Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen.
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Western museums are opening their halls for huge state exhibitions in collaboration with non-democratic regimes. The British Museum is currently hosting an exhibition on the Hajj which is funded by Saudi Arabia and reflects the royal family's position on the ritual. Should an institution dedicated to secular learning accommodate such religiously doctrinaire exhibitions? Yes, says Malise Ruthven in the New York Review of Books blog, who evidently believes in the conciliatory effects of such cultural politics. Tagesspiegel author Nicola Kuhn sees the new "Roads of Arabia" exhibition in Berlin's Pergamon Museum more critically. Image © National Museum, Riyadh
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Frankfurt's Städelmuseum has just opened its new subterranean contemporary art extension, the culmination of a radical overhaul of the building and its collections. Hans-Joachim Müller ventures down below the surreal domed lawn and is left to meander through a refreshingly idiosyncratic retrospective that turns its back on received ideas about the progress of art. (Image:exterior view of Städel extension by Norbert Miguletz)
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The Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin is currently hosting Germany's first major retrospective of the legendary Japanese artist Hokusai, featuring over 430 exhibits, many of which have never left Japan before. It is hard to believe that such
incredible diversity could stem from the hand of just one artist, but it is the product of a lifetime's dedication. By Katrin Wittneven. Image: "Onikojima Yataro and Saihoin Akabozu"© Katsushika Hokusai Museum of Art
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Ai Weiwei - the modest megalomaniac, the relaxed rebel. Hanno Rauterberg met China's most interviewed man in the cellar of Munich's Haus der Kunst, where the artist was preparing to turn the place into a battlefield.
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An exhibition in ZKM Karlsruhe explores the enormous range of artistic processes that exist between the moment of conception and finished work. By Kathrin Peters
Image: Dieter Appelt "Partitur" © 2009 ZKM
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Both the Venice Biennale and the Documenta in Kassel have taken the dark side of modernity as their theme. Looking at how the two mega-exhibitons do battle, Hanno Rauterberg prefers Kassel's investigation of evil to Venice's concession to it. (Untitled, from the series Spring-Sow-Plum-Scene, 1996, mask 6, 2003. © Aoki Ryoko)
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In a disused dockyard in Rostock, the "Art goes Heiligendamm" initiative has put the final touches to its G8 intervention. The preferred topic among the artworks is borders and overcoming them. Aside from that they deal anything that's good: information, documentation, irony, utopia, anti-consumerism. By Irene Grüter
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Probable, silent, public, inofficial - there are many categories of participant in this year's documenta. What's lacking are the official ones. Because the exhibition organisers are keeping tight-lipped about what artists have been invited, we are left to guess, speculate, hope and dismay. By Ludwig Seyfarth
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The art of glimmer and of deception. Seminal works show the roots and origins of the Op Art movement in an exhibition at Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle. The dynamic of black and white fields meets snuffling electric motors. And a bachelor machine makes jokes and winks. By Ulf Erdmann Ziegler
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Much of the work of the Renaissance sculptor Conrat Meit has been lost over the centuries. The Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich has pulled together a goodly collection from around the world which proves Meit to be a master of the pot-bellied feminine ideal of the day. By Birgit Sonna
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Berlin's Museum Island is perhaps the most important museum complex in the world. It was embellished this week with the reopening of the Bode Museum, housing the finest display of European sculpture anywhere. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, takes us on a first-ever tour of European history in three-dimensional form.
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Zamosc, the "Padua of the North," planned as an ideal city in the 16th century, is a remote town in the Polish provinces. Until the international art scene came to stay, that is. Now Sabrina van der Ley and Markus Richter have enticed a group of artists to come create works on the theme "Ideal City - Invisible Cities." By Birgit Rieger (Image: Jaroslaw Flicinski, Up, up and away, 2006)
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"Humanism in China" is a reproduction of an exhibition of over 600 photographs that toured the People's Republic and has now opened in Frankfurt's Museum of Modern Art. No other contemporary exhibition has managed to get this close to the ordinary life of the nation that makes up a quarter of the world's population. By Tilman Spengler
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The Grässlin family is opening an art space in Sankt Georgen, a tiny town high up in the Black Forest. Their collection of sculptures and installations is scattered throughout the locale, to the amazement of the international public and the locals alike. By Ulrich Stock
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Now showing in Berlin, "Melancholy: Genius and Madness in Art" is the foremost exhibition of its kind. But what makes a work melancholic? Melancholy is difficult to catch red-handed, and scarcely easier to repress. Eliminate it here, and it crops up over there, tough as any weed. Everything testifies to the presence of melancholy. Yet the more you look, the more it eludes your gaze. By Laszlo F. Földenyi
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