Doreen Mende
Doreen Mende is a curator, researcher, writer, educator and theorist, currently director of the cross-collections research department at State Collections of Art Dresden, and Associate Professor of the Curatorial/Politics seminar (sabbatical in 2023/24) of CCC RP Master and PhD Forum, that she has led from 2015 until 2021, of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD–Genève/Switzerland. She is Principal Investigator of the transdisciplinary study Decolonizing Socialism. Entangled Internationalism (2019-2024), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNFS), in collaboration with Urban Studies of University Basel, KV––Kunstverein Leipzig, House of World Cultures and Vanabbe Museum. http://p3.snf.ch/project-184864
In 2015, Mende, co-founded (with Tom Holert and Volker Pantenburg as well as with Antje Ehmann, Anna Faroqhi, Lara Faroqhi, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and others) the Harun Farocki Institut (HaFI) in Berlin.
Mende's research aims to develop vocabularies for articulating geopolitical readings of contemporary exhibiting practices in relation to knowledge processes, archival metabolisms and decolonizing socialism, unedited histories, display politics in the 21st century. Larger research projects include KP Brehmer Real Capital – Production (2014, Raven Row, London); Travelling Communiqué (2014/13, Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin – with Armin Linke and Milica Tomic), Double Bound Economies (2013/12, Halle 14 in Leipzig, centre de la photographie in Geneva, ETH in Zurich, Thomas Fischer Galerie in Berlin – with Estelle Blaschke and Armin Linke), KP Brehmer: A Test Extending Beyond the Action (2011, CAAC, Sevilla), Candida Höfer: Projects Done (2009/10, CAAC in Sevilla, MARCO in Vigo), Not Right But Wrong (2007, JET, Berlin), Ear Appeal (2006, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna). Project-based collaborations in Ramallah, Beirut, Addis Ababa and Tehran. Mende is co-editor of e-flux journal 59 Harun Farocki (2014 with Julieta Aranda, Antje Ehmann, Brian Kuon Wood and Anton Vidokle); resident of the blog for Manifesta Journal (2013/14); co-founder (with Wilfried Kuehn) and editor-in-chief of the publication series Displayer at University of Arts and Design/ ZKM Karlsruhe (2006–09); and co-founder of the collectively organised project/space General Public in Berlin (2005 with Oliver Baurhenn, Discoteca Flaming Star, Heimo Lattner, Remco Schuurbiers, Jan Rohlf, and others). Her practice-based PhD 'The Itinerant' was awarded in Curatorial/Knowledge of the Visual Cultures Department from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is an associate faculty member of the Dutch Art Institute. Mende lives in Berlin and Geneva.
harun-farocki-institut.org
thenavigationprinciple.com
head.hesge.ch/ccc/turbulence
Sylvain Menétrey realised an interview with Doreen Mende for ISSUE Journal of HEAD Genève (September 2020): https://vimeo.com/488140653
In 2015, Mende, co-founded (with Tom Holert and Volker Pantenburg as well as with Antje Ehmann, Anna Faroqhi, Lara Faroqhi, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and others) the Harun Farocki Institut (HaFI) in Berlin.
Mende's research aims to develop vocabularies for articulating geopolitical readings of contemporary exhibiting practices in relation to knowledge processes, archival metabolisms and decolonizing socialism, unedited histories, display politics in the 21st century. Larger research projects include KP Brehmer Real Capital – Production (2014, Raven Row, London); Travelling Communiqué (2014/13, Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin – with Armin Linke and Milica Tomic), Double Bound Economies (2013/12, Halle 14 in Leipzig, centre de la photographie in Geneva, ETH in Zurich, Thomas Fischer Galerie in Berlin – with Estelle Blaschke and Armin Linke), KP Brehmer: A Test Extending Beyond the Action (2011, CAAC, Sevilla), Candida Höfer: Projects Done (2009/10, CAAC in Sevilla, MARCO in Vigo), Not Right But Wrong (2007, JET, Berlin), Ear Appeal (2006, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna). Project-based collaborations in Ramallah, Beirut, Addis Ababa and Tehran. Mende is co-editor of e-flux journal 59 Harun Farocki (2014 with Julieta Aranda, Antje Ehmann, Brian Kuon Wood and Anton Vidokle); resident of the blog for Manifesta Journal (2013/14); co-founder (with Wilfried Kuehn) and editor-in-chief of the publication series Displayer at University of Arts and Design/ ZKM Karlsruhe (2006–09); and co-founder of the collectively organised project/space General Public in Berlin (2005 with Oliver Baurhenn, Discoteca Flaming Star, Heimo Lattner, Remco Schuurbiers, Jan Rohlf, and others). Her practice-based PhD 'The Itinerant' was awarded in Curatorial/Knowledge of the Visual Cultures Department from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is an associate faculty member of the Dutch Art Institute. Mende lives in Berlin and Geneva.
harun-farocki-institut.org
thenavigationprinciple.com
head.hesge.ch/ccc/turbulence
Sylvain Menétrey realised an interview with Doreen Mende for ISSUE Journal of HEAD Genève (September 2020): https://vimeo.com/488140653
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Texts by Doreen Mende
The publication presents these in detail by means of numerous text contributions as well as comprehensive photo documentations and emphasizes the complexity of the climate crisis in its proliferating manifestations.
Edited by Corina Apostol, Marius Babias, Reinhard Braun, Pablo DeSoto, Gabriela Salgado, and Leila Topić. With texts by Oliver Ressler, Andreas Malm, T. J. Demos, Ameli M. Klein, Kodwo Eshun, Doreen Mende, Toni Negri, Marco Baravalle, Pujita Guha, Anja Steidinger, and Nora Sternfeld.
272 pages, color illustrations, softcover, German / English, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne 2023
The following conversation about End Credits took place on October 25, 2022, during the lead-up to the first full-length exhibition of the work, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, in the context of the multipart curatorial project “The Missed Seminar.”
the court scene attended by Eslanda and her friend Franz; a digitized image then appeared online on digitizingdiaspora.com by Annette Joseph-Gabriel. It seemed as though the image had been reproduced by symbionts themselves to refresh their memory infrastructures. The photograph exhibited many deviations, deformations, and glitches on the surface as if it had been metabolized already. Metabolizing a photograph was still under development, but had been released with great potential for transgenerational technology.
Changes in Direction – a Journal around the research-based practice of artist Laura Horelli offers a compilation of research, interviews and discussions with further contributions by performance artist Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, curator-theorist Doreen Mende and the Finnish writer Olli Löytty.
The publication includes texts by Nikita Dhawan, Kata Krasznahorkai, Sophie Lorenz, Doreen Mende, Peggy Piesche, Kathleen Reinhardt, Maria Schubert, Hilke Wagner, and Jamele Watkins, and a new interview with Angela Davis as well as artists contributions by Yael Bartana, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sophie Calle, Contemporary And, Sadie Barnette, CHTO DELAT?, Melvin Edwards, Ângela Ferreira, Bernhard Franke, Coco Fusco, Ellen Gallagher, Claudia Martínez Garay, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Arthur Jafa, Steffani Jemison & Justin Hicks (Mikrokosmos), Iris Kensmil, Hassan Khan, Kapwani Kiwanga, Raja Lubinetzki & Petra Schramm, Julie Mehretu, Heinz-Detlef Moosdorf, Senga Nengudi, Ahmet Öğüt, Slavs and Tatars, Julia Phillips, Alex Martinis Roe, Elske Rosenfeld, Anri Sala, Willi Sitte, Cauleen Smith, Nancy Spero, Gabriele Stötzer, Strawalde (Jürgen Böttcher), Nasan Tur, Lewis Watts, Carrie Mae Weems, Christoph Wetzel, Charles White, and Heinz Wodzicka.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/isbn/9783110700442/html
FE: My question to you refers to an inevitable issue you raised at the end of your essay: What might possible “forms and methods of articulation” look like ‒ those offered to the many “active participants in the production of visual cultures” when the shared screen made possible by Teams and Zoom have become part of a “progressive neo-liberalisation of education” (and of work)? Is it also part of the “language of the enemy” that should be appropriated, or preferably rejected? Do we need to fill these structures with other content? Or do we need to create new structures?
DM: I think analysing existing digital platforms and filling them with content that is discomforting to monopoly capital (a challenge in the age of platform capitalism) is just as important as creating our own practices of transcontinental networking. These strategies are not mutually exclusive. The violence of tying power to capital through technology is not only complex, it is also several centuries old. The two can only be decoupled collectively and in several different ways at once. As Angela Davis said during a talk at the Akademie der Künste in June 2018, we can assume we won’t achieve this shift in our lifetimes. This highlights the importance of intergenerational solidarities between members of different social movements. At the same time, it addresses the politics inherent in the so-called global technologies of split-screens, liked and shared images, livestreams, video conferences, teach-ins, webinars, etc. Why shouldn’t they also be tools for internationalism of the 21st century?
_____It’s true that despite calls for collectivisation, our infrastructures remain embedded in imperial power structures that only those who feel safe within them can afford to criticise. How would we explain these problematics to the 17-year-old student Darnella Frazier, whose smartphone documentation of the brutal murder of George Floyd by the police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020 was published on her Facebook feed and led to a worldwide revolution by the Black Lives Matter movement? How could they be made plausible to Mary Jo Laupp from Iowa, or the members and fans of the teen K-Pop band Bangtan Boys from Seoul, whose “no-show protest” on the platform TikTok ‒ as in, reserve two tickets for Donald’s campaign rally at Tulsa’s BOK Centre on 20 June 2020 using your phone number but don’t actually attend ‒ successfully ensured that thousands of seats remained empty? How inappropriate would it be to reproach a Palestinian photojournalist affected by the 2014 bombings for speaking “the language of the enemy” when using Twitter to make her visual voice heard from her living room in Gaza by publishing images on the digital platform for mass-communication available to her? Oraib Toukan did so in her Skype-desktop essay When Things Occur (2016), partly to evade the dominant media narratives of European photo agencies. Not even the calls to collectivise Facebook confront the blindness of “techno-fetish activism” given the eco-colonial infrastructures the worldwide web (www) is based on, as Vinit Agarwal states in his contribution for the Harun Farocki Institute’s Rosa Mercedes Journal #02.
____Therefore, the question of critique cannot be separated from issues of class, privilege, localisation and unfinished history. In this context, the call for “selfie-communism” (Jodi Dean) could be a means of countering platform capitalism with the political power of the crowd as digital commons. However, we cannot leave it at this method, or strategy, or visual praxis alone. As Audre Lorde illustrated in her 1984 collection of essays Sister Outsider, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In other words, an either/or answer would be “a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought,” as the black, feminist and lesbian poet phrased it while also pointing out that a binary either/or believes itself morally entitled to wield subjective judgment. What’s most important is supporting and allocating any and all resources available to organisational structures that seek to connect various minorities’ struggles for social justice with one another.
Part of the “Montage or Fake News?” exhibition programme for John Heartfield – Photography plus Dynamite, the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin ‒ in cooperation with the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ‒ has organised the online symposium “Abschied von der Fotomontage?” (Goodbye Photomontage?). Originally planned as a two-day public event on Pariser Platz, with dialogically structured impulse lectures, discussions, interviews, film screenings, music performances and artist statements, the interdisciplinary project is taking place exclusively online due to the current situation. Three panels address topical issues and questions derived from a re-examination of select aspects of John Heartfield’s works and their impact.
Beitrag auf DE : https://www.adk.de/de/projekte/2020/heartfield/programm/Symposium/Einleitung.htm
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-communist-visual-cultures-9780190885533?cc=de&lang=en&
http://www.bauhaus-imaginista.org/articles/6100/hamhung-s-two-orphans-to-konrad-puschel
We are participants of the CCC PhD-Forum* with various educational backgrounds-curatorial studies, visual arts, literature, psychology, music, philosophy, gender studies, cultural studies, design theory. We bring to the PhD-Forum a set of cultural formations, practices, intellectual geographies and research interests departing from different languages. We are artists, researchers, curators, educators as well as doctoral students, PhD-applicants, assistants and professors in the humanities, social sciences, philosophy, design, architecture and contemporary art. Each of us is working individually on a research project before, during and after the PhD. These temporalities encounter one another when we meet. We are here to situate our experiences in the context of the current debates on doctoral research within the art academy. The PhD-Forum is for us, the CCC Research Affiliates, a place where we embody our research processes and create the conditions for a dialogue between our multiple backgrounds to take place. This condition emerges from the various voices, problems and projects of its participants. We gather within the format of the Forum, situated within an institutional framework, while each of our research projects are affiliated differently. Some of the Research Affiliates embarked already on a PhD-project with a university elsewhere, some are preparing a PhD-application, and some are following an independent research path. Situating our individual experiences within a shared format also means to shape the continuous transformation of a group of researchers. We have in common the concern for practice-based research; hence, our individual experiences form a research-community. At the same time, we exchange and transform our perspectives; thus, these shared experiences form a collective subject. There is continuous oscillation between these various zones of experiences from within to outside, and back again. This swinging to and from engenders a network of practices.
The Spanish translation has been realized by Paola Debellis Alvarez. Thanks to Jamie Allen and Robert Hamlin Jackson for a collaborative review of the English version on a lovely afternoon at CCC.
The Research Center for Proxy Politics (RCPP) explores and reflects upon the nature of medial networks and their actors. Between September 2014 and August 2017, the center hosted workshops, lectures and events at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, under the auspices of Hito Steyerl’s Lensbased class. RCPP is run by Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann.
Contributions by Tom McCarthy, Kodwo Eshun, Goldin+Senneby, Brian Holmes, Nick Houde, Jonathan Jung, Laura Katzauer, Boaz Levin, Mikk Madisson, Doreen Mende, Sondra Perry, Oleksiy Radynski, Robert Rapoport, Hito Steyerl, thricedotted, Vera Tollmann, Miloš Trakilović. Design by PWR
Order online: http://www.archivebooks.org/2017/10/17/proxy-politics/
The publication presents these in detail by means of numerous text contributions as well as comprehensive photo documentations and emphasizes the complexity of the climate crisis in its proliferating manifestations.
Edited by Corina Apostol, Marius Babias, Reinhard Braun, Pablo DeSoto, Gabriela Salgado, and Leila Topić. With texts by Oliver Ressler, Andreas Malm, T. J. Demos, Ameli M. Klein, Kodwo Eshun, Doreen Mende, Toni Negri, Marco Baravalle, Pujita Guha, Anja Steidinger, and Nora Sternfeld.
272 pages, color illustrations, softcover, German / English, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne 2023
The following conversation about End Credits took place on October 25, 2022, during the lead-up to the first full-length exhibition of the work, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, in the context of the multipart curatorial project “The Missed Seminar.”
the court scene attended by Eslanda and her friend Franz; a digitized image then appeared online on digitizingdiaspora.com by Annette Joseph-Gabriel. It seemed as though the image had been reproduced by symbionts themselves to refresh their memory infrastructures. The photograph exhibited many deviations, deformations, and glitches on the surface as if it had been metabolized already. Metabolizing a photograph was still under development, but had been released with great potential for transgenerational technology.
Changes in Direction – a Journal around the research-based practice of artist Laura Horelli offers a compilation of research, interviews and discussions with further contributions by performance artist Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, curator-theorist Doreen Mende and the Finnish writer Olli Löytty.
The publication includes texts by Nikita Dhawan, Kata Krasznahorkai, Sophie Lorenz, Doreen Mende, Peggy Piesche, Kathleen Reinhardt, Maria Schubert, Hilke Wagner, and Jamele Watkins, and a new interview with Angela Davis as well as artists contributions by Yael Bartana, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sophie Calle, Contemporary And, Sadie Barnette, CHTO DELAT?, Melvin Edwards, Ângela Ferreira, Bernhard Franke, Coco Fusco, Ellen Gallagher, Claudia Martínez Garay, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Arthur Jafa, Steffani Jemison & Justin Hicks (Mikrokosmos), Iris Kensmil, Hassan Khan, Kapwani Kiwanga, Raja Lubinetzki & Petra Schramm, Julie Mehretu, Heinz-Detlef Moosdorf, Senga Nengudi, Ahmet Öğüt, Slavs and Tatars, Julia Phillips, Alex Martinis Roe, Elske Rosenfeld, Anri Sala, Willi Sitte, Cauleen Smith, Nancy Spero, Gabriele Stötzer, Strawalde (Jürgen Böttcher), Nasan Tur, Lewis Watts, Carrie Mae Weems, Christoph Wetzel, Charles White, and Heinz Wodzicka.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/isbn/9783110700442/html
FE: My question to you refers to an inevitable issue you raised at the end of your essay: What might possible “forms and methods of articulation” look like ‒ those offered to the many “active participants in the production of visual cultures” when the shared screen made possible by Teams and Zoom have become part of a “progressive neo-liberalisation of education” (and of work)? Is it also part of the “language of the enemy” that should be appropriated, or preferably rejected? Do we need to fill these structures with other content? Or do we need to create new structures?
DM: I think analysing existing digital platforms and filling them with content that is discomforting to monopoly capital (a challenge in the age of platform capitalism) is just as important as creating our own practices of transcontinental networking. These strategies are not mutually exclusive. The violence of tying power to capital through technology is not only complex, it is also several centuries old. The two can only be decoupled collectively and in several different ways at once. As Angela Davis said during a talk at the Akademie der Künste in June 2018, we can assume we won’t achieve this shift in our lifetimes. This highlights the importance of intergenerational solidarities between members of different social movements. At the same time, it addresses the politics inherent in the so-called global technologies of split-screens, liked and shared images, livestreams, video conferences, teach-ins, webinars, etc. Why shouldn’t they also be tools for internationalism of the 21st century?
_____It’s true that despite calls for collectivisation, our infrastructures remain embedded in imperial power structures that only those who feel safe within them can afford to criticise. How would we explain these problematics to the 17-year-old student Darnella Frazier, whose smartphone documentation of the brutal murder of George Floyd by the police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020 was published on her Facebook feed and led to a worldwide revolution by the Black Lives Matter movement? How could they be made plausible to Mary Jo Laupp from Iowa, or the members and fans of the teen K-Pop band Bangtan Boys from Seoul, whose “no-show protest” on the platform TikTok ‒ as in, reserve two tickets for Donald’s campaign rally at Tulsa’s BOK Centre on 20 June 2020 using your phone number but don’t actually attend ‒ successfully ensured that thousands of seats remained empty? How inappropriate would it be to reproach a Palestinian photojournalist affected by the 2014 bombings for speaking “the language of the enemy” when using Twitter to make her visual voice heard from her living room in Gaza by publishing images on the digital platform for mass-communication available to her? Oraib Toukan did so in her Skype-desktop essay When Things Occur (2016), partly to evade the dominant media narratives of European photo agencies. Not even the calls to collectivise Facebook confront the blindness of “techno-fetish activism” given the eco-colonial infrastructures the worldwide web (www) is based on, as Vinit Agarwal states in his contribution for the Harun Farocki Institute’s Rosa Mercedes Journal #02.
____Therefore, the question of critique cannot be separated from issues of class, privilege, localisation and unfinished history. In this context, the call for “selfie-communism” (Jodi Dean) could be a means of countering platform capitalism with the political power of the crowd as digital commons. However, we cannot leave it at this method, or strategy, or visual praxis alone. As Audre Lorde illustrated in her 1984 collection of essays Sister Outsider, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In other words, an either/or answer would be “a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought,” as the black, feminist and lesbian poet phrased it while also pointing out that a binary either/or believes itself morally entitled to wield subjective judgment. What’s most important is supporting and allocating any and all resources available to organisational structures that seek to connect various minorities’ struggles for social justice with one another.
Part of the “Montage or Fake News?” exhibition programme for John Heartfield – Photography plus Dynamite, the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin ‒ in cooperation with the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ‒ has organised the online symposium “Abschied von der Fotomontage?” (Goodbye Photomontage?). Originally planned as a two-day public event on Pariser Platz, with dialogically structured impulse lectures, discussions, interviews, film screenings, music performances and artist statements, the interdisciplinary project is taking place exclusively online due to the current situation. Three panels address topical issues and questions derived from a re-examination of select aspects of John Heartfield’s works and their impact.
Beitrag auf DE : https://www.adk.de/de/projekte/2020/heartfield/programm/Symposium/Einleitung.htm
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-communist-visual-cultures-9780190885533?cc=de&lang=en&
http://www.bauhaus-imaginista.org/articles/6100/hamhung-s-two-orphans-to-konrad-puschel
We are participants of the CCC PhD-Forum* with various educational backgrounds-curatorial studies, visual arts, literature, psychology, music, philosophy, gender studies, cultural studies, design theory. We bring to the PhD-Forum a set of cultural formations, practices, intellectual geographies and research interests departing from different languages. We are artists, researchers, curators, educators as well as doctoral students, PhD-applicants, assistants and professors in the humanities, social sciences, philosophy, design, architecture and contemporary art. Each of us is working individually on a research project before, during and after the PhD. These temporalities encounter one another when we meet. We are here to situate our experiences in the context of the current debates on doctoral research within the art academy. The PhD-Forum is for us, the CCC Research Affiliates, a place where we embody our research processes and create the conditions for a dialogue between our multiple backgrounds to take place. This condition emerges from the various voices, problems and projects of its participants. We gather within the format of the Forum, situated within an institutional framework, while each of our research projects are affiliated differently. Some of the Research Affiliates embarked already on a PhD-project with a university elsewhere, some are preparing a PhD-application, and some are following an independent research path. Situating our individual experiences within a shared format also means to shape the continuous transformation of a group of researchers. We have in common the concern for practice-based research; hence, our individual experiences form a research-community. At the same time, we exchange and transform our perspectives; thus, these shared experiences form a collective subject. There is continuous oscillation between these various zones of experiences from within to outside, and back again. This swinging to and from engenders a network of practices.
The Spanish translation has been realized by Paola Debellis Alvarez. Thanks to Jamie Allen and Robert Hamlin Jackson for a collaborative review of the English version on a lovely afternoon at CCC.
The Research Center for Proxy Politics (RCPP) explores and reflects upon the nature of medial networks and their actors. Between September 2014 and August 2017, the center hosted workshops, lectures and events at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, under the auspices of Hito Steyerl’s Lensbased class. RCPP is run by Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann.
Contributions by Tom McCarthy, Kodwo Eshun, Goldin+Senneby, Brian Holmes, Nick Houde, Jonathan Jung, Laura Katzauer, Boaz Levin, Mikk Madisson, Doreen Mende, Sondra Perry, Oleksiy Radynski, Robert Rapoport, Hito Steyerl, thricedotted, Vera Tollmann, Miloš Trakilović. Design by PWR
Order online: http://www.archivebooks.org/2017/10/17/proxy-politics/
Exhibition from October through December 2023
Public Assembly School in November 2023
The Transcultural Academy “Zukünftigkeiten / Futurities” 2023 of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) at Japanisches Palais continues the canon-critical inquires of the holdings of the SKD. This edition, we will ask: What if we approach the art objects, cultural artefacts and archival material of SKD through their futurities? To put it differently: What can we learn, and unlearn from investigating the collections deeply as a multi-vocal and open knowledge process to shape “ethics of relations” (Bénédicte Savoy/Felwin Sarr) and poethics” (Denise Ferreira da Silva) as poetics of ethics, for a future museum? Together with artists, museum researchers and art historians, designers, architects and students of various international study programs, the Academy will practice methodologies of situated research, transdisciplinary inquiries, transhistoric investi-gations and context-aware positionings in conversation with the museum’s collections.
The focus of the Transcultural Academy 2023 is on the collections holdings as materi-al research repositories of multitudes of futures: We are researching today what was produced and acquired hundreds of years ago, as well as what was captured and concealed. The exhibition itself acts as an instrument for updating, studying and re-viewing history. However, history never repeats itself. Rather, researching and exhib-iting throw their potentials and problematics into the present: the acts of research and exhibiting, expose a future level of history. It emerges from a complex object that is made of materials, narratives, claims to power, as well as the neglected, the violated, the forgotten and repressed. Each act of research and exhibiting activates a particu-lar futurity. It creates a spectrum of futures that researchers, scientists, artists, re-storers, curators, users and visitors are able to activate through their respective ex-pertise, context and positioning. The future is neither completely reinvented nor is the past completely concluded. Rather, futures are fed by the rhythms of the past: doc-uments, inventories, material sciences and archive studies are just as much a part of this as are losses, violence, absence, the undocumented, potentials, the excluded and the uncategorizable.
The participants of the Transcultural Academy “Zukünftigkeiten / Futurities” 2023 consist of students from various universities and art academies, as well as resident artists from the SKD. They will exchange ideas with the SKD on testing what we could call “object-based futures”. By means of transdisciplinary methods and artistic ac-tion, the “chrononormativity” (Elizabeth Freeman), which also underlies the museum-academic categorisation of objects, will be creatively unsettled. The normative order of time defines the duration and sequence of events in the present and future. However, if we look at the history of an object in a way that is detached from the norm, it becomes a dialogue partner, a storyteller, a material subject, a “Lehrstück” or a “radical teaching play” and a process. Since research and exhibiting are of particular importance here, the Transcultural Academy 2023 is dedicated to curatorial methods for making these processes of research visible in the context of the museum complex “towards a worlded public”. Debates around the question of “what is to be learned from the history of an object?” are open to join. What does it mean to unlearn in order to widen and open one's own gaze – “learning to unlearn” as Françoise Vergès has put it? Which various futures lie in the 500-year-old history of the collections? What lan-guages do these futures speak? What is the relationship between history and future in the context of collections as an interwoven process? How can normative divisions between past, present and future be broken down?
Our pedagogy is informed by an object-material approach and the necessity to engage with transdisciplinary methodologies and transcultural processes. Our aim is to understand the entanglements of imperial violence and artistic virtuosity, eurocentrism and worldmaking, display and research as a network of knowledge systems. -- The Transcultural Academy is a project of cross-collection research department at the SKD in conversation with all SKD collections, artists, academic partners, art academies and friends.
In cooperation with the Technische Universität Dresden, the Technische Universität Berlin, the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, the Dutch Art Institute, CCC RP HEAD Genève, the Universität Heidelberg, the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig and others.
Design by Sohyeon Lee and Sören Sandbothe, mentored by Maureen Mooren and Malin Gewinner.
The Missed Seminar metabolizes archival material of the life, thought, writings and relationships of the Black feminist, anthropologist and African-American photographer Eslanda Robeson. Departing from her friendship with the German-Jewish Marxist philosopher Franz Loeser and their encounters in East Berlin in 1963, the curatorial study asks: What if their exchange had been the framework for a seminar to come? The exhibition and set of conversations unfold the unfinished political aspirations of Robeson and Loeser and suggest an intersectional imaginary of anti-fascism, Black feminism and technopolitics.
In conversation, artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen presents the completed version of End Credits (2012–2022). As a haunting monument to the threat of US anti-communism, the audiovisual installation gathers thousands of digitized files collected by the FBI during the Cold War in decades of surveillance of Eslanda Robeson and her husband, the actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson. These entanglements sketch the vision of what decolonizing socialism could have been and what it can still become.
Geopolitical global ruptures around 1989 / 90 mark a moment of a “potential history” (Ariella Aïsha Azoulay) that speaks about an internationalism of the 20th century, yet, in archival ruins of images, sounds, gazes, friendships, collaborations and bodies. The protagonists in these traces are students and workers across generations and geographies. The extension inter∞note in the exhibition’s title marks an independent space-time for reflecting on the possibilities and impossibilities of research practices, contemporary art and curatorial / politics which function under current conditions of the ongoing coloniality of global capitalism. inter∞note can be understood
as a research edition that may take the form of a paper, poster, booklet, interface, or any other format to reflect on the scientific research study Decolonizing Socialism. Entangled Internationalism by para-academic means: Hidden Labour Across ( inter∞note 01) is the first curatorial forum of the transdisciplinary study.
Thanks to Lars Barthel, Barton Byg, Susanne Grossniklaus, Latika Gupta and Kilian Schellbach. Graphic design booklet: Katharina Köhler.
The exhibition hidden labor across (inter∞note 01) relates to the research study Decolonizing Socialism. Entangled Internationalism (SNFS) and is part of the project K—V Encyclopedia of the KV — Verein für zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig e.V. with kind support by Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen, Kulturamt der Stadt Leipzig and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNFS).
Hamhung’s Two Orphans borrows its title from a chapter of the cine-essay Coréennes (1959) by Chris Marker for proposing to trace the transformation of the Bauhaus’s relevance from its prewar internationalist modernity into elements of the GDR’s socialist internationalism when architecture operated as a state-crafting instrument during the global Cold War.
To strike out "les indiennes" in the exhibition’s title marks the deep past of these textiles as value-making systems of the colonial matrix of global capitalism, both, in distance as well as proximity, with ongoing practices of decolonization.
With artists’ contributions, students’ voicings and conversations by Ramon Amaro, Maïté Chénière, Zasha Colah, Jean Dutoit Collective, Harun Farocki, Mathilde Gaugué, Alexander Gence, Léa Genoud, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Lauren Huret, JooYoung Hwang, Doreen Mende, Noémi Michel, Clara Nissim, Tabita Rezaire, Julie Robiolle, Laila Torres Mendieta, Françoise Vergès, Grant Watson, Fatima Wegmann.
The research-exhibition The many voices of "les indiennes" has been conceptualized in the Curatorial / Politics seminar of the CCC Research-based Master at the Department of Visual Arts at HEAD Genève between 2018/19 and 2020.
January 18 through February 02, 2019
Wed through Sat, 2 to 7pm
Opening reception: Thursday, January 17th, 2019, 6pm
The exhibition TRANSIT by the CCC Research-based Master Program presents a selection of research projects developed by current students and graduates, as well as collective articulations realized in the context of project seminars since 2016.
With Vinit Argawal, Shima Asa, Aurélien Ballif, Marie van Berchem, Ghalas Charara, Maïté Chénière, Marguerite Davenport, Nadia Elamly, Alice Escorel Boudreau, Boris Fernandez, Léa Gallon, Léa Genoud, Gaël Goy, Max Hauri, Joo Young Hwang, Camille Kaiser, Roland Mbessa, Raphaëlle Mueller, Diego Orihuela, Laila Torres Mendieta, Camilla Paolino, Julia Pêcheur, Chloe Sugden, Felix Toro, Fatima Wegmann-Guinassi, Tina Wetchy, Yael Wicki and Dan Wu. The exhibition has been conceptualized by Doreen Mende, with graphic design by Loana Gatti.
LiveInYourHead
Exhibition space of the Visual Arts Department
HEAD – Genève
Bâtiment Général-Dufour
Rue de Hesse 5
CH-1204 Geneva
Transit is the title of a novel by Anna Seghers published in 1944. The novel captures her in-transit stay in Marseille under the German occupation during WWII, and contains word-images that speak to the experience of escape, exile, refusal and refuge. The reading of Segher’s Transit during a voyage d’études to Marseille (March 2018) provided a research tool to enter the city. Transit also portrays, allegorically speaking, the time dedicated to a Master program, in an art school, in Europe. The transit begins with “a magic paper, a new invitation”, or in other words: the admission, whereby students are granted a “limited-residence permit” for usually two years. A study program is therefore a transit of sorts, marked by the “beautiful struggle” (Ta-Nehisi Coates) to know more, differently, and to transform.
In order to accommodate the different natures of doing research in this study context and beyond, the curatorial approach proposes three layers to enter the exhibition: collective trajectories, individual research projects and a mobile cart.
TRANSIT coincides with the exhibition Nothing is something (to an observer) by Work.Master which will open at LiveInYourHead at the same time. Both exhibitions take place in the framework of the HEAD Genève Open Days 2019 at the Visual Arts Department.
The Travelling Communiqué project undertakes a durational investigation into the photographic archive of the presidential Photo Service of the Yugoslav Partisan leader and statesman Josip Broz Tito, through a range of contemporary practices, from art, through theory, history, architecture, typography, to cinema and education. The project’s point of entry into the archive of approximately 300,000 photographic records, permanently housed at the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade, is the collection of 1,200 photographs taken during the first Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), held in Belgrade from 1st to 6th September in 1961, at the moment of an acute Cold War crisis.
Travelling Communiqué fosters a t rans-disciplinary way of working together towards the idea of political friendship. At work since 2012, it has been initiating its own conditions of production within current globalising forces. Most of the exposed contributions are new materials, ideas and concepts as consequences of joint research processes that are translated into the space of exhibiting: projects, proposals and films are equal to fragile vocabularies, educational sessions, students’ work, group constellations and means of articulation still to arrive.
Le Master de Recherche CCC RP [les pratiques de recherche critiques, curatoriales, cybernétiques, conceptuelles, contemporaines, communales] du département Arts Visuels de la HEAD Genève est un programme pluridisciplinaire, transdisciplinaire, transnational et multilingue qui s'attache à exprimer le spécifique dans la condition mondiale contemporaine. Le programme forme les étudiant•e•x•s (venant de formations artistiques ou non) au développement d'une méthodologie située pour matérialiser, par les moyens de l'artexpérimentation, un projet de recherche. Les champs d'application futurs des étudiant•e•x•s sont l'art contemporain, les projets curatoriaux, les organismes extra-gouvernementaux, les collaborations avec la recherche scientifique, les musées, l'activisme, les plateformes communautaires, les plateformes auto-gérées, les droits humains ou les doctorats centrés sur la pratique. Les langues du séminaire sont l'anglais et le français. L'année académique 2021/22 circule autour des questions de transmission d'un processus de recherche, vers une émergence publique, aux côtés des processus de "décolonisation, qui est le seul nom propre de la justice." (Denise Ferreira da Silva, 2018).
Seminar languages are English and French.
The CCC Public Seminar in 2020/21 will be organized by the Theory Fiction seminar and focus on art research practices mobilizing science fiction literature, futurity and the politics of alienation. In 2020/21 the publishing platform CCC TERMS/ES also plans to participate in P.A.G.E.S. book fair 11-13 December 2020. Seminar languages are English and French.
Le Master de Recherche CCC RP [les pratiques de recherche critiques, curatoriales, cybernétiques, conceptuelles, contemporaines, communales] du département Arts Visuels de la HEAD Genève est un programme pluridisciplinaire, transdisciplinaire, transnational et multilingue qui s'attache à exprimer le spécifique dans la condition mondiale contemporaine. Le programme forme les étudiant·e·x·s (venant de formations artistiques ou non) au développement d'une méthodologie pour situer et matérialiser, par les moyens de l'art, un projet de recherche multicouche. Les champs d'application futurs des étudiant·e·x·s sont l'art contemporain, les projets curatoriaux, les organismes extra-gouvernementaux, les collaborations avec la recherche scientifique, les musées, l'activisme, les plateformes communautaires, les plateformes auto-gérées, les droits humains ou les doctorats centrés sur la pratique.
Le séminaire public du CCC en 2020/21 sera organisé par le séminaire Theory Fiction et se concentrera sur les pratiques de recherche artistique mobilisant la littérature de science-fiction, l'avenir et la politique d'aliénation. En 2020/21, la plateforme d'édition CCC TERMS/ES prévoit également de participer à la foire du livre P.A.G.E.S. du 11 au 13 décembre 2020. Les langues du séminaire sont l'anglais et le français.
In 2019/20, the CCC will embark on the concept of art research mobilizing a network of “advanced practices” (Irit Rogoff/Florian Schneider, 2018) through the fields of international contemporary art via the program’s various pedagogical formats.
The CCC Research-based Master of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD Genève is a cross-disciplinary, transnational and multilingual study program with focus on voicing the contemporary condition of globalities. It trains students (with art and non-art backgrounds) to develop a methodology for situating and materialising a multi-layered research project by the means of art. The student's future operational fields are contemporary art, curatorial projects, extra-governmental entities, scientific research collaborations, museums, activism, social platforms, self-organised platforms, human rights activities, or a practice-based PhD. Beside the specificities of non-public seminars, CCC will think in 2018/19 with the term data behaviourism as a contemporary concern. Furthermore, 2018/19 will see the CCC PUBLIC THOUGHT as a new umbrella for various transversal activities with students, faculty members, external guests and (para-)institutional collaborations. The year 2018/19 will continue also CCC TERMS/ES by publishing further edition. Seminar languages are English and French.
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"Il y a quelque chose de monstrueux, d’hybride et de vibrant dans l’air, chers lecteurs, je sens de nouvelles idées qui viennent. Nous ne savons simplement pas encore ce que ce corpus peut faire." - Rosi Braidotti, in: The Society of Undutiful Daughters, 2012.
Le Master de Recherche CCC du département Arts Visuels de la HEAD Genève est un programme pluridisciplinaire, transdisciplinaire, transnational et multilingue qui s'attache à exprimer la condition mondiale contemporaine. Le programme forme les étudiants (venant de formations artistiques ou non) au développement d'une méthodologie pour situer et matérialiser, par les moyens de l'art, un projet de recherche multicouche. Les champs d'application futurs des étudiants sont l'art contemporain, les projets curatoriaux, les organismes extra-gouvernementaux, les collaborations avec la recherche scientifique, les musées, l'activisme, les plateformes communautaires, les plateformes auto-gérées, les droits humains ou les doctorats centrés sur la pratique. Au-delà des spécificités de chaque séminaire, le CCC concevra l'année 2018/19 au travers de la problématique contemporaine du data behaviourism. De plus, 2018/19 verra le nouveau CCC PUBLIC THOUGHT servir de plateforme publique aux activités transverses des étudiants, des membres de l'équipe, des invités externes et des collaborations (para-)institutionnelles. De nouvelles publications de TERM/ES verront le jour en 2018/19. Les séminaires sont enseignés en anglais et en français.
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Le CCC est le Master de recherche du département Arts Visuels de la HEAD. L'année académique 2017/18 du CCC s'intéressera particulièrement à la multiplicité des pratiques de la recherche en art. C'est dans ce contexte que s'inscrit le séminaire public du CCC intitulé " Des pratiques ". Celui-ci, alimenté par les contributions des membres du programme et invités, aura lieu ponctuellement tout au long de l'année et sera chaque fois rattaché à l'un des séminaires du programme. L'année 2017/18 du CCC travaillera aussi sur la seconde (voire troisième) édition de TERMS/ES, imaginée comme publication papier/en ligne et comme outil pédagogique destiné à rendre public les processus de recherche propres aux séminaires du programme. Les séminaires sont enseignés en anglais et en français.
The CCC is the Research-Based Master Program at HEAD in Geneva. Participants are students of art and non-art backgrounds who want to work on a research project in a transdisciplinary environment. By building its pedagogy on the idea of trans-disciplinarity, the Program fosters thinking and working conditions that are composed of different practices, geographies, languages, and work-approaches to process an original research proposal in the context of an art academy.
During the two-years graduate studies, the Program helps the candidates – collectively and individually – to render more precisely an own position from within his/her project by various means of research, text-work and self-reflection.
Research methodologies, artistic thinking and public display strategies operate today in profoundly shifting geospatial and techno-political constellations. Globalisation, migration, computation and climate are a few of the keywords that point to reordering processes on a planetary scale within contemporary societies.
How can we make our way in the world through a situational understanding of our position within complexity? Where is the location from which to speak, in-between systems, technologies, generations, time-zones, borders and entangled histories? What happens to ‘knowledge’ in a socio-technological epoch that predominately calculates the unknown into capital growth? If we are ‘planetary subjects rather than global agents’ (Gayatri Spivak), then our histories entangle on the street, through processes of transitional justice or during the work of translation.
If the art of the 20th century produced a space to analyse social and political realities, then the art of the 21st century is the space to activate new vocabularies as realities inside of superstructures.
The bilingual (English/French) two-years Master Program at HEAD – Geneva School of Art and Design welcomes any candidate that wishes to embark upon an original research project by contemporary means. The Program’s trans-disciplinary environment addresses future researchers from any cultural and educational background committed to art-led thinking processes.
Monday, October 26, 2015, 10am–9pm
Tuesday, October 27, 10am–6pm
HEAD Geneva, Boulevard Helvétique 9, 1205 Geneva, second floor, salle 27, CCC seminar room
The two-days UNMASTER CLASS: COMMITTEES OF DECOLONIZATION proposes an experimental setting to imagine a weakening United Nations in the context of contemporary independence struggles. How can we critically think the UN as a functioning intergovernmental organization in the light of ongoing independence processes in so-called ‘non-self-governing territories’ that are subject to decolonizing processes of the present? How is it possible to think of a vocabulary to 'unmaster' the United Nation’s definition of sovereignty by using trans-disciplinary processes to analyse globally networked environmental-material histories. How can we research the entanglement of geographies, commodities and technologies? How is it possible for a group of students that gather in Geneva in an art academy to learn to understand the entanglement between 'non-self-governing territories’ and Switzerland (Geneva in particular) as a set of global infrastructures? Which ‘non-self-governing territories’ exist inside of Europe? Which relations do our everyday lives have to ‘non-self-governing territories’ in the world?
Conceived in the context of POOL.CH
www.master-platform.ch
In the academic year 2015/16, the curriculum of CCC relates to the idea of ‘transition’ with regard to knowledge processes. The projects / seminar modules of the trans- disciplinary curriculum are built around the two main bodies of the research-based study programme: Research Practice and Situated Art Practices provide the spaces for students to discuss their projects. Around the two mains bodies are seminars in Theory Fiction, Curatorial, Cultural Studies, Political Studies, Critical Theory and the Reading Group that inform the students’ research based projects. 2015/16 is framed by the one- year colloquium Thinking under Turbulence that invites guests to be in conversation with the CCC. It consists of public sessions open to everyone and closed sessions for all students of CCC. The invited guests contribute to all seminars and modules of the curriculum.
STUDENTS
MASTER 1 : AURÉLIEN BALLIF, NAOUEL BEN AZIZA, MARIE BERTHOUT VAN BERCHEM, CHOI DUKE, MARGUERITE DAVENPORT, JULIA PECHEUR, VALÉRIE VILAREM, TINA WETCHY, YAEL WICKI. MASTER 2 : MANDARAVA BRICAIRE, YASMEEN CHAUDHRY, ANA RAQUEL ERMIDA GOMES, EMMANUELLE ESMAIL-ZAVIEH, CAMILLE KAISER, CHARLYNE KOLLY, ALBA LAGE, VIOLA LUKACS, DIEGO ORIHUELA, CAMILLA PAOLINO, CHARLES-ELIE PAYRE, GENEVIÈVE ROMANG, DRAGOS TARA. MASTER EQUIVALENCE : RAPHAELLE MUELLER, ANTOINETTE SCHEIDEGGER SCHAER, STÉPHANIE SERRA
FACULTY AND GUESTS
RESPONSIBLE PROFESSOR : DOREEN MENDE. ASSOCIATE PROFESSORS : PIERRE HAZAN, GENE RAY, ANNE-JULIE RACCOURSIER. VISITING PROFESSORS : KODWO ESHUN, MARION VON OSTEN; AYMON KREIL, DENIS PERNET. HONORARY PROFESSOR : CATHERINE QUELOZ. ASSISANTS : CÉCILE BOSS, ERIC PHILIPPOZ, JANIS SCHRÖDER. GUESTS : GILAD BEN-NUN, ISABELLE BENOIT, YANN CHATEIGNÉ, ILANA SALAMA ORTAR, URSULA BIEMANN, GRANT WATSON, FRANÇOISE VERGÈS, ARMIN LINKE, EYAL WEIZMAN, AND OTHERS
The reading group will focus on the notion of violence. It does not address the visual representation of violence in arts and mass media. Instead, Mende will bring into discussion violence not as a negative force per se but rather as a double-bind that indicates a relation between the means of resistance and the system of governance. Violence itself is a double-bind. This duplication is a tricky condition. It shall help to work out a possible approach to the act of making public / public utterance / protest / refusal that moves away from an exhibition of pure means and away from the concept of transparency as a moral instance. This approach entangles with the practice of an artist and an exhibition maker in which Mende sees a violence in exhibiting that is enacted upon that which is exposed; this violence arrives from a systemic structure in exhibiting through its faculties of making public. And then there is a potential of violence through the act of exposure that attempts to find means of articulation which may be not possessed by the regimes of governance but acting from within. In order to unfold a thinking around violence and the space of exposure, we will engage in readings that relate to image production, architecture, anthropology, philosophy, and writing. Texts will be read by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Pierre Clastres, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Genet, Éduard Glissant, Maria-José Mondzain, Bernhard Tschumi, among others.
Contributors and interlocutors to Thinking under Turbulence are Nabil Ahmed, Ursula Biemann, Yann Chateigné, Laboria Cuboniks/Helen Hester, Gregory Dapra, Kodwo Eshun, Anselm Franke, Laure Giletti, Fabien Giraud, Pierre Hazan, Yoneda Lemma, Armin Linke, Doreen Mende, Eric Philippoz, Griselda Pollock, farid rakun (ruangrupa), Gene Ray, Ida Soulard, Françoise Vergès and Eyal Weizman, among others, in conversation with CCC students 2015/16 Aurélien Ballif, Naouel Ben Aziza, Marie Van Berchem, Mandarava Bricaire, Duke Choi, Marguerite Davenport, Ana Raquel Ermida Gomes, Emmanuelle Esmail-Zavieh, Camille Kaiser, Charlyne Kolly, Alba Lage, Viola Lukács, Raphaëlle Mueller, Diego Orihuela, Camilla Paolino, Charles-Elie Payré, Julia Pecheur, Geneviève Romang, Stéphanie Serra, Dragos Tara, Adelina Tsagkari, Tina Wetchy and Yael Wicki. All contributions are original material in 192 pages.
Published by CCC/HEAD Geneva and Motto Books. Edited by Doreen Mende, 2017.