Photo: Amelie Tegtmeyer
The multimedia artist Pablo Lauf arrived in Berlin about 8 years ago. It was his former music project Pilot that brought him and his colleagues to the German capital, and for about three years they buzzed through the club landscape of Germany before deciding to go their separate ways. During this time, Lauf began studying at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin and graduated in 2016. His internationally exhibited photographic project »Birds Of Karachi« paints an intimate portrait of the art scene of the Pakistani metropolis. Last year, he found the opportunity to unite his fascination for image and music through the medium of film and developed three short documentaries on artists who had been invited to Berlin as part of the Border Movement Residency. In his DJ sets, Lauf likes to tell stories that often incite wonder, and his photography is similar—it provides glimpses into beautiful and striking things in environments you’d least expect to host them, that is if your exposure is limited to the daily news.
»Border Movement«Pop culture thrives on cultural exchange, and Pop-Kultur has dedicated itself to that exchange. Every now and then, though, we still need a bit of help, and Border Movement is the ideal resource. The Berlin-based platform, supported by the Goethe Institut since 2012, sees itself as a »cultural catalyst« and, as such, values interactions—especially those between Germany and the South Asia region. At Club 23, on two different festival days, the activist and journalist Sarah Chawla (New Delhi, India) and the musician Mohammed Manal (Malé, Maldives) among others will represent the bandwidth of Border Movement’s work with concerts, DJ sets, and talks. The Berlin artists Anika, Andreas Spechtl, Dan Bodan, and most recently She's Drunk have all participated in the exchange programme, and now the Pakistani artist Natasha Humera Ejaz aka Stupid Happiness Theory will come to the German capital from Islamabad. We should and must mix things up!