Festival George Town Literary Festival 2020

 IT IS TIME TO ASK OURSELVES IMPORTANT, OFTEN UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CONDITION OF OUR LIVES AND WORLD. COMING IN AT A TIME OF RAPIDLY SHIFTING COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS AND SOCIAL UPHEAVAL, ​THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS IS A CRYSTAL BALL TO THE FUTURE — A PLACE TO DREAM AND IMAGINE ROUSING, HOPEFUL NEW POSSIBILITIES. 

Lea Schneider

© c-mueck-fotografie

Is one of the most interesting poets of her young generation. She studied Comparative Literature, Chinese, Linguistics and Sociology in Shanghai, Taipei, and Berlin, where she lives and works today as a poet, essayist, and translator of Chinese poetry.
She is a member of the Poetry Collective G13, a group of poets who experiment with forms of collective writing and poetry as performance. In 2014, her debut collection Invasion rückwärts (‘Invasion in reverse’) won the Dresden Poetry Prize; it was followed in 2016 by O0, a multimedia-based e-book in cooperation with Tillmann Severin, a novelist, and Sebastian Severin, a sculptor. She was writer-in-residence of the Goethe-Institut Nanjing, China, in 2016 and is a recipient of the German 2018 Post-Poetry Award. Her most recent publications include Internationaler Tag der Reparatur (‘international repair day’), a translation of poems by Beijing-based writer and performer Yan Jun, and the anthology ‘CHINABOX - New Poetry from the People's Republic’, which features translations of twelve Chinese poets and an introduction to contemporary Chinese poetry.

Photo Book "Friendship" by Jörg brüggemann & tobias kruse

What is friendship? The first interpersonal relationship that we ourselves choose. Jörg Brüggemann and Tobias Kruse ask what kind of a relationship “friendship” is. It it neither familial nor romantic, and yet, it often goes so much deeper. Together, the two photographers have photographed each other and observed friendships
in public space.
In their new series for the OBSCURA Festival of Photography and this artist’s book, they find emblematic images of closeness and distance, joy and sorrow, love and competition, trust and doubt, giving and taking, strength and weakness, sharing and separating.
The friendship between both fotographers deepened on the journeys they undertook together. In the spring of 2019, during a residency at OBSCURA in Penang, Malaysia, they captured it all in photographs—their friendship and friendships in general. The two Ostkreuz photographers asked themselves what distinguished these connections, which are neither familial nor romantic, and decided to create pictures of them.