Imre Hofmann liest Adornos und Horkheimers "Dialektik der Aufklärung" am Stück.

Und er hört erst auf, wenn das Buch zu Ende ist
oder wenn alle gegangen sind
oder wenn er nicht mehr kann
oder wenn ihm jemand ein angemessenes Schweigegeld bezahlt.

Imre Hofmann liest Roland Barthes' "Mythen des Alltags" am Stück.

Und er hört erst auf, wenn das Buch zu Ende ist
oder wenn alle gegangen sind
oder wenn er nicht mehr kann
oder wenn ihm jemand ein angemessenes Schweigegeld bezahlt.

Imre Hofmann liest Charles Taylors "Das Unbehagen an der Moderne" am Stück.

Und er hört erst auf, wenn das Buch zu Ende ist
oder wenn alle gegangen sind
oder wenn er nicht mehr kann
oder wenn ihm jemand ein angemessenes Schweigegeld bezahlt.

Der in Brüssel und Berlin lebende Schriftsteller und bildende Künstler Karl Larsson schwankt mit seinen Arbeiten zwischen Literatur, konkreter Poesie, Skulptur, Installation und Performances. Er legt Spuren, spielt auf historische Referenzen an, um diese auch gleich wieder zu verwischen.


In seiner Ausstellung "The Double of the Object is that I Desire it" hat Karl Larsson eine bühnenhafte Situation aus Postern, Bronzeskulpturen und einen Teppich erschaffen, die eine offene Erzählung andeuten.


Öffnungszeiten: Do und Fr 13 - 19, Sa 12 - 17 Uhr.


Corner College freut sich auf Ihren Besuch!

Charlotte Cheetham is a french curator of graphic design and runs the blog manystuff.org. She will visit Corner College and have a lecture about her exploration and promotion of graphic design. Her practice, constantly redefined, is based on an experimental approach embodied in publishing experiences, in exhibition moments, and in a flow of information over the Internet. Working on interpretation, on reinterpretation, she is interested in the thinking process - multi-disciplinary, poetic, experimental and surprising - that leads to the final "form".

If the japanese collective Gutai is more or less known internationnally, most generally as filling the gap in an evolutive vision of history of art between "action painting" and performance, many major collectives and avant-garde experiments in Japan (as Mavo, Jikken kobo, Zero Dimension, The Play, Hi Red Center) are still today quite unknown outside Japan. This lecture will present some of the many avant-garde developments that took place in Japan since the start of the twentieth century, and try to highlight their fonctionning and connections with artists and collective outside Japan.

The lecture will be framed by several japanese film screenings at AP News.

Lecture and screenings are based on a collaboration of AP News and Corner College.

Das Authentische hat auch in China Konjunktur. In Zeiten der Globalisierung mit ihrem rasanten Verschleiss an ästhetischen Vorbildern und immer kürzeren Frequenzen der Erneuerung, stellen sich Fragen nach Vorbildern und Identität. Der Westen ist schnell mit oberflächlicher Kritik an den echten und vermeintlichen Kopien, die sich im Wildwuchs des chinesischen Aufstiegs zur Weltmacht finden lassen. Doch sind diese Stilblüten wirklich repräsentativ? Oft liefern ausländische Kollegen ihren zweiten Aufguss alter Konzepte, zitieren sich selbst oder transferieren tradierte Typen aus der eigenen Heimat.

Ein Diskurs auf Augenhöhe, der die lokalen Fragen ernst nimmt und unvoreingenommen nach neuen Lösungen sucht, ist dagegen selten anzutreffen. In manchen Fällen mag das kopierfähige Modell die richtige Antwort sein, in anderen die Entwicklung neuer Strategien und die Suche nach angepassten Raumstrukturen, die einer sich entwickelnden Gesellschaft Rechnung tragen. Im Zeitalter der Collage, der Versatzstücke und Zitate, der „Inspiration“ durch fremde Kulturen und der eitlen „Trendsetter“-Architektur, bedarf es genauer Analysen und unvoreingenommener Lösungen, die jenseits hergebrachter Vorbilder mit Neugier und Offenheit den Weg für eine kulturelle Erweiterung suchen. Doch welche Konzepte sind tragfähig im neuen China? Welche kritische Haltung entwickelt sich und mit welchen Argumenten wird sie vorgetragen? Gibt es Lösungen jenseits dogmatischer Festlegungen die auch für die westliche Entwicklung von Belang sein könnten? Schlicht, können wir von China lernen?

In Zusammenarbeit mit Public City.

Italian writer, curator and artist Alfredo Cramerotti will give an introduction in his book "Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform Without Informing". Recognising the “blurring of margins between artistic and information practices” as a main feature in contemporary culture, Cramerotti sets out the Who, What, Where, When and How, and Why of Aesthetic Journalism.

Cramerotti identifies this “'investigative approach” in contemporary art and photography as the use of fieldwork, reportage, interviews, document analysis, graphic mapping and information distribution. He cites a number of artists who employ these strategies: Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, Lukas Einsele, Laura Horelli, Renzo Martens, Alfredo Jaar, Renée Green, The Atlas Group/Walid Raad and Bruno Serralogue. For Cramerotti, Aesthetic Journalism implies the critical use of documentary techniques and journalistic methods where the medium itself undergoes questioning. He posits that aesthetics, understood as a “process in which we open up our sensibility to the diversity of the forms of nature (and manmade environment)” can open up the mechanisms of art and media to expose the limitations of photojournalism, documentation and the ethics of representation. In doing so, Aesthetic Journalism renders productive readings of reality, information, fact, fiction and objectivity.

The concepts outlined in the book have been a key tool in the development of the Chamber of Public Secrets’ curatorial approach for the 8th edition of Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art: Manifesta 8 taking place in the region of Murcia, Spain.

From March till July 2011 Dutch graphic designers Bart de Baets (Knokke, Belgium, 1979) and Sandra Kassenaar (Johannesburg, South Africa, 1982) were resident artists at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo.

Due to the recent events in Egypt and especially its capitol, their initial date of arrival on the 1st of February 2011 was postponed for a month. Being stunned by the political tidal wave flooding the country, the resignation of Hosni Mubarak and the phenomenon of having a curfew — something they had only heard of in World War II stories — the designers found themselves gazing from the sidelines, not knowing how exactly to react to all of this. They asked themselves ‘Would it be arrogant to confront the Egyptians with our assumptions? And ‘isn’t it ignorant to pretend to have a nose bleed?’

Their unclear position and the new situation the country found itself in proved to be an inspiring discovery, which eventually lead to the project "Success and Uncertainty." The title of this work is an existing headline taken from the 12th of February 2011 front page of "The Evansville Courier & Press," a local Indiana newspaper reporting Mubarak’s resignation as the president of Egypt.



On Wednesday June 1st 2011 a lightbox was hung outside the Townhouse Gallery that announced the start of the project and showcased the first of twenty-one posters. During the month of June 2011, each day a new poster was presented, generating a growing exhibition. The daily changing posters could be seen both in- and outside of the gallery and — just like newspapers — showed bold statements and gruesome facts, next to light-hearted messages, such as casual observations and rumours that caught Sandra and Bart’s attention during their residency. The content provided by both therefore created a clash of information that will influence the way one reads a poster. It was this constant dialogue between the designers that lead to "Success and Uncertainty."

http://www.successanduncertainty.wordpress.com

Organized in collaboration with Motto Zürich.

David will introduce some historical artists' publications and trace one origin story for this genre of experimental books. It won't be a full history - maybe a one hour chapter from a 10 part drama mini-series - but there will be a lot of action and adventure. In the mix will be content from three recent shows that he has assembled from the library collection at MoMA - Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-1974, Scenes from Zagreb and Millennium Magazine.

For a long time, Letterism – established by Isidore Isou – has remained the unknown avant-garde of European Post-war art. Using copies and documents, A Paradise of Letters looks at two aspects of the movement’s production: their notion of a ”metagraphic” or ”hypergraphic” novel, and their experiments with a ”discrepant”, ”chiseling” and ”nuclear” cinema. The display and accompanying lectures will ask the speculative, hypothetical question: what would be the result if these largely forgotten practices were reinscribed into the narrative of post-war poetry, art and cinema?



A Paradise of Letters is organized by Jonas (J) Magnusson and Kim West. Both will give a lecture (each 1h) about the following topics:

”Hypergraphics, or the art of re-reading and re-writing our world-text” by Jonas (J) Magnusson

Jonas (J) Magnusson will discuss the hypergraphic novels by Isidore Isou (Les Journaux des Dieux, ”The God's Diaries”, 1950; Initiation à la haute Volupté, ”Initiation to High Voluptuousness”, 1960; Jonas ou le corps à la recherche de son âme, ”Jonah, or the Body Searching for its Soul”, 1984), Gabriel Pomerand (Saint Ghetto des Prêts, ”St Ghetto of the Loans”, 1950) and Maurice Lemaître (Canailles, ”Riff-raff”, 1950).
Metagraphics (or post-writing), invented by Isodore Isou in 1950, and four years later renamed hypergraphics (or super-writing), aimed both at subverting the novel as it was known at the time, and at extending Letterist painting to the totality of characters of all writing systems in their existing or invented transcriptions, seen through their ideographic, lexical and alphabetic categories.

”Nuclear cinema: Letterist film experiments” by Kim West

With their first Letterist films, Traité de bave et d’éternité and Le film est déjà commencé? (both 1951), Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître wanted to radically extend cinema’s scope of possibilities. Scratching the film frames, separating images and sounds, voices and bodies, and employing the cinema theater as an aesthetic element, they introduced a number of innovative techniques that predated the experiments of ”structural” and ”expanded” cinema, as well as the renegotiations of film language by the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers.
In his combined lecture and screening, Kim West will discuss Isou’s and Lemaître’s classic films, as well as the work of other Letterist filmmakers such as Marc’O (”Nuclear Cinema”, 1952, Closed Vision, 1954, Les Idoles, 1968), Gil Wolman (L’anti-concept, 1952), and Roland Sabatier (such as Pensiez-vous (vraiment) voir un film de Roland Sabatier?, 1973).



Opening hours: Thursday and Friday, 5-7pm; Saturday, 12am-5pm

The project is made with support by Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Allianz Kulturstiftung.

As this year's Romanian Pavilion is the talk of the town and has made the "Best Pavilions" list of numerous critics, while several major artists and galleries from Romania are on view at Art Basel, the perception might be that the Romanian art scene is strong and thriving. But major challenges and obstacles are more the reality. Olga Stefan will present the political and cultural context in Romania, selections of work by practicing artists and initiatives, as well as the current debates and issues affecting the art scene.

Though hip hop music and culture was first born on the poverty stricken streets of the Bronx, it's spread across demographics in the four decades since. Mostly this has been to the betterment of the culture, though recent shifts in the media and music industries have resulted in a widening of the gap between rap's haves and its have nots. Join us for a conversation about American rap music and how commerce, technology and classism is changing its face.

In den 1930er Jahre entstanden in Italien Bauwerke, die dem Razionalismo, also etwas vereinfacht gesprochen der italienischen Variante des Internationalen Stils zuzuordnen sind. Heute sind diese Gebäude ihrer ideologischen Bedeutung enthoben, nicht aber ihrer funktionalen. Sie sind weiterhin Postämter, Bahnhöfe, Kindergärten oder Ministerien. Wohin verschwinden die alten politischen Konnotationen in der postfaschistischen Gesellschaft? Sind die Zeichen noch die gleichen, bedeuten nur etwas anderes oder sind sie leer und wieder arbiträr geworden? Aber willkürlich waren sie doch schon immer. Eiko Grimbergs Buch "Future History" (Kodoji Press, 2013) spricht über Architektur, die den ideologisch-politischen Rahmen, dessen Produkt sie einst war, überlebt hat. Eine Untersuchung der Form und ihres politischen Gebrauchs.

Anschliessend an die Präsentation findet ein Gespräch zwischen Eiko Grimberg und Stefan Wagner (Corner College) statt. Unsere Bar steht mit kleinen Häppchen später offen.

Wir freuen uns auf Ihren Besuch!

Eiko Grimberg, Winfried Heininger (Kodoji Press), Corner College-Team

Writing rapidly, in the last year of his life, and conscious of a terminal illness, the distinguished anthropologist Alfred Gell developed a highly original approach to the anthropology of art. The topic had been neglected for over a century, in spite of the fashion for primitivism within the art world, as anthropology had focused its attention on questions such as kinship systems. What Gell suggested was an approach called "methodological philistinism", by which art is treated not so much as an expression of genius or cultivated taste, but rather as a field of animism and ritual. His approach, as laid out in the posthumous "Art and Agency" (1998) has sweeping implications for questions of the role of aesthetics, the marginality of ornament, and cross-cultural theories of art. A resurgence of interest in Gell's work is currently to be seen in anthropology, and his work is increasingly being applied in other fields. This lecture will introduce "methodological philistinism", abduction, agency, and ornament, with the aid of pictures, explain their importance, and show how Gell's theory might be used to resolve or aggravate some contemporary controversies in the fine arts.

Since many tools and wetware products to create bio-labs have become affordable, artists have experimented with bio-technologies. Hence, bio-art has established itself as the latest trend in the field of media art. However, this artistic production is extremely heterogeneous, encompassing the spectacular works of Eduardo Kac and SymbioticA, the thought-provoking ones of Paul Vanouse and the Critical Art Ensemble, or again the participative and performative activities of Hackteria, for instance. How have these
practices been described and examined by critics and historians? How were they presented in institutions, museums and festivals? Furthermore, what are the future challenges for the artists engaging in biotechnologies? Through the discussion of a selection of works, exhibitions and essays, I will attempt to answer these questions and offer a possible, critical perspective on bio-art and its reception.

The presentation is part of a series on the topic of Bioart organized by Hackteria Society and Corner College.

In the 1980s a transformation took place in the way that global art was shown and discussed. Retrospectively, this can also be seen as a period of the invention of an entirely new anthropology of art, in particular by Alfred Gell, around whose work there is a currently a resurgence of interest. The exhibition ART/artifact, held at the Centre for African Art New York in 1988, is crucial to this new history of the development of global art. It is perhaps the strongest example of an attempt to test the exhibition as a machine for generating ideological consensus. Many exhibitions claim to be ‘experiments’, but ART/artifact has a stronger claim to this status than most, as it set out to reveal the methods by which museums endowed objects with the status of being either artworks, or evidence. It also acts as the trigger for one of the most provocative and unusual cross-cultural ontologies of art ever to be devised: Alfred Gell's argument that the art object is, quite literally, a kind of cognitive trap.

Such discussions may seem arcane, but the development of what has become known as the ‘ontological turn’ in the work of Bruno Latour, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Phillippe Descola owes much to Gell’s posthumous classic Art & Agency, and encourages a closer examination of the genesis of Gell’s own ideas. The profusion of interest in anthropological ontology, in combination with the dilemmas of contemporary curating, provides dual motivation for a closer reading of early Gell, as well as the careful historicisation of his ideas.

This is the second lecture Adam Jaspers is giving about Alfred Gell. First took place in December 2013 at Corner College.

Fernand Baudin (1918-2005) is a Belgian book designer, or “typographiste” as he likes to call himself. Baudin was an author, teacher and lecturer, active in organisations like the Rencontres de Lure and Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI). Next to an extensive correspondence with international designers of his time (Stanley Morison, Gerrit Noordzij, John Dreyfus… among many others), Fernand Baudin is the author of the books How Typography Works (and why it is important) and The Gutenberg Effect, and has written essays in Belgian and international periodicals (Arts et techniques graphiques, Cahiers GUTenberg, Letterletter, Visible Language) about typography and design. Loraine Furter, coordinator of the Fernand Baudin Prize- the Belgian Most Beautiful Books Prize will focus on a recurring topic in Baudins work: the evolution of writing and designing tools and their influence on communication and culture.

'the address will be dance and choreography and the moving museum - a genealogy - the time of movement is now - it's fun and not only at all for dance people it's more to understand why choreography now and how it is located in contemporary contexts. ' Mårten (ref. email from Mårten)

(Following recent talks elsewhere;) Mårten Spångberg may articulate a genealogy of hijacking, and uses the notion as a conceptual path to understand contemporary phenomena and identify tendencies within the current neoliberal regime. “What if Derrida decided for hijacking instead of friendship. What if Barthes was in to the poetics of hijacking instead of a lover’s discourse. What if Badiou was into hijacking instead of anything else... It’s a dark activity—only at it’s darkest can it relieve us from the suffering".

The evening is organized by Magnhild Fossum.

The artist Teresa Chen (www.teresachen.ch) began a dissertation as a way to extend her own artistic practice by exploring how contemporary visual artists – especially women with (East) Asian diasporic backgrounds – express ideas or meanings about Otherness and issues of belonging in their art. Using proposed set of categories, her methodology was a comparative analysis of selected pairs of artists – where at least one was a woman artist of (East) Asian diasporic background. The results of her research confirmed the significance of cultural, historical, and geographic experiences on both the conception and reception of visual art and indicated that various artistic strategies have the potential to expose and undermine culturally constructed meanings of difference. In this lecture, she outlines some of the main arguments and themes from her research.

Dr. Teresa Chen

Die Übertragung von menschlichen Handlungen und Denkvorgängen auf Maschinen funktioniert immer dann, wenn sich Handlung und Denken mittels Abstraktion in eine Folge von elementaren und rekombinierbaren Teilaktivitäten zerlegen lassen, also wenn menschliche Handlungen und Denkprozesse als Algorithmen entkörperlicht und dekontextualisert werden können. In welcher Weise diese elementaren und rekombinierbaren Teilaktivitäten zu beschreiben sind, ist jedoch keinesfalls eindeutig zu fassen. So spricht etwa der Kybernetiker Gotthard Günther im Kontext der Maschine von Serien mit unterschiedlichen Freiheitsgraden, wobei er den Konzepten der "Kausalität" und der "Magie" in diesem Zusammenhang die extremen Pole zuweist. Für Günther sind also durchaus "Maschinen" denkbar, die sich allein in magischen Bezugssystemen konstituieren und damit selbst den basalsten Grundlagen der klassischen Kybernetik widersprechen würden. In meinem Vortrag werde ich, ausgehend von Günthers Einordnung, einen Maschinenbegriff skizzieren, in dessen Zusammenhang statische Serialisierungen von Handlungs- und Denkvorgängen in Frage gestellt sowie Spielräume für alternative Verkettungen und somit "Funktionsstrukturen" eröffnet werden. Ziel wird es hierbei sein den Maschinenbegriff in einer Weise scharf zu stellen, dass mittels diesem selbst aktuell relevante künstlerische Phänomene interpretiert werden können.

This lecture is part of the additional program contextualizing and expanding the discourse of the exhibition Spooky Action at a Distance. Artes Mechanicae & Witch's Cradle, which opens on 23 April and closes on 22 May 2015.

18:30h Boris Magrini
Being immortal, again

Recent developments in artificial intelligence, biotechnologies and robotics have produced a body of speculative journalism depicting visions of our future society that are deeply embedded in transhuman (or even posthuman) ideologies. The implementation of global connectivity, social networks and multiplayer online games offered new tools for artists to create works mimicking similar narratives while contributing to a critical discussion of these visionary prophecies. Between fictions and predictions, how are artists helping to shape and imagine our future immortality?



19:30h Rayelle Niemann
Syria's uprising on-line
perspectives on the massive quantity of imagery, on ethics, icons, and narrations, methodology of archiving and memorising






Followed by a discussion with Boris Magrini, Rayelle Niemann and the audience.

Viktor Misiano is invited to Corner College in the context of his curatorial visit to Zurich for the upcoming project at the National Center for Contemporary Arts in Moscow about The Human Condition. As we have the opportunity to have Viktor Misiano with us, we would like to open a discussion on independent curatorial work, philosophical-social-political thoughts on independent practices of curating and writing, what it means to work independently, what role independent intellectuals could play in Russia and globally in relation to the concept of democracy.

Viktor Misiano is an independent curator, publisher, art theoretician and critic, living in Moscow.

From 1980 to 1990 he was a curator of contemporary art at the Pushkin National Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. From 1992 to 1997 he was the director of the Center for Contemporary Art (CAC) in Moscow. He curated the Russian participation in the Istanbul Biennale (1992), the Venice Biennale (1995, 2003, and 2005), the São Paulo Biennale (2002, 2004), and the Valencia Biennale (2001). He was on the curatorial team for the Manifesta I in Rotterdam in 1996. In 1993 he was a founder of the Moscow Art Magazine (Moscow) and has been its editor-in-chief ever since; in 2003 he was a founder of the «Manifesta Journal: Journal of Contemporary Curatorship» (Amsterdam) and has been an editor there since 2011. In 2005 he curated the first Central Asian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2007 he realized the large scale exhibition project «Progressive Nostalgia: Art from the Former USSR» in the Centro per l’arte contemporanea, Prato (Italy); the Benaki Museum, Athens; KUMU, Tallinn and KIASMA, Helsinki.

He is a lecturer at the Nuova Academia Belle Arti (NABA), Milano and holds an honorary doctorate from the Helsinki University for Art and Design. In 2014 he published the book «Five Lectures of Curatorship» by AdMarginem Publishing, Moscow.

Misiano has collaborated with numerous art magazines, given lectures at The Royal College of Art (London, UK) and School of Visual Arts (New York City, USA) and numerous other universities and art schools, and curated a variety of art projects, internationally and in Moscow.

[English below]

Eine Veranstaltung im Rahmen der Corner College Ausstellung Cold. War. Hot. Stars. The Iron(y) Helmet of the Intellect.

17:00h

Nowhere Men – Illegale Migranten im Strom der Globalisierung

Eine performative Lesung von Christoph Miler unter Mitwirkung von Fredrik Wendschlag

In Europa leben heute mehr als vier Millionen illegale Einwanderer. Unzählige weitere kommen tagtäglich hinzu. Auf der Suche nach einem besseren Leben durchfahren sie Wüsten in rostigen LKWs, überqueren Meere auf morschen Holzkähnen und passieren Grenzen unter glühenden Motorhauben. Unser Wissen über sie beschränkt sich dabei allerdings meist auf tragische Nachrichtenmeldungen und simple politische Botschaften. Das Buchprojekt Nowhere Men will dazu einen Gegenentwurf liefern und die komplexe Wirklichkeit dieser Menschen begreifbarer machen – indem es ihre Geschichten erzählt und in einen größeren Zusammenhang stellt.

Nun wird Nowhere Men erstmals im Rahmen einer performativen Lesung vorgestellt. Dabei wird die Lebensgeschichte eines illegalen Migranten in ein Netz globaler Beziehungen und Machtstrukturen eingebettet: Von den Slums in Mali und den Schmuggelrouten in Nordafrika, über die Büros transnationaler Unternehmen und mächtiger Politiker, bis hin zur Computerproduktion und dem Internet, Flughafenstreiks und Supermärkten, Lampedusas Küstenwache und dem Schweizer Wahlkampf. Ein komplexes Geflecht aus Zusammenhängen und Abhängigkeiten entsteht, der Anbruch eines neuen, wahrhaft globalen Zeitalters wird skizziert: Die unscheinbarsten Ereignisse, egal wo, egal was, können von nun an auch die Leben all jener unbekannten Gesichter am anderen Ende der Welt beeinflussen, die einst noch so unerreichbar weit weg schienen.




18:00h

Monumental Misconceptions

Vorlesung von Liane Lang

Liane Lang spricht über ihr Projekt Monumental Misconceptions. 2009 im Memento Sculpture Park in Budapest begonnen, erkundet das Projekt Bildhauerkunst, die durch politische und historische Begebenheiten ihren ursprünglichen Status als Kunst verloren hat. Das Projekt umfasst Statuen aus der sozialistischen und der Reichszeit aus Ungarn, Deutschland und Grossbritannien und untersucht den Symbolismus der Figur der Skulptur durch unterschiedliche Medien. Langs photographische Arbeiten zeigen Interventionen in Monumente, die rein skulpturaler Art sind, aber als Akte der Performance daherkommen und dadurch das Objekt neu fast und dem Publikum eine neue Perspektive auf oder Interaktion mit Statuen mit zwiespältigen und komplexen ästhetischen, sozialen und ökologischen Eigenschaften eröffnen. Langs Vorgehensweise der Bildhauerkunst gegenüber ist unehrerbietig, zuweilen makaber. Ihr Projekt ist jedoch nicht eine Kritik der monumentalen oder repräsentativen autoritären Ästhetik an sich, sondern stellt vielmehr die Frage nach der sich ändernden Bedeutung des Objekts und der dürftigen Stellung der Künstler_in, die in einem Raum kontinuierlicher sozialen und politischen Veränderung arbeitet.


[Deutsch siehe oben]

An evening in the context of the Corner College exhibition Cold. War. Hot. Stars. The Iron(y) Helmet of the Intellect.

17:00h

Nowhere Men – Illegal Migrants in the Stream of Globalization

A performative reading by Christoph Miler with the participation of Fredrik Wendschlag

More than four million illegal immigrants live in Europe today. Countless are the ones that add to this number every day. In search of a better life they drive through deserts in rusty trucks, set across seas on rotten wooden barges and pass borders hidden under smoldering engine hoods. Our knowledge of their lives however is mostly limited to tragic news reports or simple political messages. The book project Nowhere Men aims to provide an alternative perception and make the complex reality of these people more tangible – by telling their story and putting it in a broader context.

Now, Nowhere Men will be presented for the first time in a performative reading. The story of the life of an illegal migrant is thus woven into a network of global relations and power structures: From the slums of Mali and the trafficking routes in North Africa, to the bureaus of transnational corporations and powerful politicians as well as computer production and the Internet, airport strikes and supermarkets, the coast guards of Lampedusa and the Swiss electoral campaign. A complex mesh of connections and interdependencies emerges, the dawn of a new, truly global era is outlined: The most unspectacular events, wherever and whatever they may be, can from now on influence the lives of all those unknown faces on the other end of the world that once seemed so unreachably far away.


18:00h

Monumental Misconceptions

Lecture by Liane Lang

Liane Lang will be talking about her project Monumental Misconceptions. Begun in 2009 at Memento Sculpture Park in Budapest, the project investigates statuary that has lost its original status as art through political and historical events. The project includes Socialist and Empire era statues from Hungary, Germany and Britain and investigates the symbolism of the figure in sculpture through multiple media. Her photographic works show interventions with monuments that are purely sculptural but pose as acts of performance, reframing the object and offering the audience a different perspective or interaction with statues that have ambiguous and complex aesthetic, social and environmental characteristics. Lang’s approach to statuary is irreverent, at times macabre, but her project is not a critique of the monumental or representational authoritarian aesthetic per se. It is rather posing a question as to the changing meaning of the object and the tenuous position of the artist working in a space of constant social and political change.

SPARCK – Space for Pan-African Research, Creation and Knowledge - operates without a centre, physical or otherwise. It understands itself as a node in a network of likeminded practitioners stemming from diverse disciplines and backgrounds. These relationships are lateral and projects emerge through ongoing conversations. The results are collaborative experiments, rarely shown in white cube settings but rather tested in flexible approaches across multiple sites from street to studio to online. These incarnations are driven by a shared interest in tackling questions about the global urban condition. Re-readings and alternative knowledge is generated through a process of speculation. The politics intrinsic to the work and its creators do not only frame the content but, maybe more importantly, guide a practice of engagement.

Co-organized by Corner College and the Postgraduate Programme in Curating of ZHdK (as part of their series Talks on Curatorial Practice).

Where there are opinions, differences arise. Nonetheless opinions by academics, critics and music lovers generally agree on the fact that Tropicália as a musical movement marked an important change in Brazil's musical history: it clearly marks a before and an after. A lot has been said and written about the movement already, but in spite of all the information that is available, it continues to be difficult to summarize what Tropicália is without running the risk of leaving some key elements out. In my presentation I wish to introduce Tropicália through its own language: music. Different audio and visual fragments will be used to give an idea of the movement’s stylistic diversity, focusing not only on how it differs from other styles and currents in Brazilian music, but also emphasizing some important connections and continuities.

Jeffrey Pijpers

This event is also part of the Workshop Tropical, Tropicalismo, Tropicálias – Cultural (Counter)movements in Brazil at the University of Zurich.

Organized by Pauline Bachmann and André Masseno together with the Luso-Brazilian Studies department of the University of Zurich.

Talk organized by the Postgraduate Programme in Curating CAS/MAS ZHdK in collaboration with Corner College.

Marc Streit is currently the associate artistic director at Tanzhaus Zürich and founder of zürich moves! festival for contemporary arts practice in performing arts. As freelance curator he has mandates for various institutions in Europe and the US. He is an alumnus of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating.

The current manifestations of contemporary dance and its fringe areas build global bridges through the physical, aesthetic and idiosyncratic interpretation as well as the visualization of socially relevant topics. Contemporary dance inspires and is inspired and often calls for dialogue beyond the physical performance.

http://www.zurichmoves.com
http://www.tanzhaus-zuerich.ch

This event on the on-curating mailing archive: http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=97fd3828d94e99dfeceaa8b3b&id=04632005d8

Talk organized by the Postgraduate Programme in Curating CAS/MAS ZHdK in collaboration with Corner College.

On March 17, Tenzing Barshee's talk at the Postgraduate Programme will discuss and compare the following projects: On March 23, the exhibition Der Verdienst. 2014-2017 will open at the project space Oracle in Berlin. It’s a follow-up project to an exhibition titled Le Mérite. 2014-2016, which happened last October in Paris. The two exhibitions will resemble and question each other. Le Mérite reflected on the adolescence of power—how authority is claimed and in which formats it is established—while the individual experiences trauma collectively. There was a focus on a couple of polemic motifs such as construction, fabrication and abstraction by example of written, published and authored works. Der Verdienst will mimick Le Mérite. Le Mérite was afraid that Der Verdienst might happen. The first project was all about testing limits. The second one tries to draw the line.

Der Verdienst. 2014-2017 features the work of Carla Accardi, Andrea Büttner, Angeletti/Rossetti, Alexia Cayre, Paul Collins, Timothy Davies, Buck Ellison, Marina Faust, Rochelle Feinstein, Philipp Friedrich, Heike-Karin Föll, Deanna Havas, Samuel Jeffery, Matthew Lutz Kinoy, R. B. Kitaj, Jean Leclercq, Justin Lieberman, August Macke, Luigi Ontani, Kirsten Pieroth, Nicolas Roggy, Aura Rosenberg, Emanuel Rossetti, Salvo, Ben Schumacher, Lucie Stahl, Studio for Propositional Cinema, Student Art Collective, Mitchell Syrop, Lilli Thießen, Astrid Wagner, Genichiro Yagyu, Min Yoon, HP Zimmer a.o.
Oracle, Joachimsthaler Straße 14, 10719 Berlin, oracle@theoracle.works, open by appointment

Last year, Tenzing Barshee curated a two-person exhibition with Anne Speier and Judy Fiskin at wellwellwell, Applied Arts University Vienna, and the exhibition Le Mérite. 2014-2016 at Treize in Paris. He co-curated Rochelle Feinstein's exhibition In Anticipation of Women's History Month with Fabrice Stroun for Centre d'Art Genève, the group show Passo Dopo Passo with Molly Everett and Dorota Michalska for Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Torino, and Margaret Honda's exhibition An Answer to 'Sculptures' with Fanny Gonella for Künstlerhaus Bremen. He's a regular contributor to Spike and Mousse magazine and a columnist for Starship magazine. He graduated the Postgraduate Programme in Curating in 2014.

This event on the Curating mailing archive: http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=97fd3828d94e99dfeceaa8b3b&id=019d785630&e=614f2be470

This talk is based on my current and ongoing project on Decolonisation and the Scopic Regime.

Without falling into these traps in the quest towards engaging with the call towards decolonisation in South Africa’s education institutions, how does one pose questions or develop responses that reflect on how have we taken ownership of the ideological space that creative production occupies in the popular imagination in the face of the complexities of and representing a new post colonial if not a decolonised reality. Especially in the context of an arts space that is within the embattled terrain of the university, and still produce genuine platforms for reflection and imagination, contigent of the political and moral positions of any reflection.

Achille Mbembe in African Modes of Self Writing points out the sets of dogmas that seem to pass for African discourse in both its political and cultural dimensions, as lacking of historical criticism… and this lack reduces the discourse to three rituals:

the first ritual contradicts and refutes Western definitions of Africa and Africans by pointing out the falsehoods and bad faith they presuppose. The second denounces what the West has done (and continues to do) to Africa in the name of these definitions. The third provides so-called proofs which, by disqualifying the West’s fictional representations of Africa and refuting its claim to have a monopoly on the expression of the human in general, are supposed to open up a space in which Africans can finally narrate their own fables (self-definition) in a voice that cannot be imitated because it is authentically their own.

These rituals of discourse according to Mbembe reduce an extraordinary history to three tragic acts: slavery, colonization, and apartheid - to which globalization as a form of neo-colonisation is being added.

Through Decolonisation and the Scopic Regime the objective for me has been one of developing space that is relevant in this environment and brought together various people and their ideas that poses questions on aspects of the question at hand: the development of critical, self-reflexive, locally specific responses to knowledge production and dissemination in all its forms.