Shannon Barnett

Shannon Barnett © Niclas Weber for Monheim Triennale

Shannon Barnett (* Traralgon, Australia) is a trombonist and composer who studied in Melbourne and New York. She moved to Cologne in 2014, where she has been based ever since. Barnett established herself at an early stage as an important voice in the Australian jazz scene and was honoured as “Young Australian Jazz Artist of the Year” in 2007. Today, in addition to her international concert activities, she is also very active on the German scene and an important voice as an artist and professor.

In 2010, Barnett released her debut album “Country” on the label Which Way Music. She has performed regularly in Melbourne and New York with groups such as Vada, The Vampires, Andrea Keller, Barney McAll, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Charlie Haden, Darcy James Argue and Jon Faddis, and was a member of the Birdland Big Band.

From 2014, she spent four years in the WDR Big Band, which gave her the opportunity to perform with guests such as Vince Mendoza, Ron Carter, Joshua Redman, Maria Schneider and Paquito D’Rivera. Her Cologne quartet, consisting of Stefan Karl Schmid, David Helm and Fabian Arends, released its debut album on Double Moon/Challenge Records in 2016 and was shortlisted for the 2017 New German Jazz Award. Since then, she has released two more albums: Bad Lover and Live at Loft.

Compositionally, she attracted international attention in 2018 with her transdisciplinary work “Dead Weight” for 17 musicians and a fitness studio, which she presented both in Cologne and Melbourne. She released her new project “Wolves and Mirrors” on Klaeng Records in 2021 and used her voice as an additional timbre for the first time.

Since 2019, Barnett has been a professor of jazz trombone at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne.

She received the WDR Jazz Award for Improvisation in 2020 and the German Jazz Award in the category brass instruments in 2022.

Shannon Barnett:
“The Monheim Triennale presents not only the opportunity to create something new and special, but also to meet other open-minded musicians from different backgrounds and to connect with the Monheim people and locations. I am very grateful to be a part of it.”

Terre Thaemlitz

Terre Thaemlitz (* Minnesota, USA) is a Tokyo based award-winning multimedia producer, writer, speaker, lecturer, audio remixer, DJ and owner of the record label Comatonse Recordings. Her work combines a critical examination of identity politics, including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race, with an ongoing analysis of the socio-economics of commercial media production.

yuniya edi kwon

yuniya edi kwon (aka eddy kwon, * Minnesota) is a violinist, vocalist, poet, and interdisciplinary performance artist living in New York City. Her practice connects composition, improvisation, movement, and ceremony to explore transformation and transgression, ritual practice as a tool to queer ancestral lineage, and the use of mythology to connect, obscure, and reveal.

Anushka Chkheidze

Anushka Chkheidze (* Kharagauli, Georgia) is based in Utrecht and grew up in the small village of Kharagauli, where she began singing in a choir at the age of 11. She herself describes the time she spent there as magical and believes that her music is strongly influenced by those childhood years. This also led her to create the poetic sound installation “Lost Lullaby” for the orphaned garden of a day-care centre, which she created as part of The Sound, the sound art exhibition of the Monheim Triennale in the summer of 2023.