Salwa Aleryani
Summoning Memory
Workshop, English, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Thursdays, 14-17:30h, 7 sessions: 25.4, 9.5., 23.5., 6.6., 20.6., 4.7., 18.7.2024, Hardenbergstraße 33, room 150

Registration on Moodle starts 15.04.2024:
https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=2248
Moodle Enrollment Key / Einschreibeschlüssel: memory

Memory, though ongoing, is a narratability of the past, and its representation of history is intertwined with time. Today every given moment is followed by a time stamp that moves in one direction towards a measured distribution of dates. At the height of the colonial era, the establishment of a standardized universal time sought to replace local times around the world, effectively eliminating alternative cultures of time, and other ways of representing our lived chronologies.
Although “we all live in the present, not all of us live in the same now.” For those who bear witness, there is a fear of forgetting and being forgotten. A lingering reminder to resist, record, save, defend, recover and reconstruct, personal and shared political histories that often disappeared from collective memory.

This seminar aims to create a space for collective reflection, to summon images, voices, objects, and experiences, to grasp them as a whole despite discontinuities, fragmentation and displacement, and to examine and map them beyond linear time scales and insular recollection.

Through conversations and collaborative activities, guided by readings (e.g., Teju Cole, Ines and Eyal Weizman) and artistic practices (e.g., Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Black Quantum Futurism), students will be encouraged and supported to gather their artistic media and tools and use them to engage in emancipatory inquiry and articulation.

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credit points: Active and meaningful engagement and willingness to participate and contribute to collective discussions and activities, including artistic assignments and readings. Timely and regular attendance.

Salwa Aleryani (born in Sana'a, Yemen) is an artist who works primarily with sculpture and installation. Her practice is driven by objects and materials, their histories, potentials and promises, as well as their resistance. Through her work, she often engages with sites and infrastructures that converge across different geographies and serve as expressions of nationhood, as protagonists of national narratives, and as grounds for ‘other’ narratives. Her work has taken shape in a variety of exhibition, site-specific, and educational contexts, including Berlin, Vienna, New York, Beirut, Marrakech, and Amman. In 2020-21 she was a fellow at the Graduiertenschule at the Berlin Center for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences at the UdK. More recently, she was awarded the Villa Aurora Grant 2024 in Los Angeles.