Culture

Flashback 30 years. Portable video units had just come out, making it possible for ordinary people to record onto tape. That was the start of a boom in the following decade: Video Art was born. These early and later works from well-known and lesser known video and also film artists is on show right now at Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Taken from their collection of the past 30 years, the museum is showing 55 installations with ca. 270 works of moving imagery art.

10 tell-tell signs that show you're very slowly, going native.....

1. You can't think of a better word to use when something is 'Kapput'
2. You call your mobile phone a 'handy'
3. Your questions are just statements with 'oder' at the end
4. When walking down the road with a beer bottle in your hand is no big deal
5. When you stop getting annoyed that the shops are closed on Sundays and actually enjoy the peace and quiet
6. You start paying for tickets on the tram – before you even see the inspectors coming

Cologne is full of little curiosities and one of my absolute favourites is the Kallendresser. Stand outside number 24 Altermarkt and look up and you'll see the bottom of the Kallendresser - literally. The little figure of a man pulling his trousers down and poking out his bottom has been a part of Cologne history since the middle ages, but this particular bronze figure was put up by architect Jupp Engels after the war in 1956.

Swedish installation artist Matts Leiderstam presents some of his older works (1997 to 2008) at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf. Inspired by the portrait and landscape painting of the 18th and 19th centuries, Leiderstam takes paintings and graphic art out of their original collection and presentation contexts, and positions them anew within institutional exhibitions.

Take a trip to Antiquity and beyond in Bonn's Kunst und Austellungshalle (KAH). Byzanze: Splendour and Everyday Life is an exhibition that makes use of magnificent and historically meaningful exhibits and important artefacts from collections and archaeological excavations. It sheds light on many aspects of the history, archaeology and the art of the Byzantine Empire. The Empire was one of the most powerful economic, cultural, and military forces in Europe from around 324 A.D. until the late tenth century.

There are some lovely, cheeky little statues around Cologne, Düsseldorf and Bonn, one of my favourites is the "Bröckemännche" which normally lives on the Kennedy Bridge in Bonn-Beuel.  I say normally because he's been taken down since the start of building works to the bridge, but he's due to be put back up later this year.  The Brückenmännche is a figure of a man pointing his bottom at Beuel.  The original Bröckemännche was put up as a kind of "up yours" gesture to Beuel.  When the bridge was built in the eighteen h

Sketches of a Ramble in the Eifel is the theme of this beautiful exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne.  Edward T. Compton was born in Stoke Newington, London in 1849, and died in Feldafing near Munich in 1921. Like many of his 19th century contemporaries he undertook sketching tours of the Rhineland and Moselle, but unlike them, he stayed.  In 1868, at the age of eighteen, he started making sketches while on a walking tour of the Eifel and then ventured further up the Moselle, one of his sketch map's shows the meandering route that he followed.

Of Cologne's many museums The Museum of East Asian Art is one of the city's jewels, founded in 1913 it was the first museum of its kind in Germany.

In February you can see a major retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf. Mapplethorpe dominated photography in the late twentieth century and paved the way for the recognition of photography as an art form in its own right; he firmly anchored the subject of homosexuality in mass culture and created a classic photographic image, mostly of male bodies, which found its way into commercial photography. Both during his life and since his death (in 1989), Mapplethorpe’s work has been the subject of much controversial debate.

This is a great new gallery, in an unusual location. It's situated beneath the Rhine promenade in a dormant space between the bores of the road tunnels, which had been unused until 2006. The entrance area is a glass pavilion which faces onto the Rhine — making a great new cafe/restaurant with a gorgeous "Rheinblick".  At the moment you can see an exhibition called "Happy House or Minor Repairs to the World" which looks at the issues of nationality and location.