Is this woman the next Philip Glass? And why is she wearing a loudspeaker?
The crowd wandering through Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie may look like any other bunch of gallery-goers keeping out of the snow on a Saturday afternoon. Seasoned culture vultures, however, would recognise that the lanky, shaven-headed man in an Adidas jacket is choreographer Wayne McGregor; that the Irishman in an overcoat is novelist Colm Tóibín; and that the energetic, white-haired woman in glasses is Joan Jonas, who this spring will show five decades’ worth of groundbreaking work in her first Tate Modern retrospective in London.
Also in town are the likes of architect David Adjaye, cultural theorist Homi K Bhabha, theatre director Selina Cartmell, as well as the artist and opera director William Kentridge. Why are they all here? Well, most of them are currently looking at work by Thao-Nguyen Phan, a 30-year-old Vietnamese artist few, if any, will have previously heard of.
Phan’s exhibition is the first of a. Every two years, after scouring the world for talent, the company pairs an established artist with an up-and-coming one, usually from a different country. An idea that would have been familiar to the old masters, the hope is that the younger artist can learn from – and perhaps collaborate with – the elder over the course of a couple of years.
