) to form a musical and philosophical discourse on personal freedom that is as multi–layered as it is sensual.

The fact that this freedom – as in the case of the premiere of a commissioned work by Ye Shen (*1977) from Shanghai, set to music by Chinese poet Hai-zi (1964–1989) – has led to rich artistic creation, but also to suicide, indicates the psychological complexity of this theme. In her commissioned composition for voices and instruments, the Taiwanese-American composer Yu-hui Chang (*1970) deals with the role of artificial intelligence and facial recognition and its influence on the individual: the own face as a mask and as a prison.

Pieces:

• Clemens Gadenstätter: »die zelle«, 2020
• Yu-Hui Chang: »Saving Faces« 2020, second performance
• Ye Shen: »距离:7/距离 Raum/Distanz« 2020, second performance

The SCHOLA HEIDELBERG and the ensemble aisthesis will premiere the compositions for instrumental and vocal accompaniment and live electronics under the direction of Walter Nußbaum and the sound engineering by Sebastian Schottke in Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Göttingen, Hannover and Oldenburg.

This project is supported by the Karin Brass Foundation and the Förderverein der Sozialpsychiatrie Moringen e.V.

Organization / Institution

KlangForum Heidelberg e. V.