FRAMED #51 Alma Sade & Mark McNeill/ Exhibition Emeli Theander

MUSIC – Alma Sade & Mark McNeill 

Alma will be accompanied by Mark McNeill on Piano. The two met at the Komische Oper and formed a strong friendship and musical connection. The original plan was a program of French songs. When the rehearsals started, Alma felt that she wanted to sing something else, something more personal, a show she would have fun preparing and performing. With this in mind, they put together a collection of pieces that takes a journey through Jewish composers and the Yiddish language. From Mendelssohn and Mahler, who had to hide their identity in order to work at the time, to Paul Abraham, who composed through both World Wars and was an innovator by combining jazz interludes into his operettas. As Alma told me: “We love working on this program, thinking in the voices of all those composers, and deepening our friendship through the music and the text; getting to the core of those pieces which might be the core of every work of art: love, spirituality, fear of death, beauty, heartbreak, and nature.

ART EXHIBITION – Emeli Theander

Emeli Theander was born in Sweden in 1984. She has lived and worked in Berlin since 2003. Between 2006 and 2012, she studied fine arts at the UdK Berlin under Prof Valérie Favré. She was funded by the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) from 2009 to 2011 and, as part of this funding, also did a six-month artist-in-residence in Seoul, South Korea, at the Platoon Kunsthalle. In 2014, she received the Dorothea Konwiarz scholarship, and in 2013, the “Merkel collection and foundation prize for painting, Rhein Neckar Delta”.

„Feed Your Demons“ is a body of work I’ve been feeding during the last year, while trying to sort out my role as an artist and as a mother. I experienced two life-threatening events that resulted from an illness during pregnancy, which further impacted my work. The pieces are made to nurture the emotions following the loss of control, soothing the demons inside, perhaps turning them into domesticated beasts.  

Psychoanalysis has been a main influence on my work in recent years, as it revolves around what excites me the most: Exploring the depths and paradoxes of human emotions.  

I work mainly in oil on canvas. In addition to that, I draw, especially using graphite and oil pastels. In my work, I take references from art history and beats from different myths and stories, and bind/weave them together with my own personal collection of dreams, experiences, and emotional states. 

Lately, I kept coming back to Impressionist paintings with their bright gardens and sunlight. But what interests me most are actually the shadows of these places. There is something slightly threatening lurking in my abstract gardens, but also perhaps something ironic, or hopefully, even humorous.