On Mondays from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Location:
Medienhaus (Aula) 
UdK Berlin
Grunewaldstr. 2–5, 10823 Berlin 

The 2018/2019 lecture series Violence in the Arts analyses how forms of violence from modernity persist in and through the arts into the present day. 

Presented by the DFG Research Training Group “Knowledge in the Arts”  the series critically retraces reconfigurations of intertwined forms of racist and sexualized violences. Which genealogies condition contemporary modes of violence, and how do the arts uncover traditions of subjugation, objectification, and aggression? What knowledge, experience, and attitudes about forms of violence are conveyed in the histories of theater, performance art, film, photography, music, or architecture? How have spectacles of violence been aesthetically staged, and how do they continue to be staged, and with what artistic strategies has effective criticism of existing violence been formulated? 

The series examines arts as agents in, and as repositories of knowledge about relations of violence. Each lecture takes a critical look at both the arts, and the discourses produced in and through them for the (re)production of violent political-economic-social orders.

29. October 2018: Zeynep Sayın
12. November 2018: Sivan Ben-Yishai 
26. November 2018: Black Athena Collective (Heba Y. Amin and Dawit L. Petros) 
3. December 2018: Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński
10. December 2018: The lecture with Françoise Vergès unfortunately is cancelled.
28. January 2019: Shawn Michelle Smith 
4. February 2019: Pêdra Costa

October 29, 2018
Zeynep Sayın – Visual Studies, Leipzig
Wer hat Recht auf das Bild?
(in German)

Warum leitet sich die Bildanthropologie vom Tod ab? Wer hat spätestens seit den römischen Leichenmasken (imago/imagines) das Recht und das Vorrecht auf ein Bild? Warum ist das Spiegelstadium das Stadium der Leichenmasken und warum ist es ein Vorrecht der Adeligen? Warum sind die im Atrium aufbewahrten Leichenmasken Vorformen von Ahnenportraits und Fotoalben? Warum ist diese Form der ‘Familienaufstellung’ eine Form der Macht? Wer sind die Ahnen, wer bestimmt sie als solche? Wie ist die Beziehung zwischen der Genealogie und dem Bild? Was hat das mit Politik und Politiken des Todes zu tun? Wer darf abgebildet werden und was bedeutet (politischer) Ikonoklas(sizis)mus? Dieses Referat beabsichtigt einen historischen Überblick über die Beziehung zwischen dem Bild und dem Vorrecht auf das Bild.

Zeynep Sayın, geb. 1961 in Istanbul, österreichisch-türkische Literaturwissenschaftlerin und Bildwissenschaftlerin. Seitdem sie wegen Beleidigung des türkischen Staatspräsidenten von der Bilgi-Universität (Istanbul) gekündigt wurde, wo sie als Professorin tätig war, hat sie Lehraufträge an verschiedenen deutschen und österreichischen Kunstuniversitäten. Auf Türkisch publizierte sie zahlreiche Bücher, die derzeit in diverse Weltsprachen übersetzt werden.

November 12, 2018
Sivan Ben-Yishai – Playwrighting and Directing, Berlin/Tel Aviv
Let the Blood Come out to Show Them
(Lecture in German and English, discussion in English)

LET THE BLOOD COME OUT TO SHOW THEM – Dieser Titel zitiert eine Arbeit des amerikanischen Komponisten Steve Reich, der nach den Ereignissen um die „Harlem Six“ im Jahr 1964 eine Tonaufnahme von Daniel Hamm zu einem Loop verarbeitet hat. In Harlem waren damals sechs schwarze Männer zu Unrecht für den Mord an einer weißen Frau inhaftiert worden. Der Mann öffnete auf der Wache seine Blutergüsse, um sie zu zeigen, weil man ihm nicht glauben wollte, wie heftig er im Gefängnis geschlagen worden ist. Er verlangte, dass die Polizisten sich die Wunden anschauen. 

Lesung und Gespräch über das Aufdecken im Schreiben und den paradoxen Willen sich denjenigen zu zeigen, die einen verwundet haben. In Zeiten eines „kultivierten“ Krieges, in denen jemand Cappuccino trinken kann, während 50/500/5000 km entfernt in seinem/ihrem Namen eine Bombe tausende Leben zerstört, wird die Wunde zum letzten wahrhaftigen Zeugen. Ben-Yishai wird Auszüge aus ihrer zuletzt veröffentlichten Tetralogie Let the Blood Come out to Show Them lesen sowie mit Grit Köppen über Nacktheit als Sprache und mögliche anti-patriarchale Widerstandspraktiken sprechen.

Sivan Ben-Yishai wuchs in Jerusalem auf und studierte szenisches Schreiben und Theaterregie in Tel Aviv. Seit 2012 lebt sie in Berlin, wird vom Suhrkamp Verlag vertreten und von Maren Kames ins Deutsche übersetzt. 2015 inszenierte sie zwei eigene Stücke: 3RDLND if you know what I mean and I think you do im Rahmen des Future Forums der Stiftung Deutsch-Israelisches Zukunftsforum und I know I’m ugly but I glitter in the dark im Radialsystem V Berlin. Der erste Teil ihrer Tetralogie Let the Blood Come out to Show Them entstand im Zuge des AutorInnenprogramms In Zukunft III beim Westfälischen Landestheater sowie beim Neuen Institut für Dramatisches Schreiben, zweiter und dritter Teil als Auftragsarbeiten am Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin und im Herbst 2018 wird, ebenfalls am Gorki, der vierte Teil als szenische Lesung beim Festival Krieg im Frieden erstmals der Öffentlichkeit vorgestellt.

November 26, 2018
Black Athena Collective (Heba Y. Amin and Dawit L. Petros) – Visual Arts, Berlin/Chicago
Regimes of Passage
(in English)

Contemporary understandings of the Red Sea region are fixed to territorial affinities that are entangled in colonial logics. Migration shaped notions of culture in a region that has, for centuries, mediated expansive commercial spheres and circuits. Today, the migration of the Red Sea region conjures a very different imagination. Drawing on recent discoveries linking Egypt to Eritrea, Black Athena Collective (Heba Y. Amin and Dawit L. Petros) will investigate contemporary geographies through the histories of movement using an alternative conceptual framework. Archaeological and forensic approaches to mobility with an array of visual forms will converge into an expanded performance of history.

Black Athena Collective is a research and artistic laboratory for experimentation that engages political discourse and practices of spatial construction connected to the Red Sea region from Eritrea to Egypt. It looks specifically at the architectures of migrancy and the various frameworks of space and territorial demarcations in relation to errant bodies. The collective draws from challenges posed by Martin Bernal’s thesis which questions methodological assumptions embedded within Western historiography. Through multi-­disciplinary perspectives including geography, sociology and history Black Athena Collective raises the question of migration as a crucial principle for imaging new conventions of territory. Central to their investigations are the reconstitution of political spaces and the various architectures and forms of reterritorialization. Black Athena Collective was founded in 2015 by artists Heba Y. Amin (EGY) and Dawit L. Petros (ER/CA).

Dezember 3, 2018
This lecture has been moved from 14th Jan. 2019 to 3rd Dec. 2018!
Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński – Art Based Research, Wien 
Movements between “Black Annotation” and “Black Reduction” – Artistic Strategies of Working with Archival Material
(Lecture in English, discussion in English and German)

The concepts of “Black Annotation” and “Black Reduction”, introduced by Christina Sharpe in her book In the Wake. On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2017) offer fruitful paths when trying to think about artistic modes of working with archival material that refuse to play into the spectacle of Black suffering, thereby aiming at working against the prevailing repetition of violent regimes of looking. Drawing on examples of films and visual works that were developed within the ongoing PhD-in-Practice research project The Non-Human. The Believer. The Alien – Unsettling Innocence, the aim of the presentation is to highlight how artistic research serves as a mode of actively challenging “strategies of amnesia” (El Tayeb, 2011). 

Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński is a Vienna-based artist and author. Her work has an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together Postcolonial and Black Feminist Theorie with Visual Practice. Within the framework of a PhD-in-Practice at the Academy of the Arts Vienna, Kazeem-Kamiński currently researches the performativity of black-being in relation to Austrian coloniality. Her central concerns are memory and the black radical imagination, of the past, present and future.

Unfortunately the lecture with Françoise Vergès is cancelled.
Françoise Vergès – Political Science, Paris
Decolonial Methodologies. An Account of Practices and Their Unforeseen Insights
(in English)

The lecture "Decolonial Methodologies. An Account of Practices and Their Unforeseen Insights" will give an overview of what kind of contemporary collective strategies are being practiced in the cultural and academic field to discuss and dismantle the reproduction of violences. Thus, Françoise Vergès will introduce a series of regular collective workshops called « L’Atelier » she has been organising and convening, in which she brings together artists and scholars of color for regular collective events organised in Paris. This annual performance of two days is conceived as an opportunity for a multidisciplinary postcolonial study group to address the difficulties and possibilities of collective performance and decolonial methodology in the arts, bringing together history, theory, lived experience, activism, arts and curatorial practice.

Françoise Vergès is an internationally acclaimed political scientist, currently Chair Global South(s) at the Collège d’études mondiales, Fondation Maison du savoir de l’homme, Paris. She is a feminist and activist author in the global antiracist struggle, who writes about memories of slavery, decolonial methodology, feminism, race and capitalism. She is the author of numerous books, including Monsters and Revolutionaries. Colonial family romanceand Métissages (Duke University Press, 1999). She is the curator of “L’Atelier,” a regular collective workshop among artists and scholars, and other events.


January 28, 2019
Shawn Michelle Smith – Visual and Critical Studies, Chicago
Photographic Reenactments: Carrie Mae Weems’s Constructing History
(in English)

This lecture focuses on Carrie Mae Weems’s photograph series Constructing History, in which Weems and students reenact famous photographs from the U.S. Civil Rights era. It discusses the elegiac and ambivalent nature of Weems’s recreations, which are often focused on assassinations, and proposes that the photographs enact a form of melancholia that creates an affective openness to the past and calls attention to a political project that remains unfinished. Constructing History highlights the complex relationship between photography and memory. Through photographic reenactment the work emphasizes the embodied nature of historical memory and amplifies the disruptive temporality of both photography and performance.

Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has published six books on the history and theory of photography in the United States and gender and race in visual culture, including most recently Photography and the Optical Unconscious (Duke University Press, 2017), co-edited with Sharon Sliwinski, and At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Duke University Press, 2013), which won the 2014 Lawrence W. Levine Award for best book in American cultural history from the Organization of American Historians. She currently serves on the editorial advisory boards of Journal of Photography and Culture and Journal of Visual Culture. This lecture is drawn from her forthcoming book, Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography.
 

February 4, 2019
Pêdra Costa – Performance Art and Visual Urban Anthropology, Rio de Janeiro/Berlin/Vienna
de_colon_isation
(in English)

de_colon_isation part IV: a performative experience is a live performance to create a space of intimacy and political claim through the body, live images by a dildo camera and "The Southern Butthole Manifesto". It uses post-porn as a strategy of pleasure, aesthetics and politics. Failure and precariousness are words impregnated in her biography and artwork. Playing the artist as an exhibitionist, it shows performance art as a place to interact with the presence of the audience and disturb their gaze, through feelings, desire and empathy. The action merges the social categories of public and private, privileges and subalternity, sameness and alterity.

Pêdra Costa works with her body, presenting performance art, making videos and writing, using complex and fragmented epistemologies from queer communities, being contaminated by knowledge almost completely destroyed by the colonial project and remembering radical caring against the lack of opportunities of living. S/he engages the political aesthetics of post-porn and anti-colonial strategies. S/he faces failure every day, transforming failure into creative force, in connection with mixed and forgotten ancestralities. Exhibitions include Multitud Marica: Activaciones de archivos sexo-disidentes en América Latina, Santiago de Chile 2017 (Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende); QUEER ENCOUNTERS_VIENNA TRANS LA, Los Angeles 2017 (CalArts School of Art); WELT KOMPAKT?, Vienna 2017 (frei_raum Q21, MuseumsQuartier); Millionaires Can Be Trans // You Are So Brave, Berlin 2015 (Schwules Museum); Oral Museum of the Revolution, Barcelona 2013 (MACBA); Caos e Efeito, São Paulo 2011 (Itaú Cultural).

Concept: Elsa Guily, Grit Köppen, Sebastian Köthe
Organisation: Juana Awad, Renate Wöhrer, Team Studium Generale
Support: Johanna Heyne, Alicja Schindler

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