Heating prohibited! Recommendations from the SZ editorial team – culture

Cartoon art: Gerhard Seyfried in the Valentin Museum

The same Kreuzberger Straße can be seen in the two pictures, with the old building and elevated railway, in the background the TV tower and Memorial Church. But the world has developed very differently in the two pictures: environmental catastrophe and thick smog on one, “Heating prohibited between November 1st and February 15th,” a sign announces an order from the Senate. Environmental happiness on top of each other, city streams ripple and cannabis plants grow green. Comic artist Gerhard Seyfried, who comes from Munich and lives in Berlin, drew both pictures many years ago. In his 1981 volume “Invasion from everyday life”, a group of left-wing freaks imagined what the future would bring after a joint.

More than 30 years later, Seyfried’s hidden object-like city panoramas now hang in large format in the Valentin Museum at Munich’s Isartor. An exhibition curated by the director of the soon-to-be-launched Munich comic festival, Heiner Lünstedt, also brings together original and previously unpublished works by the artist, who as a chronicler of the left-wing scene has recorded contemporary history and at the same time demonstrated prophetic talent: heating is forbidden in winter, that sounds very much like it how tabloids interpret Robert Habeck’s politics today. Greener cities and marijuana legalization, on the other hand, is more what Greens supporters would prefer as the conclusion of the traffic light – the irony of the story only seems to be that Seyfried’s dystopia and utopia could be fulfilled at the same time.

The time when Seyfried and others in Kreuzberg tried to prevent the demolition of old buildings by squatting is long gone. His pun madness, for example when bulbous-nosed freaks and bulbous-nosed police officers eye each other suspiciously at two food stands – freak balls and meatballs – still works. And when you see in the exhibition, which runs until mid-July, how Seyfried, who was born in 1948, already looked in his first works for the alternative Munich city newspaper sheet also lovingly made fun of leftists who were too dogmatic and their holy seriousness about improving the world, then one would soon wish for a new hidden object: the same Kreuzberger Straße, with an old building and elevated railway, in the background the television tower and memorial church. And the “last generation” sticks to the streets. Moritz Baumsteiger

Digital Society: Debating Machines

For years, the algorithms have been watching people arguing and hating and rushing. Now that things can say something for themselves, you should let them loose on each other and then lean back. Opinionate.io is one of the new artificial intelligences that debate with itself. Most such applications see themselves as training programs for legal aid, students and those interested in politics. So why not start right away with one of the most effective fire accelerator topics in public discourse? Immigration. Yes or no? “Start Debate” and let’s go. The AI ​​first welcomes the diversity, the new ideas and perspectives that immigrants bring. Then she points out that immigrants also cause costs, could become criminals or even be terrorists. That’s how it goes. Not too different from Twitter either. Just a lot faster. Andrian Kreye

Theater: Two gentlemen from Real Madrid

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Two professional soccer players meet in the forest. This could be the start of a bad footballer joke or the start of a hilariously absurd play. Fortunately, the latter is meant here. Leo Meier’s play is called “Two Gentlemen from Real Madrid” and it can currently be seen in an enchanting production by Albrecht Schroeder at the Schauspiel Leipzig. So two football professionals from Real Madrid meet, circle each other politely, spontaneously in love. Great free-kick the other day, won the Champions League three times in a row, congratulations, congratulations too! The ensemble succeeds in telling the trick of telling the subject of homosexuality in football without carrying it pedagogically in front of you. A hilarious, warm-hearted evening about love and the business of football. And oh yes, an almost lifelike Sergio Ramos stars too. Christian Lutz

The book by Seiko Ito “The ban on novels is only to be welcomed”

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Maybe it’s just the age, very few things are brand new. On the other hand, with mashed potatoes, it doesn’t bother that you’ve eaten something similar before. And yet you sometimes stand sadly in the bookstore and think: I know all that. Here the autofiction, there the patriarchy, in between the first sentences in which someone stands in the present and smokes. Anyone who knows this sadness will be delighted to discover a book with this title on the cover: “You have never read such a strange novel, believe me.” And that one finds a second title underneath: “The ban on novels is only to be welcomed”. If you know the sadness, it’s better not to tell anyone anymore, except: Japan, dystopia, literary theory, short but not easy to read. And above all: exhilaratingly strange. Nele Pollatschek

Photo exhibition: “Trace” in the Haus der Kunst

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Artur Walther was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs until 1994 when he turned his attention to his rapidly growing photography collection. He is showing them in his hometown of Ulm, in an exhibition space in New York – and currently in Munich’s Haus der Kunst. “Trace”, the title of the show, begins with common names: August Sander, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Richard Avedon. Brave trophies from an assiduous private collector? But on the contrary. For Walther, these monuments of photographic history are more like starting points and references for his own exploration of the medium. The two series of portraits shown here are a selection from Sander’s “People of the 20th Century” and Avedon’s portraits of politicians “The Family” from 1976. Walther supplemented them with Accra Shepp’s impressive series of “Occupy Wall Street”. -Protesters of 2011. And he searches for the origins and variants of the portrait genre in images from crime files, trading cards, high school photos, and early commercial portraits.

Photography is often only part of the imaging process. The other is the self-portrayal of those photographed, as with drag queens, the early porn actresses or the anonymous New Yorker who recorded her private look book in her apartment long before the invention of the selfie.

what are humans How do you live? What are they doing to the world? These are the questions explored in this infinitely rich, entertaining and moving exhibition. And behind every picture, every series there is another: How can all of this be depicted? There are so many ways: Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong depicts the transformation of Chinese metropolises in wide-angle tableaux composed in a Gurskyesque style. Luo Yongjin shows them in cubist montages of black and white individual images. Santu Mofokeng photographs seemingly innocent landscapes that contain nothing but traces of war. Christine Meisner shows fields and forests as moving images without movement. And Yang Fudong visits depopulated outskirts of China, from which people withdraw until only skinny dogs remain, for a multi-channel video installation that is worth a visit in itself. Jörg Haentzschel