Presidency

Manos Tsangaris (b. 1956 in Düsseldorf) is a composer, drummer and installation artist who lives in Cologne.

From 1976 to 1983, he studied at the Musikhochschule Köln (Cologne University of Music) under Mauricio Kagel (composition, Neues Musiktheater/New Music Theatre) and Christoph Caskel (drums).

Internationally, Tsangaris is considered one of the most important representatives of New Music Theatre. His works are regularly performed at festivals and events that include the Donaueschinger Musiktage (Donaueschingen Festival), the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik (Witten Days for New Chamber Music), the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF), the Musik-Biennale Berlin, the Biennale di Venezia, the Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, TonLagen ‒ Dresden, Rainy Days Festival, Luxembourg, the Warschauer Herbst (Warsaw Autumn), ECLAT, Stuttgart and at theatre and opera venues in Cologne, New York, Mannheim, Dresden, Weimar and Berlin. In addition to musical compositions, he writes poetry and prose and creates installations and visual works.

From 2016 to 2024, Tsangaris and Daniel Ott directed the Münchener Biennale für Neues Musiktheater (Munich Biennale). In autumn 2024, he was commissioned by Wien Modern to perform the station theatre Arnold Elevators as part of “Schönberg 150”.

Among his teaching positions, Tsangaris has been a professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden (since 2009) and a visiting professor at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo (2017‒18). He founded the International Institute for Artistic Investigation (iike) in 2011 (www.iike.de) and conducts research in scenic anthropology. During the 2012‒13 academic year, Tsangaris was an artist-in-residence at the Zurich University of the Arts. He gives courses and lectures worldwide.

Manos Tsangaris has received numerous awards and grants, including, most recently, the Mauricio Kagel Music Prize from the Kunststiftung NRW. He has been a member of the Akademie der Künste’s Music Section since 2009 and was its director from 2012 to 2021.

In May 2024, he was elected president of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In doing so, he also took over the presidency of the European Alliance of Academies – a network currently numbering around 70 art academies and institutions in the EU, as well as in Norway and Great Britain, that stands up for freedom of the arts.

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Anh-Linh Ngo (b. 1974 in Kon Tum, Vietnam) is an architectural publicist, curator and editor-in-chief who lives in Berlin.

He studied architecture at RWTH Aachen University and was on staff there in the Department of Architectural Theory from 2002 to 2004. Ngo has worked as an editor since 2004. He has been part of ARCH+ Zeitschrift für Architektur und Urbanismus’ editorial team since 2004 and has been its editor-in-chief since 2016. Ngo reshaped the German magazine’s profile through event series, exhibitions, and other discursive formats, always closely networking with universities, international researchers, and cultural institutions.

Anh-Linh Ngo regularly co-curates exhibition projects, which include the exhibition tour of ifa ‒ Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen’s An Atlas of Commoning: Places of Collective Production (since 2018), 1989–2019: Politics of Space in the New Berlin (2019, n.b.k., Berlin), and Cohabitation – A Manifesto for the Solidarity of Non-Humans and Humans in Urban Space (2021, silent green Kulturquartier, Berlin). In 2023, in collaboration with Summacumfemmer and the Büro Juliane Greb, ARCH+ curated the presentation in the German Pavilion at the 18th Architecture Biennale in Venice, titled Open for Maintenance. Wegen Umbau geöffnet. ARCH+ curated the show The Great Repair at the Akademie der Künste (Hanseatenweg venue) in 2023‒24.

Ngo’s memberships include his place on the board of trustees of IBA’27 in the Stuttgart Region (since 2019), the Goethe-Institut’s advisory board for education and discourse (since 2021), and the Akademie Schloss Solitude’s board of trustees (since 2021). In 2020, ARCH+ received the Kunstpreis Berlin (Berlin Art Prize), awarded by the Akademie der Künste.

Anh-Linh Ngo has been a member of the Architecture Section of the Akademie der Künste since 2021. In May 2024, he was elected vice-president of the Akademie der Künste.

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