German guitarist Michael Rother broke from the experimental electronic band Kraftwerk in 1971, along with with the late drummer Klaus Dinger, to form NEU! The influential Krautrock duo’s four LPs, recorded between 1971 and 1986, were recently rereleased by Grönland Records in a five-disc vinyl box set. This fall, Rother, Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, and Tall Firs guitarist Aaron Mullan are touring together as Hallogallo 2010, playing the music of NEU! in select cities across the US and Europe. Photo: Hadley Hudson.

Swiss-born Ligia Dias is a designer based in Paris. From 2002 to 2005 she worked under Alber Elbaz for Lanvin, before launching her own jewelry line, Ligia Dias Colliers. She has since collaborated with 3.1 Phillip Lim, Comme des Garçons, and Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret and was a recipient of the 2009 Association Nationale pour le Développement des Arts de la Mode (ANDAM) award for Best Young French Designer. A solo exhibition of her new work opens May 7 at Art Since the Summer of ’69 in New York.

Founded in 2007 as an import/export agency by German-born, New York–based artists Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder, DAS INSTITUT is an ongoing collaboration that creates hybrid forms of artistic production and reproduction through painting, design, and performance. In September 2009, the Swiss Institute presented the duo’s first solo exhibition in New York, and this past winter their installations were included in “Leopards in the Temple” at the SculptureCenter in New York and as part of Ei Arakawa’s “Non-Solo Show, Non-Group Show” at the Kunsthalle Zürich. Next month a solo exhibition of their

Los Angeles–based artist Margaret Honda most recently exhibited her sculptures and photographs in group shows at S1F Gallery, Los Angeles, and Estación Tijuana, Mexico, and as part of the 2008 California Biennial. Currently she is constructing a full-scale paper rendition of a house that is being published and distributed piece by piece in publications such as North Drive Press and the Drawing Center’s Drawing Papers.

A Berlin-based architect and artist, Jesko Fezer has collaborated with the architecture cooperative ifau to realize projects in Berlin, Munich, and Stuttgart, Germany; Utrecht, the Netherlands; Graz, Austria; London; and New York. He is cofounder and manager of Berlin’s Pro qm bookstore and coeditor of the journal An Architektur. He is also head of the research program Civic City: Design for the Post-Neoliberal City at the Institute for Design Research, Zurich University of the Arts.

Tirdad Zolghadr is a freelance writer and curator. He teaches at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, and is cocurating the 2010 Taipei Biennial with Hongjohn Lin. The working title of his second novel is Top Ten.

New Jerseyy is a gallery based in Basel and run by curator Daniel Baumann, artists Tobias Madison and Emanuel Rossetti, and graphic designer Dan Solbach. With support from Nordtangente-Kunsttangente, the gallery has recently staged projects such as Ei Arakawa’s “M.A.V.O.E. (killer COMMERCIAL)”; Ei Arakawa, Gela Patashuri, and Sergei Tcherepnin’s “Shindisi Autocenter”; and the group show “Bridges and Tunnels” at Hard Hat in Geneva.