[en]

At the event OFF SPACES 2 Kulturbüro Zürich invites art and project spaces in Zurich linked to them to elaborate an event contribution specifically for their twenty-year anniversary. Today these are Corner College, Les Complices* and Raum*Station, with the artists Martina-Sofie Wildberger, Madame Psychosis and Ivy Monteiro.

The conversation between Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth of Corner College and the artist Martina-Sofie Wildberger, Conversation on Language, Performance and the Political Performative, will take place in English.

Dimitrina: So, you shape the piece during rehearsal. And you have an agreement that improvisation is possible as you perform.
Martina: You never know what comes after what. You never know the duration of any of the fragments. It can be short, it can be made longer. It depends on who performs it, since everybody can perform any of it. It’s a kind of big playground.
Dimitrina: Did you research on the logic of different plays and games to elaborate this approach?
Martina: We researched not so much games. The square pieces of Beckett are around, as are aspects of minimal dance. It’s not from movement that it comes, but rather the proximity needed by the word that is said. The voice brings about the movement. What relation this voice needs to the others, or what relation what is said needs to the others, and to the space, is what brings the movement. Whether what you want to say needs to be heard everywhere, or needs to be heard only in one square meter, its physicality will be different.
When we did the improvisation I WANT TO SAY SOMETHING at Corner College, an improvisation on these five words, we went even more minimal on the text substrate, but also we went so minimal with these five words, which we performed for an hour and a half, the words charged themselves with possible meanings. Through the way they are said, you have a variety of possibilities that can also be imagined in the spectators’ impression, in their mind. We can talk about a lot of things with just these five words. A lot of different meaning can emerge. The movement there was a bit similar. But it was entirely interpretation, with no rules or protocol. Sometimes, we all had the same idea. Or we would have different ideas in terms of the relationship with the other two performers. For me, how we move in space, or where we are, is not linked to the meaning of what we say. It’s a landscape of social relationships that is ever changing.

(excerpt from a conversation between Dimitrina Sevova and Martina-Sofie Wildberger, to be published)

[de]

Am Veranstaltungsabend OFF SPACES 2 lädt das Kulturbüro Zürich mit ihnen verbundene, unabhängige Zürcher Kunst- und Projekträume ein, jeweils einen eigens fürs Jubiläum erarbeiteten Veranstaltungsbeitrag im Kulturbüro zu kuratieren. Es sind dies heute Corner College, Les Complices* und Raum*Station, mit den Künstler*innen Martina-Sofie Wildberger, Madame Psychosis und Ivy Monteiro.

Das Gespräch zwischen Dimitrina Sevova und Alan Roth vom Corner College und der Künstlerin Martina-Sofie Wildberger, Conversation on Language, Performance and the Political Performative, findet in Englisch statt.

Dimitrina: Du formst also das Stück während der Proben. Und ihr trefft eine Abmachung, dass Improvisation möglich ist, während ihr performt.
Martina: Du weisst nie, was auf was folgt. Du weisst nie die Dauer eines jeden Fragments. Es kann kurz sein, kann in die Länge gezogen werden. Es kommt darauf an, wer es perform, da jede_r jeden Teil davon performen kann. Es ist gewissermassen ein grosser Spielplatz.
Dimitrina: Hast du die Logik verschiedener Spiele erforscht, als du diese Vorgehensweise entwickelt hast?
Martina: Nicht so sehr Spiele. Die quadratischen Stücke von Beckett sind da, sowie Aspekte des Minimal Dance. Es kommt nicht aus der Bewegung heraus, sondern eher aus der Nähe, die ein Wort verlangt, das gesagt wird. Die Stimme führt zur Bewegung. Was Bewegung bringt, ist das Verhältnis, das die eine Stimme zu den anderen braucht, oder das Verhältnis, das das, was gesagt wird, zu den anderen braucht, oder auch zum Raum. Ob das, was du sagen willst, überall, oder nur innerhalb eines Quadratmeters gehört werden soll. Seine physische Qualität wird davon abhängen.
Als wir die Improvisation I WANT TO SAY SOMETHING im Corner College gemacht haben, eine Improvisation auf fünf Wörter, gingen wir noch mehr ins Minimale, was das Textsubstrat angeht, aber auch in Bezug auf die fünf Wörter selber, die wir anderthalb Stunden lang performt haben, wobei die Wörter sich mit möglichen Bedeutungen aufgeladen haben. Durch die Art und Weise, wie sie gesagt werden, hast du eine Palette von Möglichkeiten, die auch in der Vorstellung der Zuschauer_innen imaginiert werden können, in ihren Köpfen. Mit nur gerade diesen fünf Wörtern können wir über viele Dinge sprechen. Viele Bedeutungen können zum Vorschein kommen. Die Bewegung war da etwas ähnlich. Aber es war ganz und gar Interpretation, ohne jegliche Regeln oder Protokoll. Manchmal hatten wir denselben Gedanken. Oder unterschiedliche Gedanken, was das Verhältnis zu den anderen zwei Performern angeht. Für mich verbindet sich die Art und Weise, wie wir uns im Raum bewegen, oder wo wir sind, nicht mit der Bedeutung dessen, was wir sagen. Es ist eine Landschaft sozialer Beziehungen, die ständig im Wandel begriffen ist.

(Auszug aus einem Gespräch zwischen Dimitrina Sevova und Martina-Sofie Wildberger; Veröffentlichung in Vorbereitung)

Final event at Kochstrasse 1

From 20:00h party with surprise concert by good old Mosh Mosh

10 years of Corner College
with DJ Sweatproducer! (Zürich) und DJ Mosh (Berlin)
and finissage of the personal exhibition by Isabel Reiß, Waben, Schlangen, Felder.


Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Einzelausstellung von Isabel Reiß, Waben, Schlangen, Felder.

Selbsthilfegruppe Solidarity and Europe
Open discussion with an introduction by Cathérine Hug and following barbecue

Feel free to bring material on the subject. Beamer/laptop are provided

Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Einzelausstellung von Isabel Reiß, Waben, Schlangen, Felder.

Wer beschreibt gerade die Lage hier?
Kann ich der guten Frau trauen?
Verlässliche Infos?
Sie meldet Gebüsche, sie meldet Dornen und sagt
hier sei die Strasse zu.

Diese Performance ist Teil der Einzelausstellung von Isabel Reiß, Waben, Schlangen, Felder.

Einzelausstellung von Isabel Reiß // Personal exhibition of Isabel Reiß

07 July - 18 August 2018
(Summer break: 23 July - 05 August 2018)

Öffnungszeiten / Opening Hours
Thu/Fri 16:00h – 19:00h
Sat 14:00h – 17:00h


Opening Saturday 07 July 2018, 18:00h

Event Thursday 12 July 2018, 19:00h
Combs, Lines, Fields
Interactive audioexperiment/performance by Isabel Reiß and the audience

Event Thursday 09 August 2018, 19:00h
Nux comica
Performance by Anne Käthi Wehrli

Event Thursday 16 August 2018, 19:00h
Selbsthilfegruppe Solidarity and Europe
Open discussion with an introduction by Cathérine Hug and following barbecue
Feel free to bring material on the subject. Beamer/laptop are provided

Finissage Saturday 18 August 2018, 18:00h
with surprise concert by good old Mosh Mosh
10 years of Corner College, and final event at Kochstrasse 1
with DJ Sweatproducer! (Zürich) und DJ Mosh (Berlin)


Diese Ausstellung wird unterstützt von der Stiftung Erna und Curt Burgauer, der Georges und Jenny Bloch Stiftung, und der Dr. Georg und Josi Guggenheim-Stiftung.

Just now, the journalists of the government critical newspaper “Cumhuriyet” have been sentenced in an unprecedented politically induced trial and just now, the state of emergency in Turkey has been extended once again. Meanwhile, Osman Kavala, Turkey’s most important and influential civil society activist and philanthropist, has been in prison without charge since October 2017. What does this mean for artists and cultural producers in Turkey? And how has the art scene in Turkey changed since 2016 (the coup-d’etat), or shall we say, since 2013 (the Gezi protests)? And what can we understand about it and how can we help our colleagues in Turkey?

Asena Günal is the program coordinator of the art center Depo in Istanbul-Tophane. Depo is an initiative of Anadolu Kültür which was founded by Osman Kavala. She is concerned about the isolation Turkish art scene might face with the rise of authoritarianism. Depo is a space for critical debate and cultural exchange with a wide variety of international art exhibitions, screenings, talks and such and the first initiative in Turkey to focus on regional collaborations among Turkey and countries in the Caucasus, the Middle East and the Balkans. Asena Günal is also the co-founder of Siyah Bant, a platform that documents censorship incidents in the field of arts.

Asena Günal has studied International Relations and Sociology and obtained her PhD in the History of Modern Turkey program at the Atatürk Institute, Boğaziçi University. She previously worked as an editor in İletişim Publishing House between 1998 and 2005.

In this open talk, Asena Günal will speak about the current situation in Turkey and especially in Istanbul’s art scene, how does the state of emergency affect the artists, who is Osman Kavala and how does his detention and arrest intimidate the civil society and the art scene; she will also talk about the artistic programme at Depo and their resistance strategies.

An invitation by para polis/Anke Hoffmann in collaboration with Corner College/Dimitrina Sevova.

A TETI Group exhibition in two parts for Corner College

Curated by Gabriel Gee & Anne-Laure Franchette


Saturday, 2 – Saturday, 23 June 2018 (Part 2: Blood as a rover)

Opening Hours: Wed/Thu/Fri 16:00h-19:00h & Sat 14:00h-19:00h

With works and interventions by Jürgen Baumann, Gregory Collavini, David Jacques, Tuula Närhinen, Claudia Stöckli, & VOLUMES Library

Opening Saturday, 2 June 18:00h
19:00h: Borderless poetics in fluidity, performance by Claudia Stöckli, accompanied by Michael Cerezo

Discussion Tuesday, 19 June 18:00h In contact with the wild, with Michael Günzburger & Lukas Bärfuss



Finissage Saturday, 23 June 18:00h with a book presentation: Changing representations of nature and cities: the 1960s and 1970s and their legacies, Gabriel Gee & Alison Vogelaar (eds.), 2018.





Curatorial text

See Hinterland, Part 1. The eyes of the lighthouse



Jürgen Baumann

Holey Mountain
2017



Holey Mountain by Jürgen Baumann radiates blackness, it drips more than it seats on a black stool, surrounded by white bowls filled with dark oil. The metabolic fluids of our global surroundings are indeed best captured as pitch black, with an oily whiff that threatens to choke the air we breathe when we take the time to truly look into the ground beneath our feet.



Gregory Collavini

Conduite forcée
2011



As part of Hinterland, Blood as a rover, Gregory Collavini presents a series of photographs exploring the management and exploitation of water in Switzerland: “One of the greatest powers in Switzerland is water. I wanted to illustrate this force, which is mainly used to produce electricity. But the year I did this project the precipitation was as its lowest. So it dried rivers and still machines became my subjects. However due to the roughness of the constructions they appeared to me as modern ruins, sculptures from the past and scars in the landscape.”



David Jacques

Oil is the devil’s excrement
2017




For Hinterland, blood as a rover, David Jacques explores the pernicious nature of oil in the shaping of our contemporary global societies. His film Oil is the devil’s excrement takes as a starting point a 1975 prophetic speech by the Venezuelan politician Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, in which the former minister of energy declared: “Ten years from now, twenty years from now, you will see; oil will bring us ruin. Oil is the Devil’s excrement.” The animation film depicts an ailing Alfonzo in bed in hospital, as he is visited by a diabolic creature, who has come to claim its due. The metaphoric tale ultimately meditates on the extent to which humans, far from gaining control of oil, have always been its slaves…



Tuula Närhinen

Baltic Sea Plastique



Närhinen will present in Hinterland work from her series Baltic Sea Plastic, composed of sculptural forms made out of plastic found on the sea shore in Helsinki. The series explores the complex issue of environmental pollution by plastic waste, combining visual plasticity with the resilient capacity of marine life to evoke the formative process of nature.



Claudia Stöckli
Borderless poetics in fluidity





«I am on the way to leave my breathable habitat…» With ease my ego departs from anthropocentrism. Levitating approaching contemporary entities, which are thousands of years older then me. New microbes species settle. The dark liquid expands into infinity. Borderless, transnational thinking evolves in the deep sea through sound and loops. In the mostly unexplored ocean the human species is a minority. Perception alters, new connections between humans and non-human entities occur.



The exhibition is supported by the Temperatio Stiftung

TETI Group
www.tetigroup.org
VOLUMES
www.volumeszurich.ch

A TETI Group exhibition in two parts for Corner College

Curated by Gabriel Gee & Anne-Laure Franchette


Saturday, 5 – Saturday, 26 May 2018 (Part 1: The eyes of the lighthouse)

Opening Hours: Wed/Thu/Fri 16:00h-19:00h & Sat 14:00h-19:00h

With works and interventions by Cliona Harmey, Monica Ursina Jäger, Salvatore Vitale, & VOLUMES library

Opening: Saturday 5 May 18:00h

Discussion Friday 11 May, 18h30: Seen Unseen, Salvatore Vitale in conversation with Lars Willumeit, independent curator

Research encounter 25-27 May: Maritime Poetics: from Coast to Hinterland, limited seats, booking necessary, contact gabriel@tetigroup.org

Finissage: Saturday 26 May 18:00h artists talk Light and land with Cliona Harmey & Monica Ursina Jäger



Curatorial text

At the turn of the 1960s-70s, a drastic shift in the representations of nature paralleled an urban revolution that signalled an intensification of global networks. The increasing interpenetration of the natural and the human realms, as well as the increasing realisation of such an interpenetration, has been a characteristic of the rise of a ‘planetary age’. On continental coasts, where the sea meets the land, ports manage the transfer of goods and the balance of offer and demand with heightened efficiency. Such maritime commerce stands as the historical engineering of our global world, accelerated by the adoption of standardised containers in the 1960s. Ships ride anonymously over the sea, the lifting sea, their bellies filled with plastic wrapped merchandise. We appear to see more afar than we used to, through digital devices and virtual fluxes, while crowds fly to distant lands that air technology has made suddenly accessible. And yet, much remains unseen in the eyes of the lighthouse, which blips to bring the sailors safely home – and their goods for the improvement of lighthouse technology in the 19th century was directly connected to mercantile interests – thereby necessarily offering dark passages and suggesting the persistence of blind spots below our promethean visions. Through the lighthouse, we can explore and question the modes of representation of our socio-natures: what is it that we see, that we can see, that we are willing to see and not able or unwilling to look at, in a contemporary age where silvery and golden profusions might well lead to blackened collapses.

If the eyes of the lighthouse can guide us towards an enquiry into our perceptions of 21st century planetary conditions, they might then also shed light on the obscurity which surrounds the circulation of earthly materials, that fuel the light of our cities and the heat of our ever more complex technologies. It is to the blood of the land that we turn the spotlight, to gaze beneath the metal of the discreet gas and oil pipelines, to the construction of roads and canals, the baskets of railways and trucks roaming planes and mountains. We foresee the advanced state of Narcissus, peering no longer to himself in the pool of water, but inward in the woods behind him. And just like the industrial city of Tony Garnier used anthropomorphic features to organise its exemplary functioning, we look at the metabolism of the hinterland to query its desires and its health. For blood’s a rover, to use James Ellroy’s words, and beside the vitality of hybrid wild cities, loom darks shadows whose intentions or rather, projections, must be deciphered to read the oracles of the present …

Text: Gabriel Gee www.tetigroup.org



Cliona Harmey

Poolbeg lighthouse



Cliona Harmey’s response to “Hinterland” takes the form of a series of works which reflect on the transmission and absorption of light which lies at the heart of many communication technologies. Starting with a view from the interior of a lighthouse's red lantern the works look at modern systems of visibility, encoding, simulation and information. The show combines images of technological systems, a simulation deck which can emulate any port in the world, the interior of a barcode scanner, a view from the lighthouse. The works allude to the ways in which many global communication technologies used in logistics, cybernetics and infrastructure were influenced by developments in maritime environments.

The invention of the original concept for the now ubiquitous barcode was inspired by engineer Norman Woodland's experience with morse code. We could also think of lighthouses as original nodes in a developing network of a developing global communication and trading system. The individual elements in this exhibition reference the transmission and absorption of light at the heart of many contemporary communication technologies. lanterns, scanners, the ubiquitous barcode, whilst also considering some of the spaces which fall out of the range of this visibility.



Monica Ursina Jäger

Liquid Territory




As part of Hinterland, Monica Ursina Jäger presents a range of materials collected and produced through her investigation of the hinterlands of Singapore, looking in particular at sand trade, cut and fill strategies and reclamation practices. Her research explores the shifting grounds of port cities, the visible and invisible forms of global trade, and reflects on an inversion of the hinterland, whereby the inner land is projected outwards onto the sea.

This work has been conceived as part of an artists residency at NTU CCA Centre for Contemporary Arts, Singapore.



Salvatore Vitale



Salvatore Vitale takes us into the heart of the Hinterland, in the Swiss Alps, searching for an ever elusive yet resolute presence: the wolf. The re-emergence of the wolf in Europe has been the object of conflicted debates, and carries strong issues pertaining to the place of non-human species in our mixed-communities and environments. Through photographs, film and sound, Vitale illuminates the shadows of the hinterland, and the changing representation of wilderness and its perceived values at the turn of the 21st century.



The exhibition is supported by the Temperatio Stiftung
The research encounter is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and Franklin University, CH.

TETI Group
www.tetigroup.org
VOLUMES
www.volumeszurich.ch

[English below]

09. Mai 2018 – 18:30 Uhr
Book + Web Launch
Æther #1: Flughafen Kloten: Anatomie eines komplizierten Ortes

Flughäfen stehen für Mobilität, flows, Geschichtslosigkeit, Kommerz. Tatsächlich sind sie auf vielfältige Weise mit ihrer Umwelt verflochten, denn sie sind komplexe Gefüge, in denen sich Technik und Natur, Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Vergangenheit und Zukunft vermengen. Æther #1 untersucht einen solchen komplizierten Ort: den Flughafen Zürich-Kloten.
Die Reihe Æther versucht, Wissensgeschichte anders zu gestalten – und geisteswissenschaftliches Publizieren selbst in die Hand zu nehmen. Wir glauben, die beste Antwort auf die viel beschworene Krise der wissenschaftlichen Zeitschrift bzw. des Buchs sind neue Formate, die digital und print zusammendenken. Hybrid ist auch die Wissensgeschichte, die uns vorschwebt: Komplizierte, dichte, miteinander verwobene Geschichten, die im Kollektiv entstehen.
Online unter: www.aether.ethz.ch

Mit Beiträgen von: Sam Bodry, Nicole Egloff, Nicole Graf, Nils Güttler, Annina Haller, Charlotte Hoes, Jonathan Holst, Oskar Jönsson, Carolyn Kerchof, Robin Leins, Monique Ligtenberg, Kilian Lock, Benedikt Meyer, Niki Rhyner, Kaj Späth, Max Stadler, Stephanie Willi, Raphael Winteler.
Herausgegeben von: Nils Güttler, Niki Rhyner, Max Stadler
Gestaltung: Loraine Olalia, Reinhard Schmidt, Nadine Wüthrich
Erschienen bei: intercom Verlag



[Deutsch oben]

09 May 2018 — 6:30pm

Book + Web Launch
Æther #1: Zurich Airport: Anatomy of a Complicated Site

Airports tend to signify mobility, flows, ahistoricity, placelessness, consumption. And yet they are entangled, in multiple ways, with their surrounds; for they are complex assemblages, where technology and nature, science and society, futures and pasts intimately intertwine. Æther #1 explores one such complicated site: Airport Zurich-Kloten.
The series Æther aims to make the history of knowledge accessible — and rethink the way publishing in the humanities is done. The best response to the so-called crisis of scientific publishing, we believe, is new formats that bring together print and digital. The history of knowledge, as we imagine it, likewise is hybrid: dense, involved, ramified stories — products of a collective.
Online at: www.aether.ethz.ch

With contributions by: Sam Bodry, Nicole Egloff, Nicole Graf, Nils Güttler, Annina Haller, Charlotte Hoes, Jonathan Holst, Oskar Jönsson, Carolyn Kerchof, Robin Leins, Monique Ligtenberg, Kilian Lock, Benedikt Meyer, Niki Rhyner, Kaj Späth, Max Stadler, Stephanie Willi, Raphael Winteler.
Edited by: Nils Güttler, Niki Rhyner, Max Stadler
Design: Loraine Olalia, Reinhard Schmidt, Nadine Wüthrich
Brought to you by: intercom Verlag

Saturday, 21 April 2018, 14:00h: A Dependency Relationship: Does Feminism Need Separatism and / or Art?
With contributions by Laura Iamurri, Quinn Latimer, Federica Martini and Angela Marzullo


Program

14:00h Introduction by Donatella Bernardi

14:10h Lecture by Laura Iamurri, Carla Lonzi, Art Criticism, Feminism, and Writing

14:50h Talk by Angela Marzullo, including the projection of the film Let's spit on Hegel and the presentation of the book Home Schooling

15:20h Discussion between Laura Iamurri and Angela Marzullo

15:45h Break

16:00h Lecture by Federica Martini, Maria Lai: Sardinia, Venice and Antonio Gramsci

16:45h Discussion between Laura Iamurri and Federica Martini

17:00h Reading by Quinn Latimer

17:45h Conclusion of the afternoon

18:00h End



Laura Iamurri

Carla Lonzi, Art Criticism, Feminism, and Writing

Laura Iamurri, PhD, is Associate Professor of History of Modern Art and part of the doctoral program at the Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Università Roma Tre.

She works and conducts researches on different types of artistic, editorial or institutional practices, visual cultures, and connections between artists, critics, periodicals, galleries, and museums in the 20th century, chiefly in Italy and with special attention to the political context. She curated the new edition of Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto (Milan, 2010) and co-curated Scritti sull’arte (with L. Conte and V. Martini; Milan, 2012). She has recently published the book Un margine che sfugge: Carla Lonzi e l’arte in Italia, 1955–1970 (Macerata, 2016).

Between 1969 and 1970 Carla Lonzi set aside her work as an art critic to found, along with artist Carla Accardi and journalist Elvira Banotti, one of the most radical movements in Italian feminism: Rivolta Femminile (Female Revolt). The process of transitioning from one field to another raises a series of questions on the role of art in the elaboration of Lonzi’s feminism; on her dialogue with artists Carla Accardi and Luciano Fabro; on the power gradient at stake in relationships between artists and critics; on writing; and on feminism as an irruption into history of an “unexpected subject,” able to redefine relationships on the basis of reciprocal recognition.



Quinn Latimer

Doubling the Line



Quinn Latimer is a poet, art critic, and editor from California whose work often explores feminist economies of writing, reading, and image production. Her most recent book is Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (Berlin, 2017), and she was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14.

In Doubling the Line, Latimer will discuss the constant loop between poetic and critical writing practices as they approach or attempt to narrate visual art production. Her talk will focus on feminist literary and art practices in particular, as examined in her most recent book.



Federica Martini

Maria Lai: Sardinia, Venice and Antonio Gramsci



Federica Martini, PhD, is an art historian and curator. She worked in the Curatorial Departments of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Musée Jenisch Vevey, and Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne. From 2015 to 2016 she was a fellow of the Swiss Institute in Rome. From 2009 to 2017, she was head of the master’s program MAPS – Arts in Public Spheres at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais, Sierre (ECAV), and since 2009 she has also been part of the independent art space standard/deluxe, Lausanne. In January 2018, she was appointed Dean of Visual Arts at ECAV.

As a starting point for her contribution to From Abdizuel to Zymeloz, Federica Martini proposes two quotes by Maria Lai:

“Ero doppiamente straniera, sia per essere sarda, selvatica, primitiva, sia per essere l’unica donna tra gli allievi di Arturo Martini all’Accademia di Venezia. Arturo Martini era pur sempre di quella generazione che non dava spazio alle donne nell’arte. Qui si fa sul serio, diceva; la mia presenza era per lui un ingombro. Ma io non dubitavo di essere al posto giusto, anche se pensavo alla Sardegna e alla mia famiglia con il rimorso di un tradimento.”
Al Gigante lassù: Omaggio a Nivola, 2008.

“I was twice a stranger, first because I was Sardinian, wild, primitive, and second for being the only woman amongst Arturo Martini’s students at the Academy [Accademia di Belle Arti] in Venice. Arturo Martini was still from that generation that did not give women space in art. He used to say, ‘Here, we do it seriously;’ my presence was an obstacle for him. But I did not doubt that I was in the right place, even though I was thinking of Sardinia and of my family, with the remorse of a betrayal.”
Al Gigante lassù: Omaggio a Nivola (To the Giant Up There: Homage to Nivola), 2008.

“Sono partita dai quaderni di Gramsci: mi ha dato un’immagine, e da lì sono partita: avevo detto che l’arte deve arrivare all’uomo della strada. Quando un operaio per andare a lavorare fa sempre la stessa strada, non si accorge che il suo sguardo tocca le opere architettoniche che vede. Ma in questo modo lo sguardo acquista un ritmo.”

“I began with Gramsci’s notebooks [Prison Notebooks]. He gave me an image, and I started from there. He said that art must reach the man in the street. When a worker goes to work, doing the same commute every day, he doesn’t notice the architectural works he sees. However, in this way his gaze acquires a visual rhythm.”



Angela Marzullo

Sputiamo su Hegel



Angela Marzullo is an artist born in 1971 in Zurich, Switzerland, of Italian origin on her father’s side and Swiss on her mother’s. As a videographer, she combines video art and performance exploring feminist questions, which are at the heart of all her artistic endeavors. In 2010 she was awarded a residency at the Swiss Institute in Rome. During that year, she produced an experimental short film, Concettina, based on the Lutheran Letters of P. P. Pasolini, with her two daughters as the main actresses. Since 2003, she has undertaken a practice of critical artistic transmission through a new series of works.

Sputiamo su Hegel (Let’s Spit on Hegel, 2015, 10 min.) is the title of Angela Marzullo’s latest video, made in collaboration with Michael Hofer, the final work of a ten-year process of artistic research analyzing the critical thinking of the 1960s and 1970s and revitalizing such thinking with a feminist bent, through the voices of her two daughters, “starkids” Lucie and Stella. Sputiamo su Hegel is also the title of the book-length manifesto of Rivolta Femminile, the seminal group in Italian feminism, written by art critic Carla Lonzi.



Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Ausstellung From Abdizuel to Zymeloz von Donatella Bernardi. //
This event is part of the exhibition From Abdizuel to Zymeloz by Donatella Bernardi.


Die Ausstellung wird unterstützt von der Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung und der Georges und Jenny Bloch-Stiftung. //
The exhibition is supported by Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung and the Georges und Jenny Bloch-Stiftung.

Opening: Friday, 16 March 2018, 18:00 h
With a short introduction by Donatella Bernardi and a lecture-performance by Nicola Genovese: It’s not about power, it’s about comfort zone

Donatella Bernardi (b. 1976 in Geneva, Switzerland), artist, gives a brief introduction to her project From Abdizuel to Zymeloz, which takes into consideration the site-specificity of Corner College and includes a debate on the current state of feminism, based on various Italian sources.

Nicola Genovese is an artist and musician from Venice, Italy. He lives and works in Zurich and graduated from ZHdK in 2017 with an MA Fine Arts. He mainly works with installation and performance.

It’s not about power, it’s about control. It’s not about power, it’s about comfort zone. The male fear of losing power and the anxiety this creates are topical issues that are ripe for scrutiny as feminism becomes increasingly mainstream and deradicalized. As a corollary to this, hypermasculinity does not allow any form of weakness. Trump’s “You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything” reverberates from the US to Modi in India. Power issues inevitably lead to conflicts or exploitation, and what about sexual impotence and slippers? Nicola Genovese would like to come to a deeper understanding of the fragility and ambivalence of the contemporary male, who is – fortunately – facing the slow decline of patriarchy.


Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Ausstellung From Abdizuel to Zymeloz von Donatella Bernardi. //
This event is part of the exhibition From Abdizuel to Zymeloz by Donatella Bernardi.


Die Ausstellung wird unterstützt von der Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung. //
The exhibition is supported by Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung.

Thursday, 29 March 2018, 19:00h: After Carla Lonzi and Ketty La Rocca
With contributions by Claire Fontaine, Elisabeth Joris and Sally Schonfeldt

Claire Fontaine’s research and practice are profoundly influenced by the non-reformist spirits of Italian feminism in the 70s.
The very concept of a “human strike,” elaborated by the artist, is deeply connected to the analysis of processes of subjectivization and their link with the hidden productive and reproductive labor force that capitalism exploits without remuneration. Carla Lonzi, in particular, has been the subject of several texts written by the artist, such as “We Are All Clitoridian Women: Notes on Carla Lonzi’s Legacy,” in e-flux journal # 47 (2013); “Gallerie da non riempire,” in Il gesto femminista: La rivolta delle donne nel corpo, nel lavoro, nell’arte (Derive Approdi, 2014); “Carla Lonzi o l’arte di forzare il blocco,” in Carla Lonzi: La creatività del femminismo (Il Mulino, 2015).
Claire Fontaine has taken part in two events on the legacy of Italian feminism organized by Helena Reckitt: “Feminist Duration in Art and Curating” at Goldsmiths, 2015, and “Now You Can Go,” held at several venues in London in 2016. In the same year, at La Monnaie de Paris, she organized and coordinated the encounter “Work, Strike and Self-Abolition: Feminist Perspectives on the Art of Creating Freedom” with Julia Bryan-Wilson, Elisabeth Lebovici, Helena Reckitt, Marina Vishmidt, and Giovanna Zapperi. She was involved in the symposia “Speak Body,” on issues of reproduction and feminism, at Leeds University in 2017 and “Histories of Women, Histories of Feminism” at MASP in Sao Paulo in 2018.
In light of recent developments in the feminist movement, Claire Fontaine will explore the issue of emotional exploitation and the possibility of striking within the context of care work. The labor of love will be approached as one that is constantly submerged, an invisible effort undertaken by women to hold society together. This work is the secret core of capitalism, which thrives on its charity and generosity and, by denying its importance, threatens every workforce with the prospect of going unremunerated, perpetuating the lie contained in the supposed equivalence of time to salary and money in general.





Sally Schonfeldt (b. 1983 in Adelaide, Australia) lives and works in Zurich. Her work is predominantly concerned with the aesthetic possibilities offered by the contemporary discourse of artistic research. Using this discursive field of research as a foundation, Schonfeldt is concerned with interacting site-specifically in spatial environments to create informative, contemplative situations, which seek to enact alternative modes of experience within the production and reception of knowledge. The overriding impulse behind her work is the generation of alternative possibilities of interacting with history and the construction of new narratives in juxtaposition to accepted cultural orders.
For the occasion of “After Carla Lonzi and Ketty La Rocca,” Sally Schonfeldt revisits the extensive archive she built up during her work The Ketty La Rocca Research Project (2012), in which she first came across the radical feminist thought of Carla Lonzi. Interweaving the presentation of a short experimental archival film entitled Carla, Ketty + I, made especially for the occasion, with readings from her own diary The Ketty la Rocca Research Diary and Lonzi’s Shut up. Or Rather, Speak: Diary of a Feminist, Schonfeldt offers the audience a minor performative gesture to share her personal discovery of Lonzi through La Rocca.



Elisabeth Joris (b. 1946 in Visp, Switzerland), is a historian, who has conducted extensive research and produced numerous publications on Swiss women, feminism, gender equality, and Zurich in 1968. At Corner College, she will take part in a panel following Claire Fontaine and Sally Schonfeldt’s presentations.



Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Ausstellung From Abdizuel to Zymeloz von Donatella Bernardi. //
This event is part of the exhibition From Abdizuel to Zymeloz by Donatella Bernardi.


Die Ausstellung wird unterstützt von der Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung. //
The exhibition is supported by Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung.

eine Veranstaltung im Corner College, die Nicole Bachmann, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Nora Schmidt, Sally Schonfeldt, Axelle Stiefel, Martina-Sofie Wildberger und Dimitrina Sevova zusammenbringt, um ein kollaboratives Feld pluraler Performativität zu eröffnen, einschliesslich singulärer Interventionen, Filmvorführungen und Performances, danach eine Diskussion zwischen den Künstlerinnen, der Kuratorin und dem Publikum.

an event at Corner College that brings together Nicole Bachmann, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Nora Schmidt, Sally Schonfeldt, Axelle Stiefel, Martina-Sofie Wildberger, and Dimitrina Sevova to open up a collaborative field of plural performativity, encompassing singular interventions, screenings and performances and followed by a discussion between the artist, the curator and the audience.



[Text unten / Text below]



Nicole Bachmann

Personare Part II

Screening of the video documentation of the performance Personare Part II at Tenderpixel, London on 20 January 2018.



This performance examines the relationship between language, voice and power. Negotiating the materiality of speech and gestures, it investigates the power of the disembodied voice and its relationship to other bodies and find agency in this relationality. The piece deals with questions around the constitution of subjectivity and becoming an active agent through language both in a political or civil sense.

It is important to mention the set up of the performance: the gallery consists of a ground floor space and a lower ground floor gallery, connected with a tight staircase. The audience was led downstairs where the dancers were in place. The actor was upstairs, unknown to the audience. They would only hear her voice.

The performance is based on rehearsed improvisation, by which I mean there was a script and a choreography but each time the piece would be different through the interaction between the three performers.

The piece is about how we can each find a language, a form of expression through different means, by language as well as an embodied vocabulary.

Performed by Anna Procter, Patricia Langa and Sonya Frances Cullingford.

Dance choreography by Patricia Langa.



Delphine Chapuis Schmitz

poems fRom our time(s)

Delphine Chapuis Schmitz will be reading from a collection of texts she is currently working on under the title poems fRom our time(s), and will give a short presentation of her practice at the crossroads of visual art and experimental writing.



Nora Schmidt

Journal/Blog (2011-today)

Reading with a selection of short texts from the artist's Journal/Blog (2011-today).





Sally Schonfeldt

On the Politics of Present Thought

Experimental film. 8′




Axelle Stiefel

Codex Operator
Sound performance. 20′





Martina-Sofie Wildberger

I WANT TO SAY SOMETHING

Performance, Improvisation. About 13′

Text: Martina-Sofie Wildberger, I want to say something (printable as PDF, 17KB)





Endless Conversation – Spacing! enacts a performative and conversational setup to test the aesthetic and political conditions of sharing, which inevitably involves an inoperative spacing, intervaling, and displacing. This in-betweenness is the condition of taking place and the mechanism of giving meaning. “Sharing is itself the origin,” wrote Jean-Luc Nancy in Being Singular Plural, sharing according to language exposes singular plurality to interrogate this openness toward the infinity of performative language games and endless scholarship – “the circulation of a meaning of the world that has no beginning or end”, which is the condition of every engaged and committed conversation from a being to a being.

With this event we are looking forward to the potentiality of a new performative that has to be continuously rehearsed, re-enacted, exercised, and practiced, sharing infinite language ‘conversations’ that go into affective registers and intensive qualities. Singular plurality lies at the heart of the discourse concerned with the political and aesthetic potentiality of language, into which this event intervenes, involving the somatic quality of voices and deconstructive/uncompleted gestures, inflections, movements of bodies and production of spaces – “or sometimes it takes place through a shift in tone or modulation of voice,” (Judith Butler) or just spacing, intervaling, displacing.

At the limit of presentation, the event tests how art is a matter of differing/deferring, a coming-into-presence involving “the simultaneity of all presences that are with regard to one another, where no one is for oneself, without being for others.” (Nancy) In Endless Conversation – Spacing!, presentation is distinct from the representation of art. With the live event and vivid conversation, it aims to reflect on art in terms of spacing / interval / displacement in the relation between the politics of language and embodied practices, “a certain displacement in time and space that constitutes the condition of knowing.” (Judith Butler) These dislocated elements of shared language produce other spaces of knowledge, with their particular aesthetics.

The event is part of the curatorial research by Dimitrina Sevova, On the Politics of Language and the Aesthetics of Affect – Thinking of Art Beyond Representation in Contemporary Art Practices and Production, a qualitative curatorial research that maps out a cluster of artistic positions and reflects on their practices by means of relational and analytical techniques, from the perspective of the affective politics of the performative and the politics and aesthetics of language, conceptualizing further the relation between contemporary art, plural performativity, and the singular plural.

The research explores the potentiality of language as an artistic material and reflects on the relation between the performative and performance, practices and discourse, in voice-based and text-oriented art practices. It further discusses and analyses, in close collaboration with the artists, how artists do things with words, textuality and space – a flux of art practices that generate ‘concepts in the wild,’ in the sense that they venture beyond the conformity of the well-known and of conventional representation into ambiguous space and unpredictable experiments, pursuing other avenues and producing temporalities and unexpected encounters. The research asks how they relate a politics of place and the possibilities of language in the trajectory of the plural performative as a proliferation of difference. This research is concerned with art practices and the artists’ process of making, rather than their representational contexts.

The curatorial research reflects the role of language in contemporary art, and artistic practices that form a critical fabulation and involve other experimental forms of artistic research that bring together aesthetic practices and knowledge production. The main objective of this research is to ask how art produces knowledge by other means and opens onto a new ethico-aesthetic paradigm. The focus of my research is on artists whose practices and aesthetics embody a materialism of alterity and the translatability at the heart of the unpredictability of an event, testing the limits of how language can articulate the body and the space.

The artistic positions are selected for their experimental approach to language and voice-based practices, the inventive and critical way they work with performative strategies, and how they deal with the system of circulation and collection of information, with knowledge production and the aesthetics of affect, and operate within expanded discursive fields. I would not want to split a certain flux of practices and artists into generations. Because of this, the research is situated across what is defined as a generation. The artists and their practices are approached not as insulated cases in a monographic framework, which would have focused on individual art works or an artistic oeuvre. Rather, my aim is to give, through the research, a sense of a vibrant art scene of resonating practices and overlapping contexts. For me, it is more important to map and reflect on how they are related and shared in certain approaches and trajectories in their work. I did a series of interviews, conversations face to face, and studio visits, and followed the artists in different public activities during the period of the research.

The focal point of the curatorial selection in the process of mapping is a new generation of Swiss artists who work with language and the aesthetics of affect. Their practices can no longer be considered peripheral to the system of art, or alternative, on the edge of the art institutional context, as they form a new and fascinating direction in contemporary art. At the same time, the research emphasizes the differences in practices amid the cluster of selected artists, and the shift in the means of production in contemporary art at large, and its context as it has expanded into sociality, politics and daily life.

There is an upcoming modest publication, composed of an analytico-reflective text that sums up my curatorial reflections, insights, encounters. It will be accompanied by the collected documentation, and conversations and interviews with the selected artists recorded in the context of this research.

Text: Dimitrina Sevova, 2018




This project is supported by a curatorial research grant of Pro Helvetia.

Friday, 16 March – Sunday, 22 April 2018

Öffnungszeiten // Opening Hours

Do/Fr/Sa 16:00h – 19:00h
oder nach Vereinbarung (geschlossen am Karfreitag, 30. März)

Thu/Fri/Sat 16:00 h – 19:00 h
or by appointment (closed on Good Friday, 30 March)



[English below]

Aufbauend auf einer von Umberto Eco zusammengestellten Liste von Engelsnamen, ist From Abdizuel to Zymeloz eine Installation aus vierhundertzehn Stoffstreifen, die von weiss bis schwarz reichen und das ganze Farbspektrum durchlaufen. Jeder Streifen ist mit dem Namen eines Engels bestickt. Vierhundertzehn Muster davon, wie die Dinge sein könnten – Farbton, Textur, Druckmuster oder monochrome Fläche, lichtdicht oder durchsichtig, glatt oder geriffelt. Wenn ein Kind einen Namen erhält, werden traditionell vor der Geburt zwei Listen erstellt. Hier gibt es nur eine.

[Deutsch oben]

Based on a list of the names of angels compiled by Umberto Eco, From Abdizuel to Zymeloz is an installation made of four hundred and ten pieces of fabric ranging from white to black and passing through the entire color spectrum. Each piece is embroidered with an angel’s name. Four hundred and ten samples of what things could be like – hue, texture, printed pattern or monochrome surface, opaque or transparent, smooth or striated. When a child is named, two lists are traditionally composed before the birth. Here there is only one.



Eröffnung // Opening: Friday, 16 March 2018, 18:00 h
With a short introduction by Donatella Bernardi and a lecture-performance by Nicola Genovese: It’s not about power, it’s about comfort zone

Read more…



Thursday, 29 March 2018, 19:00h: After Carla Lonzi and Ketty La Rocca
With contributions by Claire Fontaine, Elisabeth Joris and Sally Schonfeldt

Read more…



Saturday, 21 April 2018, 14:00h: Dependency relationship: does feminism need separatism and / or art?
With contributions by Laura Iamurri, Quinn Latimer, Federica Martini and Angela Marzullo

Read more…



Die Ausstellung wird unterstützt von der Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung und der Georges und Jenny Bloch-Stiftung. //
The exhibition is supported by Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung and the Georges und Jenny Bloch-Stiftung.

Zine – to March, Clandestine Life of the BoycottGiiirls! 2017

Zine launch

Für gute Laune sorgt Musik, ausgesucht von / For our good mood, music selected by Anne Käthi Wehrli und / and Monica Germann

Mit Beiträgen von / With contributions by
Tonjaschja Adler, Madeleine Amsler, Ariane Andereggen, Nicole Bachmann, Martina Baldinger, Nadja Baldini, Mirjam Bayerdörfer, Marina Belobrovaja, Sofia Bempeza, Denise Bertschi, Ursula Biemann, Klara Borbély, Johanna Bruckner, Patricia Bucher, Sarah Burger, Françoise Caraco, Bettina Carl, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Teresa Chen, Marie-Antoinette Chiarenza, member of RELAX, data | Auftrag für parasitäre* Gastarbeit, Brigitte Dätwyler, Kadiatou Diallo, Bettina Diel, Mo Diener, Quynh Dong, Marianne Engel, Klodin Erb, Anne-Laure Franchette, Anna Francke, Ipek Füsun, Monica Germann, Clare Goodwin, Co Gründler, Gabriela Gründler, Sabine Hagmann, Marianne Halter, Andrea Heller, Samia Henni, Seda Hepsev, Anke Hoffmann, Cathérine Hug, Patricia Jacomella, Monica Ursina Jäger, Sophie Jung, Anastasia Katsidis, Yasmin Kiss, Sandra Knecht, Verica Kovacevska, Isabelle Krieg, Sandra Kühne, Georgette Maag, Julia Marti, Federica Martini & Petra Elena Köhle, Angela Marzullo, Mickry 3, Maya Minder, Rayelle Niemann, Caroline Palla, Ursula Palla, Katherine Patiño Miranda, Leila Peacock, Linda Pfenninger, Cora Piantoni, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud , Maria Pomiansky, Elodie Pong, Isabel Reiss, Marion Ritzmann, Ana Roldán, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Dorothea Rust, Eliane Rutishauser, Margit Säde, Saman Anabel Sarabi, Julie Sas, Lisa Schiess, Annette Sense, Dimitrina Sevova, Francisca Silva, Veronika Spierenburg, Vreni Spieser, Claudia Spinelli, Marion Strunk, Milva Stutz, Una Szeemann, Lena Maria Thüring, Yota Tsotra, Jana Vanecek, Anne Käthi Wehrli, Nives Widauer, Martina-Sofie Wildberger, Angela Wittwer, Sophie Yerly.

Zinesters / editors: Nadja Baldini, Dimitrina Sevova, Tanja Trampe

Prepress by code flow / Dimitrina Sevova & Alan Roth

Herausgegeben von / Published by Corner College Press, 2018

ISBN 978-3-033-06183-5

Auflage / Print run: 450

Seiten / Pages: 226

Die Einleitung in voller Länge samt Verzeichnis der Beiträge findet sich auf unserer Materialien-Webseite.

The complete intro including a list of contributions can be found on our materials website.


[Deutsch unten]
The Zine – to March, Clandestine Life of the BoycottGiiirls is an artistic response to the International Women’s Day 2017 that came in a highly turbulent global situation and was one of the most political International Women’s Days. We have found ourselves in our localities sensing translocally. With the Zine we catch an “atmospheric flux,” undertake an experiment in “how to get taken up by the motion of a big wave” of women’s protest on a global scale. We want to move instead of being ordered into something. We want to do something in common, to come together, being many and so different, to make feminist media urgent and her voice heard.

[English above]
Das Zine – to March, Clandestine Life of the BoycottGiiirls ist eine künstlerische Antwort auf den Internationalen Frauentag von 2017. Dieser fand in einer global turbulenten Situation statt und war einer der politischsten Frauentage überhaupt: Wir haben in der je eigenen Lokalität translokal empfunden. Mit der Herausgabe des Zine wollen wir diesen «atmosphärischen Fluss» einfangen, indem wir das Experiment wagen und erproben, «wie man von der Bewegung einer grossen Welle» von Frauenprotesten im globalen Massstab «erfasst wird». Wir wollen uns bewegen und nicht in etwas hineingedrängt werden. Wir wollen zusammenkommen, etwas Gemeinsames tun, Viele sein und zugleich verschieden, wollen feministische Medien dringlich und ihre Stimme hörbar machen.

02.02. 2018 *22:00 *Sihlquai 240 *Zürich *EINTRITT FREI *Dresscode: zwischen Siff & Haute Couture

#artistsdance #NeinzuNoBillag

43 Zürcher Kunsträume sagen NEIN zur No Billag Initiative

*Corner College *la_càpsula *LastTango *Dienstgebäude *Offspace Offspace *KIOSK TABAK *Itinerant Projects *Merkurgarten *Kunstklinik *blossom *Raumstation *Büro Discount by Büro Destruct* OnCurating Project Space *Raum für Malerei *Wall & Stage *dock18 *Garage *message salon embasssy *Counter Space *Video Window *artcontainer *Wunderkammer *data/Auftrag für parasitäre Gastarbeit *Kunsthaus Aussersihl *Chamber of Fine Arts *Die Diele *Kunstgriff *6/2, Zimmer für zeitgenössische Kunst *Kunstgrill *Sihlhalle *Kunsthalle Schlieren *TART-exhibition space *Kunstsalon_ Zurich *KunstRaum R57 *K3 Project Space *Egg'n Spoon *Schaufensterklub *Kunstraum Walcheturm *Theory Tuesday *vein contemporary *Outside Sundays *Klara Kiss Zip Space

Performances: * B.B.Rouge (Luxus) * Frances Belser feat. Thomas Haemmerli & Operation Libero * Jordis Fellmann * Karoline Schreiber
Installation: * Chantal Hoefs
Tabledancers: * Martin Schick * San Keller
DJs: *Manon *Monica Germann
https://soundcloud.com/manon
https://soundcloud.com/monica-germann
Photographers: Eliane Rutishauser *Roland Iselin *Sabine Hagmann
*Celebrities Reception ..........
*Influencer Bar * ......

https://www.facebook.com/events/115912182496849/

Polina Akhmetzyanova

Gracious numbers or thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear

Duration of performance : 15 minutes



Cyriaque Villemaux

Help, the artist comes to speak about his work

Au secours l’artiste vient parler de son travail

Hilfe, de Künschtler chunt und redt über sini Arbet




The work will be presented in silence during five minutes, the time needed for the projection of selected slides.

Le travail sera présenté en silence pendant cinq minutes, temps nécessaire à la projection de diapositives choisies.

D'Arbet wird während foif Minute schtumm vorgschtellt, d'Ziit, wo's brucht, zum usgwählti Dia z'zeige.




Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Ausstellung la chambre d'écoute von Axelle Stiefel.

This event is part of Axelle Stiefel's exhibition la chambre d'écoute.

UNTERTAGE
im Waldhuus
best of visarte zürich & guests

Corner College (Dimitrina Sevova & Alan Roth) lädt zu

Künstlergespräch und Diskussion

mit Johanna Bruckner, Anne-Laure Franchette, Michael Günzburger und Milva Stutz


Bitte warm anziehen, die Räume sind nicht geheizt!


Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Finissage der Ausstellung UNTERTAGE im Waldhuus. best of visarte zürich & guests


Anreise: Tram 3/8/15 bis Römerhof, dann mit der Dolderbahn bis Dolder Waldhaus, links runter zum Eingang "Anlieferung" (Zugang über Dolderstrasse)
Adresse: Waldhuus, Kurhausstrasse 18, 8032 Zürich

veranstaltet von Corner College Axelle Stiefel Stan Iordanov BPS und anderen Geräuschen // * hosted by Corner College Axelle Stiefel Stan Iordanov BPS and other noises

eine Ausstellung von Axelle Stiefel // An exhibition by Axelle Stiefel

4 February – 4 March 2018

Opening // Eröffnung: 4 February 2018, 18:00

Opening Hours // Öffnungszeiten
Thu/Fri/Sat 16:00 h – 19:00 h
or by appointment
Do/Fr/Sa 16:00h – 19:00 h
oder nach Vereinbarung

Ein Festmahl war es, ohne Frage,
Nichts fehlte, was das Herz begehrt,
Doch plötzlich wurde das Gelage
Im besten Zuge jäh gestört.

Ein Lärm von draußen, welch ein Schrecken!
Es poltert an des Saales Tür.


In the context of this exhibition, see the conversation with Axelle Stiefel by Dimitrina Sevova (also printable as PDF, 3.20MB).

And a short text by Stan Iordanov about his sound piece in the exhibition (also printable as PDF, 59KB).



Das Projekt ist Teil der Corner-College-Plattform Transferenzen: Die Funktion der Ausstellung und Performativer Prozesse in Kunstpraktiken – Fragen der Teilnahme, initiiert von Dimitrina Sevova und Alan Roth.

The project is part of the Corner College platform Transferences: The Function of the Exhibition and Performative Processes in the Practices of Art – Questions of Participation, initiated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.

Two publications based on the Art Work(ers) research project by ECAV / Ecole Cantonale d'Art du Valais.

Magazine Launch: Friday January 19, 2018, 18h – 21 h
The exhibition will remain open till January 28, 2018

Concept: Art Work(ers), Federica Martini & Christof Nüssli
Publisher: art&fiction, Lausanne
With texts by: Leah Anderson, Andrea Bellini, Donatella Bernardi, Mabe Bethonico, Chrisantha Chetty, Robert Ireland, Alexandros Kyriakatos, Federica Martini, Guillaume Pilet, David Romero, Marcella Turchetti, W.A.G.E.

The Blackout Magazine invites artists, historians and theoreticians to reactivate editorial formats emerged around industrial utopias.
The first two issues are Blackout #0: Art Labour and Blackout #1: Olivetti, poesia concreta. They focus on industrial and cultural labour, Olivetti, visual arts and post-industrial conditions.


Art Work(ers) is a research project by Robert Ireland, Petra Köhle & Federica Martini at the ECAV - Ecole Cantonale d'Art du Valais/Sierre. The Art Work(ers) research project is supported by the Hes-so research fund and the Canton du Valais.

With Mirjana Power, Nadja Baldini, Jeltje Gordon-Lennox, Dimitrina Sevova and Julius John Alam.

I am a Lahore based artist. I received a Bachelors of Fine Art degree from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2013 and a Masters of Fine Art degree from Parsons the New School for Design in 2016, where I studied on a Fulbright Scholarship. I have exhibited at Participant Inc, New York, 1×1 Gallery, Dubai, 12 Gates, Philadelphia, Gallery of Light, DUCTAC, Dubai, Canvas Gallery, Karachi, Koel Gallery, Karachi, Sanat Initiative, Karachi, Taseer Art Gallery, Lahore, and Rohtas II, Lahore. I currently teach at the National College of Arts, Lahore and also contribute to various art publications.

In 2016, I engaged some young people to help me make work for a new exhibition. I felt that the safe social space that formed during that time was transformative and healing for everyone. This experience shifted my work from an object based practice to a participatory approach. So, in my next art project I tried to recreate that safe social space. But I found galleries to be stressful spaces that put pressure on people to behave in a certain way. So I grew dissatisfied with the gallery system.

When I arrived in Zurich in 2017 for a residency, I thought it would be better that, instead of working from this problematic position, I use the opportunity to find a solution. I conceived Zurich Konversationen as a collection of conversations with people who employ the arts as a tool in their own practices in an attempt to make the world a better place. Through these conversations I am trying to better understand the role of art and artists in life and how the approaches discussed in the conversations can help me in my own practice.

As I am nearing the end of the project it is becoming clear to me that I cannot call myself an artist anymore, nor can I make and exhibit art in galleries. So I have decided to call myself a facilitator and to independently hold one-on-one and group sessions to facilitate self-healing through the arts. Having been through my own self-healing process and continuously working on my own awareness I understand the challenges that arise through such a process. As a facilitator I have two main roles: to ensure that a safe social space is created for the participant(s); and, to hold the psychological space for inner healing to take place.

The series of conversations I had with people concerning the same are archived as audio recordings. These can be accessed online at the website (www.zurichkonversationen.com) that I made exclusively for the project. Dimitrina Sevova has kindly invited me use Corner College's space to present my final project. It will be structured like a panel discussion. She will mediate and there will be 2 or 3 other people on the panel. It will be a group discussion about the same questions that I have posed during the project and also a reflection on the project itself. It will be held on 16 December at 4:30PM.


Julius John Alam's residency and Zurich Konversationen are kindly supported by IG Rote Fabrik and Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council.

Opening: Samstag, 9. Dezember 2017, 17-22.30 Uhr

UNTERTAGE
im Waldhuus
best of visarte zürich & guests

Guests: Corner College, Die Diele, Kunsthaus Aussersihl, The Museum of the Unwanted
Konzept/Kuration: Daniela Minneboo & Sandra Oehy
Bar: Sandi Paucic + Team
DJ: Monica Germann

Unter Tage im Waldhuus präsentiert visarte zürich zum Jahresende einen grossen Überblick über das vielfältigen Zürcher Kunstschaffen.

Dieses Jahr wird unsere Ausstellung an einem sehr besonderen Ort stattfinden: In den leerstehenden unterirdischen Diensträumen des früheren Hotel Dolder Waldhaus in Zürich. Das Gebäude wird bis zu seinem geplanten Abbruch von Projekt Interim als "Waldhuus" zwischengenutzt.

Neben den Mitgliedern des Berufsverbands für Visuelle Kunst visarte zürich werden erstmals auch ausgewählte Zürcher Kunsträume und Ausstellungsformate als Gäste an der Ausstellung teilnehmen. Mit dabei sind das Corner College, Die Diele, das Kunsthaus Aussersihl und The Museum of the Unwanted.

Corner College präsentiert Arbeiten von Johanna Bruckner, Anne-Laure Franchette, Milva Stutz und Katharina Swoboda.

Weitere Informationen finden sich auf der Materialien-Seite des Corner College.









Corner College legt sein Augenmerk auf vier künstlerische Positionen und deren für die Ausstellung ausgewählten Arbeiten. Diese Auswahl sehen wir als Zusammenspiel singulärer Positionen sowie als kollektive Arbeit, die ORLANs Körper bildet und ein transhumanistisches Engagement für kritische Ökologien zum Ausdruck bringt, als Praxis der posthumanistischen feministischen Wende, eine “materialistische, sekuläre, geerdete und unsentimentale Antwort auf die opportunistische transspeziesistische Kommodifizierung des Lebens, welche die Logik des fortgeschrittenen Kapitalismus ist.” Wir sehen diese Sammlung künstlerischer Arbeiten in den sozio-politischen und ästhetischen Verlangen des Feminismus der vierten Welle.
Kuratiert von Dimitrina Sevova & Alan Roth

Corner College’s focal point is on four artist positions and their works selected for the exhibition. We see the selection as a collaboration of singular positions and as a collective work that forms ORLAN’s body and expresses a transhumanist engagement in critical ecologies as a practice of the postanthropocentric feminist turn, which is a “materialist, secular, grounded and unsentimental response to the opportunistic transspecies commodification of Life that is the logic of advanced capitalism.” We see the collection of art works in the socio-political and aesthetic desires of fourth-wave feminism.
Curated by Dimitrina Sevova & Alan Roth


VERANSTALTUNGEN

Sa, 9.12.17, 17 Uhr Kabuki-Aufführung mit Porte Rouge
Sa, 16.12.17, 15 Uhr Performances von Svetlana Hansemann und von Olivia Wiederkehr
Do, 28.12.17, ab 16.30 Uhr Kaffee, Kunst und Konversation mit Artist/Curator Clare Goodwin und special guests – The Museum of the Unwanted (no3)
Sa, 6.1.18, 13 Uhr Die Diele zeigt Shortcuts von Nino Baumgartner (Gutes Schuhwerk, Platzzahl beschränkt, Anmeldung unter info@diediele.ch)
So, 7.1.18, 14 Uhr Corner College (Dimitrina Sevova & Alan Roth) lädt zu Künstlergespräch und Diskussion mit Johanna Bruckner, Anne-Laure Franchette, Michael Günzburger und Milva Stutz

Bitte warm anziehen, die Räume sind nicht geheizt!


AUSSTELLUNG

Ausstellung: 10. Dezember 2017 – 7. Januar 2018
Öffnungszeiten: Do + Fr 16-19 Uhr / Sa 14-17 Uhr
Vernissage: Samstag, 9. Dezember 2017, 17-22.30 Uhr
Finissage: Sonntag, 7. Januar 2018, 14-17 Uhr

Anreise: Tram 3/8/15 bis Römerhof, dann mit der Dolderbahn bis Dolder Waldhaus, links runter zum Eingang "Anlieferung" (Zugang über Dolderstrasse)
Adresse: Waldhuus, Kurhausstrasse 18, 8032 Zürich

In relation to Nicole Bachmann’s new work I say, the artist together with Cathérine Hug and Dimitrina Sevova will discuss the wider implications of finding your voice and the political consequences this can have. But also think together and with the audience about artistic processes in this context, as well as reflect on the wider context of text-based, voice-based art works.

This event is part of Nicole Bachmann's personal exhibition at Corner College, I say.

I say explores the relation between the liveliness of the sound and the activity of listening by intensifying the microprocess of forming words so as to enunciate them. It unfolds the micropolitics of language structures in close relation to body movements in the plural and singular, to ask how the speech affects the body, instituting corporeal vulnerability and body resistance. The artist employs warm-up techniques of voice practices in actors’ routines, when they rehearse and test speech sounds in order to speak clearly during the performance. In Bachmann’s approach, the rehearsal is a performative situation evolving new emotions and affects in ever changing environments to mobilize the power of the voice with the materiality of the abstracting machine in the body in the variations between the combination of selected and collected words. In Samuel Beckett’s assertion, “make the limits of our language tremble,” one can grasp how I say produces a breathing space at the limit when the forms appear – a space of knowledge.
(Excerpt from the text on Nicole Bachmann's I say by Dimitrina Sevova; find the full text here)

Interview with Nicole Bachmann by Dimitrina Sevova

An exhibition of the Art Work(ers) research project by ECAV / Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais.
Curated by Robert Ireland, Petra Köhle and Federica Martini.

With contributions by Donatella Bernardi, Christopher Füllemann, Patricio Gil Flood, Robert Ireland, Petra Köhle, Federica Martini, Christof Nüssli, Aurélie Strumans, Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin.

Texts by Leah Anderson, Andrea Bellini, Donatella Bernardi, Mabe Bethonico, Chrisantha Chetty, Robert Ireland, Alexandros Kyriakatos, Federica Martini, Guillaume Pilet, David Romero, Marcella Turchetti, W.A.G.E.

Thursday, 07 December 2017  –  Sunday, 28 January 2018

Opening: Thursday, 07 December 2017, 18:00 h – 21:00 h
Discussion: Friday, 08 December 2017, 11:00 h – 13:00 h

Opening hours:
Thu-Sat 16:00h - 19:00h
or by appointment
Closed from 25 to 31 December 2017.
Do-Sa 16:00h - 19:00h
oder nach Vereinbarung
Vom 25. zum 31. Dezember 2017 geschlossen.

The research project Art Work(ers) began from a set of historical facts and some intuitions: the concurrent deskilling of art and industrial labour; the parallel emergence of applied research in the arts and in utopian industrial plans; the observation that art did not enter the factory only once production was over, as an alternative or a gentrification agent. Rather, artistic production had often overlapped, both aesthetically and politically, with industrial labour and materials.

Working in between the past and present of two factories (Alusuisse, Chippis and Olivetti, Ivrea), the exhibition Blackout shares performances, discussions and printed matters from the archive of the Art Work(ers) research project.

The exhibition Blackout is a collateral event of the SARN Symposium “Art Research Work,” ZHdK, Zurich, 8 – 9 December 2017.

The Art Work(ers) research project is supported by the Hes • so research fund and the Canton du Valais.

Opening 5 November 2017, 17:00h

Opening Hours
Thu/Fri/Sat 16h – 19h

Bachmann’s new video-audioinstallation examines the relationship between language, voice and power and the singular voice within the plural. The piece deals with negotiations of speech within a group and the exploration of the singular as well as the communal voice. The materiality of gestures and the spoken word become an embodied vocabulary through which the performers navigate the construct of language and affirmation of their own expression.




Exhibition supported by
Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia
Dr. Georg & Josi Guggenheim Stiftung
Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung
Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung

On/Off Booth A13 | ABB Hall 550 | Ricarda-Huch-Strasse | 8050 Zürich-Oerlikon | http://www.onoff.today/

Corner College presents works by Donatella Bernardi

Thursday, 26.10.2017 - Sunday, 29.10.2017

Opening Hours
Thursday, 16:00h - 22:00h
Friday, 12:00h - 20:00h
Saturday | Sunday, 11:00h - 19:00h

Donatella Bernardi

Guest event: Le Foyer Conversation XLXI

Appunti del passaggio and an Occasional Accent: Storia di storie

A (performative) evening with Maria Iorio, Raphaël Cuomo and Alessandra Eramo

Performance, screening (43’15 min, Italian, English subtitles) and discussion

Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo’s film Appunti del passaggio (2014–16) reconstructs forgotten episodes related to migration from the South to the North of Europe in the 1960s. For tonight’s event the artists further developed a performance-based discussion in collaboration with the performer Alessandra Eramo, which will serve as an introduction to the screening. By investigating how the risk of contamination has been used as a strategy to control immigration and the legality of border crossing, the artists retrace the trajectories of some of those who made the passage, unfolding first-hand accounts that manifest a counter-memory of migration from southern Italy to Switzerland during the post-war ‘economic miracle’. Through a series of a series of transitions – from storytelling to listening, from one language to another – the artists raise questions in regards to the widespread perception of migrants as ‘abject’ bodies while concentrating on the biopolitical apparatuses that shape subjectivity and collective experience.

http://www.parallelhistories.org/
http://lefoyer-lefoyer.blogspot.ch/

Une prise de parole

13 - 29 October 2017

Opening Friday, 13 October 2017 at 19:00h
Performance I WANT TO SAY SOMETHING with Martina-Sofie Wildberger, Tobias Bienz and Denise Hasler.

Friday, 27 October 2017 at 13:30h
As part of the trans-local Sympodium What’s Wrong with Performance Art?, Martina-Sofie Wildberger's Artist Talk Performance as Book. Book as Performance in conversation with Georg Rutishauser.

Öffnungszeiten / Opening Hours
Do– Sa 16:00h – 19:00h / Thu-Sat 16:00h-19:00h
oder nach Vereinbarung / or by appointment






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The project is part of the Corner College platform Transferences: The Function of the Exhibition and Performative Processes in the Practices of Art – Questions of Participation, initiated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.


This exhibition is supported by the Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain, DIP, Genève.

Detailed program and additional materials


Friday, 27 October, 12:30h doors open, coffee / tea / buffet

13:00h Introduction by the curators

13:30h Artist Talk Performance as Book. Book as Performance by Martina-Sofie Wildberger in conversation with Georg Rutishauser in the context of her personal exhibition at Corner College and her collaborative book project with edition fink / Georg Rutishauser.

14:00h Session 1 Performing the Curatorial / Curating Performance with Chris Regn, Madeleine Amsler, Sibylle Omlin and Elise Lammer, moderated by Irene Müller
16:05h panel discussion

17:15h Performances by Heike Fiedler and Nathalie Rebholz

18:50h Keynote Inputs by Linda Cassens Stoian and Federica Martini

Saturday, 28 October, 10:30h doors open, coffee / tea / croissants
11:00h Session 2 Performative (Un)Learning – Performance as Teaching with Donatella Bernardi, San Keller, Kamen Stoyanov, Axelle Stiefel, moderated by Bernadett Settele
12:50h lunch break
13:35h panel discussion

14:45h Performances by Katharina Swoboda and Kamen Stoyanov

16:15h Session 3 What’s Wrong with Performance Art – Strategies in the Performative with Valerian Maly, Voin de Voin, Camille Aleña, Lou Masduraud and Guillaume Pilet, moderated by Dimitrina Sevova
18:35h panel discussion

19:45h Performances by Camille Aleña and Delphine Chapuis Schmitz


Sunday, 29 October, 10:30h doors open, coffee / tea / croissants

11:00h Session 4 Performance Szenen / Scenes – Tribal & Translocal Networking with Milenko Lazic, Pascal Schwaighofer, Muda Mathis and Gilles Furtwängler, moderated by Chris Regn
12:50h lunch break
13:50h panel discussion

15:00h Performances by Dorothea Schürch and Voin de Voin

16:30h Session 5 Performative Tactics, Activism & Performance Politics with Mo Diener, Lia García, Angela Marzullo, Nathalie Rebholz, moderated by Denis Pernet
18:30h panel discussion

19:30h Performances by Gilles Furtwängler and Axelle Stiefel

20:40h Final report by the observer throughout the Sympodium, Andrea Saemann

curated by Dorothea Rust and Dimitrina Sevova,
co-curated by Denis Pernet



[en]

The Sympodium sets up a two-and-a-half days live performative event that aims to provide a platform for presenting, discussing and performing Performance Art throughout a panel structure with an accent on moderated discussions and performances. The Sympodium strives to generate an energetic open space for aesthetic experience and exchange of knowledge between the current active practitioners in the field of Performance Art(s): artists, curators, performance study researchers, educators, and their publics. Those committed to Performance Art will share their practices, experience, reflections, thoughts, and research.

The Sympodium is a podium that encourages invited participants to give a very direct subjective response from the material objectives of the event itself. The Sympodium is quasi-academic and brings together practitioners inside and outside Academia to publicly present and discuss their practices and modes of articulation and action. The Sympodium operates within the local, interregional and international Performance Art scene. It strives for different perceptions and a new ontology of the relation between Performance and Art, and a pattern of branching that expands the field of live practices.

[de]

Das Sympodium stellt in einer zweieinhalbtägigen performativen Live-Veranstaltung eine Plattform zur Verfügung zum Präsentieren, Diskutieren und Performieren von Performance Art, in einer Podiumsstruktur mit Schwerpunkt auf moderierten Diskussionen und Performances. Das Sympodium strebt danach, einen energischen offenen Raum zu erzeugen für ästhetische Erfahrung und den Wissensaustausch zwischen den heute aktiven Praktiker_innen im Bereich der Performance Art(s): Künstler_innen, Kurator_innen, sowie Forscher_innen und Pädagog_innen zu Performance, und ihr Publikum. Jene, die der Performance Art verpflichtet sind, teilen ihre Praktiken, Erfahrungen, Überlegungen, Gedanken und Forschung.

Das Sympodium lädt als Podium die Teilnehmer_innen ein, aus den materiellen Zielen des Ereignisses selbst eine sehr direkte subjektive Antwort zu geben. Das Sympodium ist quasi-akademisch und bringt Praktiker_innen inner- und ausserhalb der akademischen Welt zusammen, um ihre Praktiken und ihre Artikulations- und Aktions-Modi öffentlich vorzustellen und zur Diskussion zu stellen. Das Sympodium operiert mit der lokalen, interregionalen und internationalen Performance Art-Szene. Es streicht unterschiedliche Wahrnehmungen heraus und erarbeitet eine neue Ontologie des Verhältnisses zwischen Performance und Kunst, in einem Verzweigungsmuster, welches das Feld der Live-Praktiken erweitert.



The Sympodium is supported by Kultur Stadt Zürich, Fachstelle Kultur Kanton Zürich, Pro Helvetia and Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung.

In this workshop we try to connect to clarifying and healing qualities of gold. in a goldspray enhanced atmosphere, specific visualization and awareness exercises will be guided. golden shining energy may arise and nourish our energetic bodies. we allow us to dive into these golden psychoimaginations and enjoy them. But we also ask if this these are states beyond criticality where historical reflections on gold refinements and colonial settings are muted. bring your own little piece of gold to charge it anew!

date: thursday, 14th september, 6-8pm
place: corner college. 

free of cost but limited space of attendance, please register at cornercollege@gmail.com.

followed at 8pm by a discussion between Rohit Jain and knowbotiq on Swiss Psychotropic Gold and latent archives.

the workshop and discussion are part of knowbotiq's exhibition The Swiss Psychotropic Gold Refining. what is your mission? at Corner College.

[English below]

Eröffnung: Sonntag, 10. September, 18h-20h
verschiedene performative Settings und Heilungen von post-/kolonialer Amnesie:
DJ Fred Hystère und Nina Bandi (molecular listening session),
Martina Buzzi (golden acupuncture/charming the ghost points) und
Gabriel Flückiger (meditation on pure gold)

Donnerstag, 14. September
Workshop trans-shine mit Gabriel Flückiger: 18h-20h, Anmeldung erforderlich
Rohit Jain und knowbotiq im Gespräch über Swiss Psychotropic Gold und latente Archive, 20h

Finissage: Sonntag, 8. Oktober, 16h-19h
performative Settings und Heilungen von post-/kolonialer Amnesie:
Martina Buzzi (golden acupuncture/charming the ghost points) und
Gabriel Flückiger (meditation on pure gold)

Öffnungszeiten
Do– Sa 16:00h – 19:00h
oder nach Vereinbarung


Detailliertere Infos: corner-college.com und knowbotiq.net/psygold

Seit mehr als drei Jahrhunderten ist der Schweizer Rohstoffhandel Teil von kolonialen, postkolonialen und neoliberalen Verflechtungen. Er ermöglichte sowohl die frühe moderne Industrialisierung als auch die Konstituierung des Finanzplatzes der Schweiz. Er brachte aber auch spezifische ästhetische, affektive und moralische Ökonomien hervor. Der Schweizer Mythos der Neutralität verwandelt die “schmutzigen” Materialitäten und Geschäfte mit den Rohstoffen zu einer opaken und diskreten Form von Technokratie, Sicherheit, Philanthropie und weißer Vorherrschaft.

The Swiss Psychotropic Gold Refining fabuliert über den Rohstoffhandel und das Raffinieren von Gold. Am hochglänzenden, zärtlich schützenden Metall molekularisieren sich die Narrative über Gewalt, Zugriffe auf schwarze Körper, derivative Bereicherungen, psychotrope Energien und wechselseitige Schulden. Das calvinistische Gold durchläuft, einmal gefördert, einen sich wiederholenden Zyklus von Reinigung/Raffinierung, Verarbeitung und Wiedereinschmelzung – es wird aber nie gezeigt. Es eignet sich für jegliche Form von Spurenlöschung und Anonymisierung als auch Heilung von post-/kolonialer Amnesie.

in Zusammenarbeit mit ifcar, Institute for Contemporary Art Research Zurich


[Deutsch siehe oben]

10 September – 8 October 2017

Opening: Sunday, 10 September, 18h-20h
different performative settings and healings of post-/colonial amnesia:
DJ Fred Hystère and Nina Bandi (molecular listening session),
Martina Buzzi (golden acupuncture/charming the ghost points) and
Gabriel Flückiger (meditation on pure gold)

Thursday, 14 September
Workshop trans-shine with Gabriel Flückiger: 18h-20h, registration required
Rohit Jain and knowbotiq in conversation about Swiss Psychotropic Gold and latent archives, 20h

Finissage: Sunday, 8 October, 16h-19h
performative settings and healings of post-/colonial amnesia:
Martina Buzzi (golden acupuncture/charming the ghost points) and
Gabriel Flückiger (meditation on pure gold)


Opening Hours
Thu – Sat 16:00h – 19:00h
or by appointment


Further information: corner-college.com and knowbotiq.net/psygold

For more than three hundred years, Swiss commodity trading has been part of a mesh of colonial, postcolonial and neoliberal entanglements. It enabled both early modern industrialization and the constitution of Switzerland as a financial center. It also brought about specific aesthetic, affective and moral economies. The Swiss myth of neutrality turns dirty materialities and trades in commodities into an opaque and discreet form of technocracy, security, philanthropy and white supremacy.

The Swiss Psychotropic Gold Refining fabulates on commodity trading and refining of gold. Narratives of violence, the access to black bodies, derivative enrichments, psychotropic energies and mutual indebtness molecularise on the high-gloss, tenderly protective metal. Calvinist gold is never shown. It goes through repeated cycles of purification/refinement, processing and remelting – making it suitable for any form of erasing traces and anonymising, as well as the healing of post-/colonial amnesia.

in collaboration with ifcar, Institute for Contemporary Art Research Zurich

The exhibition is concerned with the production of space or elliptical sense between the three positions and the works on display by Nora Schmidt, Katharina Swoboda, and Kosta Tonev, and to what extent the aesthetic use of research or research creation (lightening of sense) refers to what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “knowledge of a condition of possibility that gives nothing to know.” It is rather about “the syndrome known as life,” or “the sense of being which calls for more form.”

Curated by Dimitrina Sevova & Alan Roth.

Saturday, 5 - Thursday, 31 August 2017.

Opening: Saturday, 5 August 2017, 17:00h

Finissage: Thursday, 31 August 2017, 19:00h
with, starting 19:30h,
Performative reading Altered State by Nora Schmidt
Lecture-performance Practice as Research – Research as a practice (Video Narratives) by Katharina Swoboda
Lecture-performance Wilfred Wyman by Kosta Tonev

Sunday, 6 August 2017, 16:00h - 19:00h: Guided tour with the curators and Kosta Tonev, with coffee, tea and cake.

Opening Hours
Thu/Fri/Sat: 16:00h - 19:00h
or by appointment



Nora Schmidt

Altered State
2017. Installation and performative reading.

[English below]

Prolog: Alles, was ich während meines Aufenthaltes an jenem Ort tat, war, das Innen mit dem Aussen abzugleichen.
Das, was scheinbar offenbar war, im Negativ zu zeigen. Nahm Mass an den Objekten, die diesen Ort mitbestimmten.
Dass die Oberfläche, die ich zu sein glaubte, die mich umschloss und in welche ich gleichzeitig eindrang, die Form eines Poetischen Faktums annahm…

“[…] Zu unterscheiden ist das poetische Faktum von der poetischen Kunst – die zum Ziel hat, solcher Art Faktum zu produzieren oder zu provozieren oder zu präparieren oder zu isolieren.
Jedes Ereignis, jeder Eindruck, der von sich aus Erregung, Produktion von ungebundener Energie bewirkt, ohne auf ein präzises Bedürfnis, eine unmittelbare Handlung zu zielen, ohne Vorhaben, ein Begehren hervorzurufen (ausser der Bewahrung, Fixierung, Erfassung dieser Erregung selbst) – ist ein poetisches Faktum, Objekt oder Ereignis.”
(Paul Valéry, Cahiers/Hefte: Die vollständige Pléiade-Edition)




[Deutsch oben]

Prologue: Everything I did during my stay in that place was to match up the inside with the outside.
To show what was seemingly obvious, in the negative. Took the measure of objects that contributed to defining this place.
That the surface I believed to be, that enclosed me and into which I penetrated at the same time, took the form of a poetic fact…


“[…] The poetic fact is to be distinguished from poetic art - which has as its aim to produce or to provoke or to prepare or to isolate facts of this kind.
Every event, every impression that of itself effects excitation, production of unbound energy without aiming at a precise necessity, an immediate action, without a plan to evoke a desire (besides the preservation, fixing, capture of the excitation itself) - is a poetic fact, object or event.”
(Paul Valéry, Cahiers/Notebooks)



Katharina Swoboda

Marguerite’s Desires
2017. Site-specific installation, video, archive materials, wallpapers.



Marguerite’s Desires is a video work about French Feminist Marguerite Durand (1864-1936). The work makes a connection between two places founded by Durand: the pet cemetery Cimetière des Chiens and the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand in Paris. Durand, a former actress at Comédie-Française, became interested in politics after the Congrès féministe international in 1896. She then founded the journal La Fronde (The Sling), a journal solely written and edited by women. Marguerite had a lion, which she lovingly called tiger and which brought her also publicity for her political campaign. In 1899 she founded the pet cemetery Cimetière des chiens in Asnières-sur-Seine, close to Paris. Although an animal lover, she founded the cemetery for purely hygienic reasons. In 1932, she donated her extensive collection of journals and literature to the government, and the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand was founded. It was the very same place where Durand died in 1936 of a heart attack.




Practice as Research – Research as a practice (Video Narratives)
Lecture-performance (at the finissage on 31 August 2017)

As a strategy, I often use historical, actual or fictive female characters to install a multilayered biopic inside the exhibition. In Marguerite’s Desires, I use the figuration of Marguerite Durand to explore her progressive ideas and their relevance today. My video interact with other material like discourses in cultural theory, press releases or even the exhibition text on the wall. In this sense, the audio-visual fragments, that I produced, are or can be read in an actual and abstract relationship to other texts, videos, photographies, performative elements and events.


This project was supported by Kulturamt der Stadt Graz.



Kosta Tonev

Wilfred Wyman
2014-2017. Object and sound installation, 23′30″.



The project constructs and narrates the life story of a fictional, late-Victorian artist named Wilfred Wyman (1859-1939). Set against the backdrop of real, historical events, Wyman’s life witnessed the developments in post-Darwinian science and their dire consequences. The human body is a recurrent theme in Wyman’s own work, which resonates with the scientific and intellectual discourses of his time. A collection of documents and relics forms a narrative reflecting the intricate relationship between 19th-century biology and the totalitarian ideologies of the 1930s.





The project is part of the Corner College platform Transferences: The Function of the Exhibition and Performative Processes in the Practices of Art – Questions of Participation, initiated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.


Mit der freundlichen Unterstützung des Bundeskanzleramts Österreich.

Bildungsfernsehen #3:

«Television, Images, Messages and Ideologies», Society and social science: a foundation course (D103) pt. 9., Open University, UK, 1991

Der Kulturtheoretiker Stuart Hall (1932–2014) wirkte zwischen 1979 und 1997 als Professor für Soziologie an der Open University (OU), einer britischen Fernhochschule, nachdem er zuvor das wegweisende Centre for Cultural Studies an der Universität Birmingham geleitet hatte.

Die Sendung «Television, Images, Messages and Ideologies» behandelt das Problem der Ideologie am Beispiel britischer Nachrichten- und Unterhaltungssendungen. Sie ist Teil des von Hall konzipierten Einführungskurses «Society and Social Science» der von der OU produziert und 1991 von der BBC ausgestrahlt wurde. Das Erwachsenenbildungsprogramm steht für ein Bemühen, akademische Fragestellungen über den geschlossenen Kreis der bestehenden Universitäten hinaus zu vermitteln.


Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil von Lucie Kolbs Ausstellung Studium, nicht Kritik.

Bildungsfernsehen #2:

«The Politics of Equal Opportunity», Society and social science: a foundation course (D103) pt. 8. [Prof. Stuart Hall], Open University, UK, 1991

Der Kulturtheoretiker Stuart Hall (1932–2014) wirkte zwischen 1979 und 1997 als Professor für Soziologie an der Open University (OU), einer britischen Fernhochschule, nachdem er zuvor das wegweisende Centre for Cultural Studies an der Universität Birmingham geleitet hatte.

Die Sendung «The Politics of Equal Opportunity» ist Teil des von Hall konzipierten Einführungskurses «Society and Social Science» der von der OU produziert und 1991 von der BBC ausgestrahlt wurde. Das Erwachsenenbildungsprogramm stellt den Versuch dar, akademische Fragestellungen über den geschlossenen Kreis der bestehenden Universitäten hinaus zu vermitteln. Die gezeigt Folge vergleicht Massnahmen zur Organisation von Chancengleichheit in Grossbritannien und den USA.

Vor der Sendung geht Philipp Messner auf Halls Engagement als Autor und Mitherausgeber bei der 1957 gegründeten Zeitschrift «Universities & Left Review» ein, aus der 1960 die äusserst einflussreiche «New Left Review» hervorging, bei der Hall Anfangs ebenfalls als Herausgeber fungierte.

Der Inhalt der beiden Zeitschriften ist frei online zugänglich:
«Universities & Left Review» (1957–59): http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/ulr/index_frame.htm
«New Left Review» (1960–): https://newleftreview.org/search


Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil von Lucie Kolbs Ausstellung Studium, nicht Kritik.

Bildungsfernsehen #1:

«The Question of Sovereignty», Society and social science: a foundation course (D103) pt. 7. [Prof. Stuart Hall], Open University, UK, 1990/91

Mit einer Einführung von Lucie Kolb und Philipp Messner.

Stuart Hall (1932–2014) war ein Kulturtheoretiker und marxistischer Intellektueller. Seit 1979 wirkte er als Professor für Soziologie an der Open University, einer 1969 gegründeten Fernhochschule, nachdem er zuvor das wegweisende Centre for Cultural Studies an der Universität Birmingham geleitet hatte. Die gezeigte Sendung ist Teil des von Hall konzipierten Einführungskurses «Society and Social Science» der 1991 von der BBC ausgestrahlt wurde. Das Erwachsenenbildungsprogramm stellt den Versuch dar, akademische Fragestellungen über den geschlossenen Kreis der bestehenden Universitäten hinaus zu vermitteln. «The Question of Sovereignty» fragt vor dem Hintergrund der damaligen Integration Grossbritaniens in die Europäische Union nach der Bedeutung des Konzepts der nationalen Souveränität.

Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil von Lucie Kolbs Ausstellung Studium, nicht Kritik.

At Kaserneareal in Basel:

ART SPACES II
Hard Hat, Geneva
Corner College, Zurich
Dr. Kuckucks Labrador, Basel
DEPO, Istanbul

The discussion is part of the broader three-day event organized by Pro Helvetia to present the Cahiers d'Artistes. For Corner College, Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth are taking part.

The Cahiers d’Artistes will be presented throughout the week at LIVING ROOM, a temporary space conceived as a place for discovering emerging Swiss artists, an open platform for discussion as well as a meeting point for the public. Pro Helvetia will host a series of conversations with national and international guests on a range of subjects related to its activities in the visual arts.

http://cahiers.ch/event/

In den Lebensmitteln drin geht es zu und her wie in einer Stadt
Anne Käthi Wehrli
Corner College Press, 2016

17:30h Türöffnung
18:30h Lesung

Der Titel dieser Publikation stammt aus einem Gedicht, enstanden bei der Arbeit an einem Beitrag, der Performance "These we have tried …", für den Anlass "Alice Toklas reads her famous hashish fudge recipe", der 2015 in Wien stattfand. In dieser Performance geht es um die Zubereitung von Fudge und um das berühmte Haschisch Fudge Rezept von Alice Toklas, um Hausfrauen, Sprache, Chemie, Zufall und feine Unterschiede. Ein Teil daraus findet sich in dieser Publikation.

Auch weitere Beiträge dieses Buchs kamen schon an anderen Orten und in anderen Formaten vor.

In Fanzines, Ausstellungen, Radiosendungen, Zeichnungen an Performances, Gedichte als Teil von Texten. Die Zeichnungen und Collagen sind aus der Zeit von ca. 1993-2016. Zusammen mit den Texten die alle neueren Datums sind, sind sie jetzt für dieses Buch neu versammelt worden.

Ein Ausstellungsprojekt von Lucie Kolb

08.07. 16:00h Opening
17.07. 20:00h Bildungsfernsehen #1: «The Question of Sovereignty», D103 pt. 7, Society and social science: a foundation course (D103) [Prof. Stuart Hall], Open University, UK, 1990/91
24.07. 20:00h Bildungsfernsehen #2: «The Politics of Equal Opportunity», D103 pt. 8, ibid.
29.07. 20:00h Bildungsfernsehen #3: «Television, Images, Messages and Ideologies», D103 pt. 9, ibid.

Weitere Veranstaltungen siehe unten.

Opening Hours // Öffnungszeiten
Thu/Fri/Sat 16:00h–19:00h

08 - 29 July 2017


Ich habe mir kürzlich die Science-Fiction-Serie «The 100» angesehen. Eigentlich nicht die Serie, sondern bloss die Storyline von Clarke und Lexa: Zwei Teenagerinnen, die in einer postapokalyptischen Welt rivalisierende Gemeinschaften anführen. In der siebten Folge der dritten Staffel stirbt Lexa kurz nachdem sie mit Clarke im Bett gelandet ist – ein Moment der über zwei Staffeln aufgebaut wurde.

Auf Twitter wird Lexas Tod unter dem Tag #lesbiandeathtrope diskutiert: Das Vorantreiben einer Geschichte durch den Tod eines lesbischen Charakters wird nicht akzeptiert. Die Fans lancieren eine Kampagne in deren Verlauf nicht nur eine Reihe von Drehbuchautor_innen zur Unterzeichnung eines offenen Briefs gewonnen werden, Geld für LGBT-Zwecke gesammelt wird, sondern den Produzenten der Serie auch Todesdrohungen erreichen. Dieser reagiert mit einer offiziellen Entschuldigung. Was zeigt sich hier? Die Macht von Nutzer_innen, die ihr Recht geltend machen, bei der Ausarbeitung einer fiktionalen Geschichte mitzusprechen? Im digitalen Raum verändern sich wirkmächtige Vorstellungen von Autorschaft und Storytelling und machen Platz für Neues. 
Die Fans sind abgetaucht in die Abgründe der Fan Fiction. Sie schreiben eine Geschichte mit Lexa weiter, in der sie lebt und regiert. Die Story ist Teil von «The 100», aber nicht von ihr. Sie isoliert sich nicht, weicht aber von der Serie ab, überzieht sie.

+ Study
«When I think about the way we use the term ‹study›, I think we are comitted to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held unter the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‹study› is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.»
Fred Moten

Beiträge von Zoran Popović und Jasna Tijardović

Texte von u.a. YGRG, Tyna Fritschy, Stephan Geene, Barbara Kapusta & Cathrin Mayer, Ludovica Parenti, Marion von Osten: http://www.brand-new-life.org/b-n-l/tag/study

Bildungsfernsehen mit Philipp Messner: «Society and Social Science – A Foundation Course» (Stuart Hall, Open University/BBC, 1991)

Screening/Talk «Struggle in New York» 1976 with Zoran Popović und Jasna Tijardović at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst Zürich (06.07., 19:00h) and Forde Genève (07.07., 19:30h).


The project is part of the Corner College platform Transferences: The Function of the Exhibition and Performative Processes in the Practices of Art – Questions of Participation, initiated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.

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.

Who likes Chicken Curry? Who laughs about blackfacing and Mohamed caricature? Who defines arranged marriages? Who is scared of Indian IT-Workers? Who is involved in colonialism? Who survives? Who votes? Who really cares?

In this talk anthropologist and sociologist Rohit Jain inquires into the making of postcolonial public spaces of Switzerland in the age of de-centralised capitalism.

Informed by ethnographic and artistic research as well as from activist interventions Rohit delves into the unruly archives of forgotten stories, displaced feelings and interrogates the hegemonic machinery of making things und humans un/happen.

Starting from the transformative notion of „structure of feelings“ (Raymond Williams), the talk unravels the affective nature of postcolonial amnesia in Switzerland. On the hand, the resistance against postcolonial amnesia provokes melancholia, anxieties, or anger. On the other hand, to imagine alternative histories and stories allows to affect unruly archives and to unleash a performative power of assembly (Judith Butler).

Rohit Jain is, thus, interested in the conditions of possibilities as well as in the artistic, political and theoretical strategies to develop alternative publics of conviviality and new communities. The presented work, therefore, opens up new avenue for understanding an unacknowledged Swiss history of violence and envisioning a future of reparative justice at the intersection of ethnography, artistic practices and activism.

Rohit Jain is an anthropologist and anti-racism activist based at Zurich and Berne. His current work focuses on the connections between postcolonial archives, the politics of affects and the performative intervention into translocal publics. Rohit has done research and published on the entanglements of racism, humor and anti-PC in TV comedy, on transnational politics of representation among “second generations Indians” as well as on the connection between the Swiss public discourse of Bollywood, yoga and IT and postcolonial anxieties. Recently he has collaborated in artistic research projects on the “An/aesthetics of Suburbia” and on “Swiss Psychotropic Gold” (both at IFCAR Zurich) and on urban citizenship (at Shedhalle Zurich). He is co-founder of “Laugh Up. Stand Up! Antiracist Humor Festival” and of “Salon Bastarde”, a series of postmigrant happenings in Zurich.

The is a guest lecture of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZHdK.

[English below]

Der israelische Kurator Joshua Simon untersucht in seinem Vortrag “The Great Soviet Encyclopedia: Communism and The Dividual“ ein Poster von Eliezer Lissitzky (1890-1941), das der russisch-jüdische Künstler 1929 für die Eröffnung einer Ausstellung im Gewerbemuseum Zürich gestaltet hat. Es widerspiegelt den inszenierten Enthusiasmus über die forcierte Industrialisierung der Sowjetunion und die damit einhergehende veränderte Bedeutung des Individuums. Simon sieht Parallelen zu heutigen Formen von Subjektivität, was er auch in einem aktuellen Projekt untersucht hat: Die von ihm betreute Ausstellungsreihe „The Kids Want Communism“ (2016/17) öffnet den Blick auf das utopische Potenzial des Kommunismus, gerade auch in Israel, wo die sozialistischen Staats- und Gesellschaftstraditionen durch Globalisierung und Privatisierung verschüttet wurden.

Der Vortrag findet in englischer Sprache statt. Einführung: Dorothee Richter, Leiterin des „Postgraduate Programme in Curating“ an der Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK).

Joshua Simon ist Autor, Filmemacher und Direktor des MoBY-Museums in Bat Yam. Er ist Mitbegründer von „Maayan Publishing“ in Tel Aviv, eines Magazins für Dichtung, Literatur und Ideen. Er ist Autor von „Neomaterialism“ (Sternberg Press, 2013) und Herausgeber von „Ruti Sela: For The Record“ (Archive Books, 2015). In letzter Zeit kuratierte er die Ausstellungen “Factory Fetish” in Melbourne und „Roee Rosen: Group Exhibition“ im Tel Aviv Museum. Er hat am renommierten Londoner Goldsmiths College ein Postgraduiertenstudium in „Curatorial Knowledge“ absolviert.


[Deutsch siehe oben]

The entry point for this talk is the Russian Exhibition which took place at the Museum of Applied Arts in Zurich (Marc-April 1929), and especially its poster, designed by Eliezer Lissitzky (1890-1941). The unique design of this poster by Lissitzky stands between avant garde montage and socialist realism with its inflated portraits and staged enthusiasm. These aesthetic attributes correlate with the shifting economic realities of the time with the move from the NEP to shockwork methods of the Soviet five year plan. This poster comes from a specific moment in Soviet industrialization which was accompanied by a new subjectivity as well. That moment seems to inform our moment as well.Considering this poster opens up a discussion on contemporary forms of subjectivity under current modes of production and distribution of computerized networks. In his talk, Joshua Simon will present The Kids Want Communism, a yearlong program of exhibitions marking 99 years since the October Revolution, which he initiated in collaboration with State of Concept Athens, Free/Slow University of Warsaw, Tranzit Prague, Skuc gallery in Ljubljana, the Visual Culture Research Center in Kiev, Westspace Melbourne, and MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam. The talk will outline how the communist horizon and real existing socialism can inform our understanding of the current social and cultural, political, and economic realities as we are facing the implosion of the neoliberal order.

The talk is a cooperation of Onamut and Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZHdK and Corner College.

Buchvernissage
Christoph Kappeler
Josef Maria Schröder

Edition Patrick Frey

Mit Texten von
Christoph Kappeler, Ulrich Kinder, Michael T. Ricker
Gestaltung
Hi, Megi Zumstein, Claudio Barandun
Gebunden, 152 Seiten, 153 Farbabbildungen
17 × 24 cm
ISBN Nummer: 978-3-906803-37-1
Sprache: Englisch

Einzelheiten zum Buch siehe bei Edition Patrick Frey.

[English below]

PRESENT PROGRESSIVE

Corner College, Zürich
Kuratiert von peekaboo! (Lisa Biedlingmaier & Bernadette Wolbring)

Teilnehmende KünstlerInnen: Abel Auer (DE), Lisa Biedlingmaier (CH / DE), June Crespo (ES / NL), Ulrika Jäger (DE), Bernadette Wolbring (DE / SE)

Eröffnung Samstag, 13. Mai 2017, 19:00h
Finissage Samstag, 10. Juni 2017, 17:00h

Zusätzliche Veranstaltungen siehe unten.

Samstag, 13. Mai - Samstag, 10. Juni 2017

Öffnungszeiten
Mi: 15:00h - 18:00h
Do/Fr: 17:00h - 19:00h

Present Progressive; Zeitform, Englisch

Das Present Progressive ist eine Verlaufsform der Gegenwart. Dieses Tempus kann sich sowohl auf die Gegenwart als auch auf die Zukunft beziehen: Zum einen wird das Present Progressive für Handlungen, die jetzt gerade stattfinden, verwendet, zum anderen für sich ändernde Situationen und bereits vereinbarte Handlungen in der Zukunft. Dabei kommen vor allem Verben zum Einsatz, die einen Plan oder eine Bewegung von einem Ort oder einer Bedingung zur anderen vermitteln. Das Present Progressive ist eine Zeitform, die es im Deutschen nicht gibt.

peekaboo! präsentiert die Arbeiten von fünf KünstlerInnen, die sich mit Vorstellungen von Zeit und dem Ineinandergreifen von Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft beschäftigen. Recalling, reenacting und rewriting zum Beispiel sind Strategien, die wiederholt eingesetzt werden, um das Gewicht der Geschichte zu verlagern. Die Zeitreise wird als eine Möglichkeit vorgestellt, die Zukunft zu gestalten. Angeregt durch Chris Kraus´ „naive Vorstellung, dass es möglich ist dem Unglücklichsein zu entkommen, indem man einfach den Kanal wechselt“, hebt die Ausstellung Present Progressive die Gleichzeitigkeit von Ereignissen hervor – sei es in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart oder Zukunft.

Das Ausstellungsdesign besteht aus einem genau 68,38 m langen Gewebestreifen, der in Erinnerung ruft, dass es auch andere Vorstellungen von Zeit und zeitlichen Zusammenhängen gibt. Die Maße und die Materialität des Streifens beziehen sich nämlich auf den Teppich von Bayeux (entstanden im 11. Jh., 0,53m × 68,38m). Der Mediävist Peter Czerwinski stellt die These auf, dass im Mittelalter ein anderer Zeitbegriff existiert habe, der im Gegensatz zur heutigen Wahrnehmung der Zeit von einer Simultanität ausgehe (in Gegenwärtigkeit: Simultane Räume und zyklische Zeiten, Formen von Regeneration und Genealogie im Mittelalter, 1993). Kausal zusammenhängende Ereignisse, die in unterschiedlichen Zeitebenen stattfanden, wurden – laut Czerwinski – als gleichzeitig gedacht. Vergangenheit und Gegenwart sind in dieser Zeitvorstellung mithin nicht klar unterscheidbar. Darum werden auch auf dem Teppich von Bayeux Ereignisse, die nicht zeitgleich stattfanden, im selben Raum dargestellt, der lediglich durch Architekturelemente unterteilt wird.




[Deutsch oben]

PRESENT PROGRESSIVE

Corner College, Zurich
curated by peekaboo! (Lisa Biedlingmaier & Bernadette Wolbring)

Participating artists:
Abel Auer (DE), Lisa Biedlingmaier (CH/DE), June Crespo (ES/NL), Ulrika Jäger (DE), Bernadette Wolbring (DE/SE)

Opening Saturday, 13 May 2017, 19:00h
Finissage Saturday, 10 June 2017, 17:00h

Additional events see below.

Saturday, 13 May - Saturday, 10 June 2017

Opening hours
Mi: 15:00h - 18:00h
Do/Fr: 17:00h - 19:00h

­Present Progressive, tense, English

This tense is used to suggest either the present or the future. It can indicate that an action is going to happen in the future, especially with verbs that convey the idea of a plan or a movement from one place or condition to another.


peekaboo! presents the work of five artists that are dealing with perceptions of time and how past, present and future are interconnected. Strategies of recalling, reenacting and rewriting are applied in order to shift the weight of history. Travelling in time is presented as a way of shaping the future. Encouraged by Chris Kraus’s “naive recognition that it might be possible to escape from unhappiness just by changing the channel,” the show highlights the simultaneity of events – be it in the past, present or future.

The exhibition design consists of a 68.38m long strip of fabric running through the space to evoke a different idea of how time can be perceived. The strip’s measurements and materiality refer to the Bayeux Tapestry (0.53m × 68.38m). The German medievalist Peter Czerwinski claims that in the Middle Ages a different notion of time existed (in Gegenwärtigkeit: Simultane Räume und zyklische Zeiten, Formen von Regeneration und Genealogie im Mittelalter, 1993). In contrast to today’s chronological perception of time, the tapestry – like other medieval works of art – depicts a notion of time that assumes simultaneity. Here past and present are not clearly distinguishable – therefore causally related events are depicted in the same space, separated merely by elements of architecture.

Additional Events

Listening Sessions: RSI 92.3 FM Douala, Cameroon or any other proposals

Friday, 19 May, 5-6 pm
Thursday, 25 May, 5-7 pm
Friday, 26 May, 5-7 pm

“emotion reigns, information governs” is a thematic radio station dedicated to sports, music, and culture.

RSI is an avant-garde radio station featuring sports and cultural content. Created four years ago by Martin Camus Mimb, a renowned sports reporter on the African continent, the station is today the most listened-to radio in Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon. In the unique field of sports, we aim to give listeners a new vision of information, thanks to an experienced team of specialized reporters.

with Lisa Biedlingmaier

This talk is concerned with histories of South African colonial formations featuring gardens and plants. It is grounded in empirical research of multispecies histories in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden.

Plants have featured prominently in imaginations and conceptualisations of South Africa throughout the colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid era. In the late 19th century, white settlers appropriated the indigenous flora as a marker of identity. The settler elite regarded the cultivation of scientific and aesthetic appreciation of the vegetation as a tool for promoting civilisation and patriotism. This occurred within the larger discourse of nature conservation, which served as a legitimisation of white land appropriation, forced removals and prohibition of subsistence land use by Africans and slave-descendants.

In 1913, the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden was established in Cape Town. Subsequently, Kirstenbosch evolved as the centre of a network of regional botanical gardens spread throughout the country. In 2004, UNESCO listed Kirstenbosch as a natural World Heritage Site and it currently attracts over one million visitors per year. Through plant collecting, design and what I term “monumental gardening”, Kirstenbosch gave rise to South African colonial and imperial formations. These activities expressed the aspirations of the Cape colonial elite and evolved in the context of both rising South African settler nationalism and British imperialism. In 1948, the Nationalist Party came to power and apartheid became the official state policy. Parallel to the rise of local and international criticism of apartheid, the South African state began to use Kirstenbosch as a stage for political spectacles, deploying botanists as well as plants themselves as ambassadors in what I call “floral diplomacy”. Standing in a genealogy of empire exhibitions and flower shows, plants from Kirstenbosch were displayed internationally. The state also invited international botanists to South Africa in an attempt to impose a positive image of South Africa to them. The apartheid state deployed flowers and gardens because they were widely regarded as beautiful and apolitical – an understanding that needed to be continuously reproduced and in the late 1980s was challenged by activists and artists opposed to apartheid. The South African National Botanical Gardens have continued to thrive in the post-apartheid era. They have been reframed as tourism destinations and sites of post-apartheid nation building. However, they have been continuing to reproduce “colonial presents” (D. Gregory, The Colonial Present, 2004) and “occluded histories of empire” (A.-L. Stoler, Duress, 2016).

The talk is concerned with such histories of South African colonial formations. They are addressed from a multispecies perspective, which acknowledges not only humans but also other living beings, in particular plants, as historical actors and witnesses. It does so by drawing on and combining a range of methods, including historiography, multispecies ethnography, critical plant studies, plant sciences, and floriography (the reading and writing with flowers).

This event is part of the personal exhibition of Uriel Orlow at Corner College, Geraniums Are Never Red.

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

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

Corner College, 01 April - 6 May 2017

Opening on Saturday, 01 April, 16:30h

17:00h Discussion between Uriel Orlow and TJ Demos

You can find here and read an interview with Uriel Orlow by Dimitrina Sevova in the context of the exhibition (also printable as PDF 3.65MB)

Opening Hours / Öffnungszeiten
Wed/Fri 15:00h – 18:00h
Thu 16:00h – 19:00h
or by appointment (+41-79-792 77 44)
Additionally open on Saturday, 6 May, from 14:00h to 18:00h


[English below]

In seiner Ausstellung im Corner College betrachtet Uriel Orlow die botanische Welt als Bühne für Geschichte und Politik im Allgemeinen. Die gezeigten Arbeiten wurden in den letzten zwei Jahren entwickelt und befassen sich mit dem Vermächtnis der botanischen Forschungsexpeditionen, Pflanzenmigration, Blumendiplomatie und botanischem Nationalismus aus dem doppelten Blickwinkel Südafrikas und Europas.

Die in der Ausstellung gezeigten Arbeiten sind Teil von Uriel Orlows laufendem Rechercheprojekt Theatrum Botanicum. Das Projekt sieht Pflanzen nicht einzig als passive Objekte der Natur, des ästhetischen Genusses, der Klassifizierung, der Bewirtschaftung oder des Naturschutzes; sondern sowohl als Zeugen als auch als Akteure der Geschichte, als dynamische Agenten, die Natur und Menschen, Tradition und Modernität verbinden, und das über unterschiedliche Geographien, Geschichten und Wissenssystemen hinweg, mit heilenden, spirituellen und ökonomischen Kräften.


[Deutsch oben]

In his exhibition at Corner College Uriel Orlow looks to the botanical world as a stage of history and politics at large. The work in the exhibition was developed over the last two years and engages with the legacies of botanical exploration, plant migration, flower diplomacy and botanical nationalism from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe.

***

European colonialism in South Africa – as elsewhere – was both preceded and accompanied by expeditions that aimed at charting the territory and classifying its natural resources, in turn paving the way for occupation and exploitation. 'Newly' discovered plants were often named after the botanist who first described them and eventually classified according to the Linnaean system and its particular European rationality.


What Plants Were Called Before They Had a Name (2016-17) is an audio plant dictionary created from nine indigenous South African languages. Conceived as a surround sound installation, the work serves as an aural repository of local knowledge that was originally passed from generation to generation through oral tradition but was displaced by European writing and nomenclature, which it now confronts in the exhibition space.

Geraniums are never Red (2016-17) revisits the bright red geraniums that trail from the balconies of Swiss chalets and clamber up palm trees in California. Botanically speaking they aren’t geraniums at all–nor are they Swiss or Californian. They are in fact pelargoniums. They were first brought to Europe – and misidentified – after 1652, when the Dutch East India Company established a permanent settlement and a Company Garden at the Cape and started to explore the surrounding flora to bring back new botanical treasures, which apart from pelargoniums included proteas, ericas and many other mainstays of European gardens. By the time the confusion between the two species was resolved, ‘African geraniums’ had been around for 150 years and British commercial growers and gardeners were reluctant to give up the familiar name.

In 1963, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of Kirstenbosch, the national botanical garden of South Africa in Cape Town a series of films were commissioned to document the jubilee celebrations and their ‘national’ dances, pantomimes revisiting the colonial conquest, the visit of international botanists and the history of the botanical garden itself. The films’ cast of botanists and visitors are mostly white and when we see Africans they are engaged in menial labour.

These films have not been seen since 1963 and were found by the artist in boxes in the cellar of the library of the botanical garden. The Fairest Heritage (2016-7) is an attempt to watch these documents today and speak back to the archive. Orlow collaborated with the actor Lindiwe Matshikiza who inhabits and confronts the found footage and its politics of representation, sending up the botanical nationalism and flower-diplomacy of apartheid era South Africa.

Exotics were the pride of European gardeners for a long time. But new species were not just brought to Europe to satisfy horticultural demand and other colonial economic interests. Some plants also arrived as stowaways; seeds in animal feed or other shipments. The consequences of newly introduced species were not always predictable and in recent decades botanists have highlighted the threat of some of these new-arrivals to local biodiversity. A number of national organisations deal with the problem of invasive neophytes producing information campaigns and so-called blacklists of exotics that are illegal and need to be eradicated. The management of ‘invasive aliens’ and the language accompanying it produces new forms of botanical nationalism that inadvertently mirror public discourse on human migration. The series of posters Blacklisted (Was wir durch die Blume sagen) re-mixes information gathered from the Zurich office for the control of neophytes and uses quotes from literature and websites across Switzerland.

***

The work in this exhibition is part of Uriel Orlow's ongoing research entitled Theatrum Botanicum. The project considers plants not solely as passive objects of nature, aesthetic pleasure, classification, cultivation or conservation; but as both witnesses and actors in history and as dynamic agents linking nature and humans, tradition and modernity– across different geographies, histories and systems of knowledge, with curative, spiritual and economic powers.


Mit der freundlichen Unterstützung der Stiftung Erna und Curt Burgauer, der Georges und Jenny Bloch Stiftung, und der Ernst Göhner Stiftung.

Zine – to March, Clandestine Life of the BoycottGiiirls! 2017

Mit Beiträgen von / With contributions by
Tonjaschja Adler, Madeleine Amsler, Ariane Andereggen, Nicole Bachmann, Martina Baldinger, Mirjam Bayerdörfer, Marina Belobrovaja, Sofia Bempeza, Denise Bertschi, Ursula Biemann, Klara Borbély, Johanna Bruckner, Patricia Bucher, Sarah Burger, Françoise Caraco, Bettina Carl, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Teresa Chen, data | Auftrag für parasitäre* Gastarbeit, Brigitte Dätwyler, Kadiatou Diallo, Bettina Diel, Mo Diener, Quynh Dong, Marianne Engel, Klodin Erb, Anne-Laure Franchette, Anna Francke, Ipek Füsun, Monica Germann, Clare Goodwin, Co Gründler, Gabriela Gründler, Sabine Hagmann, Marianne Halter, Andrea Heller, Samia Henni, Seda Hepsev, Anke Hoffmann, Cathérine Hug, Patricia Jacomella, Monica Ursina Jäger, Sophie Jung, Anastasia Katsidis, Verica Kovacevska, Isabelle Krieg, Sandra Kühne, Georgette Maag, Julia Marti, Federica Martini & Petra Elena Köhle, Angela Marzullo, Maya Minder, Rayelle Niemann, Caroline Palla, Ursula Palla, Katherine Patiño Miranda, Leila Peacock, Cora Piantoni, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud , Maria Pomiansky, Elodie Pong, Isabel Reiss, Marion Ritzmann, Ana Roldán, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Dorothea Rust, Margit Säde, Saman Anabel Sarabi, Julie Sas, Lisa Schiess, Annette Sense, Dimitrina Sevova, Francisca Silva, Veronika Spierenburg, Vreni Spieser, Claudia Spinelli, Marion Strunk, Milva Stutz, Una Szeemann, Lena Maria Thüring, Yota Tsotra, Jana Vanecek, Anne Käthi Wehrli, Nives Widauer, Martina-Sofie Wildberger, Angela Wittwer, Sophie Yerly.

Konzept und Realisierung / Concept and realization: Nadja Baldini, Dimitrina Sevova, Tanja Trampe

Herausgegeben von / Published by Corner College Press

[English below]
Vor dem Hintergrund der gegenwärtigen politischen Lage und in Solidarität mit den weltweiten Protesten von Frauen gegen Sexismus, Rassismus, Gewalt, Homophobie, religiöse Intoleranz, Klimawandel und ökologische Ungleichheit haben wir Künstlerinnen und Theoretikerinnen eingeladen, je einen A4-Druckbogen Querformat (bzw. zwei A5-Seiten Hochformat) beizutragen, Text oder Bild/Zeichnung, schwarz-weiss.

Veranstaltung im Corner College am 8. März um 20:00h, mit einer Vorschau-Slideshow der Druckbogen des Zines, und DJ-Sets von Monica Germann und DJ Sweatproducer. Die Einnahmen von der Bar gehen an die Druckkosten.

DJ Sweatproducer:
Strassengeräusche, Haushaltslärm, Trompeterinnen in den Wohnungen.
Das Denken und die Gefühle scheinen jetzt schon zu laut zu dröhnen, Hauswänden und Böden zittern und knacken.
Gebüsch im Wind.
Schimpfen durchs Fenster hinaus, Lieder, Gedichte und furiose Reden, dringen zu den Nachbarinnen hoch.
Durch die Luft, so dominant, man hört es, schon den kleinsten Mucks!

Zine-Vernissage und Auktion am 1. Mai 2017 im Corner College.

[Deutsch oben]
Against the background of the current political situation and in solidarity with the worldwide protests of women against sexism, racism, violence, homophobia, religious intolerance, climate change and ecological inequality, we invited artists and theoreticians to contribute one A4 landscape format spread each (or two pages A5 portrait format), either text or image/drawing, black and white. The income from the bar will go towards the printing costs.

Event at Corner College on 8 March at 20:00h, with a pre-launch slideshow of the spreads of the zine and DJ sets by Monica Germann and DJ Sweatproducer.

DJ Sweatproducer:
Street sounds, household noise, women trumpetists in the apartments.
The thinking and feelings seem already now to buzz, as house walls and floors shake and crash.
Bushes in the wind.
Railing out the window, songs, poems and furious speeches reach the neighbors upstairs.
Through air, so dominant, one can hear it, even the slightest sound!

Zine release and auction on 1 May 2017 at Corner College.

18:30h: Doors open

A temporary video installation of The Judgment by Kosta Tonev will be on display all evening.

19:00h: Presentation by Kosta Tonev, and discussion with the artist




Kosta Tonev

The Judgment
2011, dual-channel video, 4 min 44 sec.

The video tells the story of a police roadblock. An artist has illegally appropriated the object transforming it into an exhibition piece. Shortly thereafter a police team enter the gallery where it is on display, and repossess it.
The first screen of the video installation presents the story as seen through the eyes of the cleaning lady who was the sole witness of the event. In the second, a group of actors impersonate the characters of her story.


The Judgment
2011, 2-Kanal-Videoinstallation, 4 Min 44 Sek.

Das Video erzählt die Geschichte eines Gegenstandes. Ein Künstler stiehlt eine Scherensperre von der Polizei und stellt sie danach in einer Galerie aus. Eines Tages wird die Putzfrau der Galerie von einer Gruppe von PolizistInnen überrascht, die ihre Scherensperre zurückfordern.
Im ersten Kanal dieser Videoinstallation erzählt die Putzfrau von dem Ereignis. Im zweiten werden die Personen aus ihrer Erzählung von SchauspielerInnen dargestellt.


This event is part of the exhibition project Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy. Part II: Der Prozess / The Trial.

Celebrating high times on a Sunday afternoon with a small reading out of the book Josefine, a special high time music set, some tea and gin. high times at Corner College: http://www.hightimepublishers.com

This event is part of the exhibition project Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy. Part II: Der Prozess / The Trial.

INTERMEZZO (locus solus), in which the audience is invited to a public visit of Jso Maeder's storage to select a few wrapped pieces or parts of installations, based on their wrapped shape, without seeing them. They will then be transported to Corner College for a public mise a nu par un objet.

14.00h: Meet at Bhf. Oerlikon, bus stop 62 direction “Schwamendingerplatz”, or
14.15h: Werkerei Schwamendingen, Luegislandstr. 105, 8051 ZH (Eingang Halle)
17.30h: Corner College (le public mis a nu par un objet)

This event is part of the exhibition project Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy. Part II: Der Prozess / The Trial.

INTERMEZZO (locus solus), in which the audience is invited to a public visit of Jso Maeder's storage to select a few wrapped pieces or parts of installations, based on their wrapped shape, without seeing them. They will then be transported to Corner College for a public mise a nu par un objet.

14.00h: Meet at Bhf. Oerlikon, bus stop 62 direction “Schwamendingerplatz”, or
14.15h: Werkerei Schwamendingen, Luegislandstr. 105, 8051 ZH (Eingang Halle)
17.30h: Corner College (le public mis a nu par un objet)

This event is part of the exhibition project Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy. Part II: Der Prozess / The Trial.

16:30h doors open

17:00h Artist presentation by Maria Pomiansky, followed by discussion between Maria Pomiansky and curator Dimitrina Sevova.

18:00h Spirits Call, a performance by Vadim Levin. Vadim Levin in a dialogue with a dead artist. The name of the artist will be announced later.



This event is part of the exhibition project Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy. Part I: Critique de l’économie politique de l’atelier d'artiste.

Doors open 16:30h

17:00h Screening and artist talk by Aya Momose, followed by a discussion between Aya Momose, co-curator Miwa Negoro and the audience.
Japanese artist Aya Momose will screen Exchange Diary (2015-; 48 min), made in collaboration with Korean artist Im Heung-soon.

19:00h Discussion between the artists Robert Estermann, Jakob Jakobsen, Jso Maeder, Saman Anabel Sarabi & Josefine Reisch and the curators Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.

This event is part of the exhibition project Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy. Part II: Der Prozess / The Trial.


Aya Momose

Exchange Diary
2015-. Video, HD, 48′09″. In collaboration with Im Heung-soon.

Taking the form of a visual diary, Exchange Diary is a collection of short films recorded and exchanged by two artists over a year, using a unique way in which each artist filmed a short video and sent it to their collaborator who then added their own narration based on their impressions of the visual images. This work incorporates each artist’s personal interpretation of the images combining the differences and similarities of their cultural, social and political values.

Initially, each artist shot a short video of their everyday lives or a place they had visited, and then sent the video to their collaborator. The other artist then watched the video, and added their own narration based on their impressions of the visual images. This artwork incorporates each artist’s personal interpretation of the images combining the differences and similarities of their cultural, social and political values.

Following the screening, Momose will introduce her artistic practices dealing with the issue related to one’s body and voice, including Lesson (Japanese).

A group exhibition with Robert Estermann, Jakob Jakobsen, Lara Jaydha, Jso Maeder, Aya Momose, Saman Anabel Sarabi & Josefine Reisch

curated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth,
co-curated by Miwa Negoro and Swati Prasad.


Opening: 24 February 2017, 19:00h

Opening Hours / Öffnungszeiten
Wed/Fri 15:00h – 18:00h
Thu 16:00h – 19:00h


Saturday, 25 February 2017, 17:00h (doors open 16:30h)
17:00h Screening and artist talk by Aya Momose, followed by a discussion between Aya Momose, Miwa Negoro and the audience.
Japanese artist Aya Momose will screen Exchange Diary (2015-; 48 min), made in collaboration with Korean artist Im Heung-soon.
19:00h Discussion between the artists Robert Estermann, Jakob Jakobsen, Jso Maeder, Saman Anabel Sarabi & Josefine Reisch and the curators Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.


Thursday, 2 March, 19:00h
Screening of The Judgment, video by Kosta Tonev, and discussion with the artist.


Saturdays, 4 and 11 March, 14:00h
INTERMEZZO (locus solus), in which the audience is invited to a public visit of Jso Maeder's storage to select a few wrapped pieces or parts of installations, based on their wrapped shape, without seeing them. They will then be transported to Corner College for a public mis a nu par un objet.

14.00h: Meet at Bhf. Oerlikon, bus stop 62 direction “Schwamendingerplatz”, or
14.15h: Werkerei Schwamendingen, Luegislandstr. 105, 8051 ZH (Eingang Halle)
17.30h: Corner College (le public mis a nu par un objet)


Sunday, 19 March, 16:00h
Celebrating high times on a Sunday afternoon with a small reading out of the book Josefine, a special high time music set, some tea and gin. high times at Corner College: http://www.hightimepublishers.com


“The machine has to be rediscovered under the sensibility which is no more than a theatrical effect of it.” (Jean-François Lyotard) 1
“Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Despite that “K. claims to be innocent and doesn’t even know the Law,” he has been convicted.

The novel Der Prozess by Franz Kafka is appropriated for the title and gives the direction of the second part of the exhibition project Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy. Written between 1914 and 1915, it pulls the reader into a maze of ambiguous biopower entity control by a remote authority, where the nature of the crime is never revealed to either the character Josef K. or the reader. The world is subject to rules and obeys laws – there is order in this world, and knowledge of this world comes by knowledge of its ‘law,’ as Isaac Newton might have said. At the same time, it is haunted by a radical instability. Laws can change. They can be valid for a time but not eternally. The novel remained uncompleted, in a state of ever incompleteness, which turns out to be a concept. Some lines cross over between The Trial and In the Penal Colony, a short story written in October 1914 and published 1919, which describes a sophisticated machine, a device of torture and execution that carves the sentence on the skin of the condemned prisoner before letting him die, all in the course of twelve hours. Kafka, who himself studied law and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as a law clerk for the civil and criminal courts, was obsessed with the system of justification and the process of justice, of law and aesthetics.

“Baumgarten published his Aesthetica, the first aesthetics, in 1750. Kant would say of this work simply that it was based on an error. Baumgarten confuses judgment, in its determinant usage, when the understanding organizes phenomena according to categories, with judgment in its reflexive usage when, in the form of feeling, it relates to the indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the judging subject.” (Lyotard)

The flashing K-function in the middle is a micro intra-process of reflective actions in a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness – the real(ity) of virtuality, the power to affect and to be affected, what Deleuze defines to be a theater without a stage. There is no personal inputs by the actors, who do not embody characters, but are only masks behind which there is nothing, just another mask. Their performance of repetitive clothing veils the plane, and is the collective acting of the three avatars Percept, Affect, Concept, which constitute the forces of individuation and the positive estrangement or displacement that clothe the event and transform it.
In Hegel’s negative dialectics, they are Abstract, Negative, Concrete, or Immediate, Mediated, Concrete. In Deleuze, they are transformed into the positive affirmation of No! The immanence evokes the masks and hiding, crime, and the false (the fancy, or funky). The politics of justice, which is not only in the ethical but also in the aesthetic domain, deals with the distribution of force between the layers of violence and control.

The exhibition tests the ‘other’ logic of Labor of negativity (Hegel), which resonates in Karl Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, in which he constructs the notion of an “other” to “consciousness” or an “other” to “productive” labor as the case may be. The ability of labor to recognize itself in terms of its own otherness, or to ‘create a void in front of themselves.’ (Althusser) Only in the void can solidarity become concrete. There is a striking proximity between the theory of surplus value and the aesthetic sublime, that in the economy of translation comes even closer the politics, aesthetics and economics.

Excerpts from the curatorial text by Dimitrina Sevova, in collaboration with Alan Roth.

We also refer you to the first section of the curatorial text for Part I of this exhibition project, which applies to both chapters.



Robert Estermann

Out of the Fog
2016. Video, HD, 20′35″, looped.



I let the rider ride. I set up a spectacle („I“ not being a less speculative claim than „spectacle“). Everywhere (prism-like), are uncounted drum-like cylinders (to use an image) with reflecting surfaces autonomically revolving around themselves, deflecting the light from all the other cylinders. The wobbling „man with the movie camera“ is just one of these revolving cylinders in this beach-scape. There is no relationship between them – none. Out of the fog is being recorded just after sunrise. Coming out from the cold into the warm, the glasses of the camera are foggy when starting recording. During the video, the fog on the glasses is slowly fading away. Speaking of revolving cylinders, the earlier work Distant Riders consists of a larger-than-life model of a zoetrope, a revolving cylinder with vertical slices on it, one of the first cinematographic devices.

„In this larger-than-life zoetrope, the individual riders merge, so to speak, into a single rider. The landscape in the background of the nine photographs also seems to coalesce into a hyper-landscape. The background does not refer to a concrete geography more closely defined in temporal and spatial terms, but is rather the visual correspondence of a more diffuse kind of “beach-likeness” with a heavily metaphorical element: distance, culturally protected zone, state of emergency. Once again we are dealing not with a literally political discourse - for which read sexually reformist, generally “liberationist” – although it is also possible to discern an atmosphere of this kind in Distant Riders. This atmosphere is produced by the hallucinatory effect of the signifiers of the 1970s which Estermann is quoting here, apparent in the slightly voyeuristic gaze with which the riders enter the field of vision. One consequence of this hallucinatory treatment of signs may be that another context interposes itself over the sexually reformist and generally “liberationist” discourse of the 1970s: the question of the economic, political or even erotic relationship between humans and animals. But how does this theme arise, when it is neither formulated as an ethical programme nor idealised as a mythical unity from the past? As has already been discussed, the slight sexualisation of the motif of the girl rider is too faint to locate the sequence of images in the sphere of the obscene, let alone the perverse. And the atmosphere of the images, with their location in a distant, undefined coastal zone is too restrained to be subjected to a moral discourse. One key may be the landscape. Its significance as a trope may be better understood if we compare it with the function of the scenic refuge zone commonly featured in dystopias: usually this is portrayed as a zone contrasting with the civilised space, which is why it is depicted alternately as an inaccessible desert far from city life, as in Brave New World, as a hidden, protected forest at the end of the last railway line as in Fahrenheit 451, or as a distant coastal zone as in Distant Riders. This counter-world is rich in sensations and full of sensual freshness (in Fahrenheit 451, this is represented by the constant light snowfall in the protected zone of the forest). But as it is freed from the everyday, and its inhabitants are often in a kind of temporally and/or culturally exceptional condition, there is always something unreal – phantasmatic – about the counter-world. This makes its psychological function all the more important: it allows the citizens to experience sensomotoric renewal or even awakening (as opposed to social anaesthesia), psychical continuity (as opposed to schizoid fragmentation), and develop ethical care (as opposed to moral cynicism).“
Excerpt from: Improper Thinking by Daniel Kurjakovic
in: Robert Estermann, Pleasure, Habeas Corpus, Motoricity. The Great Western Possible, ed. Susanne Neubauer, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Museum of Art Lucerne, edition fink, Zurich, 2007, ISBN 978-3-03746-105-1


Scenic Tongical
2015, two artist’s newspapers, concept with Georg Rutishauser, Edition Fink, Zürich.





Jakob Jakobsen

Antiknow Scene 2. The Body Event (Plumbing). On improvisation, unlearning and antiknow
2013-2017. Work-papers from the Antiknow Research Group and one speaker playing unskilled music. From Antiknow. A pedagogical theatre of unlearning and the limits of knowledge. Directed by Jakob Jakobsen.



The installation Antiknow is a collective effort into unlearning and nonknowledge as critical strategies. This, in a time where institutional and frozen forms of knowledge and learning shaped by economic forces increasingly characterise education and society in general. The term ‘Antiknow’ was originally introduced by John Latham as his course title for the Antiuniversity of London in 1968. It is doubtful whether this course ever took place.

During his six-month residency at Flat Time House, starting in April 2013, visual artist Jakob Jakobsen engaged in elaborating possible meanings and consequences of the term Antiknow in the current context of so-called knowledge economy. Jakobsen set up the Antiknow Research Group, involving young artists from FTHo’s MFI Graduate Group as well as a number of artists, writers and therapists with whom Jakob has collaborated for many years. This led to a series of meetings focusing on Antiknow in relation to work, politics, art and resistance. Marina Vishmidt, Maria Berrios, Howard Slater and John Cunningham were invited to reflect on specific themes within these fields of social practice. Also involved in the group were John Hill, Mary Vettise, Henrik Heinonen, Claire Louise Staunton, Katriona Beales, Mohammad Namazi, Danny Hayward, amongst other incidental participants.



This installation is one of the consequences of Antiknow and involves experiments into drama for non-actors, unskilled music and free drawing. The installation refers to FTHo as a ready-made stage, using as a point of departure the anthropomorphic scheme that John Latham proposed for the building, where each room is dedicated to a specific part of the body: The Mind, The Brain, The Body Event (Plumbing), and the Hand. In the space, a mechanical theatre was developed. The various themes investigated by the Antiknow Research Group are presented as a drama (or anti-drama) between sets of loudspeakers and synchronised lighting. The scripts have been produced collectively using transcriptions of the Antiknow Research Group meetings. The improvised/unskilled music is produced together with Paul Abbott and Gabriel Humberstone.



Lara Jaydha

Broken and open
2017. Moving Image | A series of digital collages (work in progress)



We reach out for a real connection to stay afloat in a sea of submerged emotions. From a deep sense of longing for connection, comes the desire to open and share parts of ourselves. We allow ourselves to be vulnerable and in doing so realize the fragility of our existence. There is an attempt to hold on to the present but everything keeps slipping away. Endings are often unresolved.

This existential truth is terrifying but at the same time, I find there is a sense of beauty and calm in it. I am interested in exploring how we perceive the idea of fragility and its association with gender, form and stereotypes. Why is it looked at a sign of weakness? How can we change this notion? Can we look at it without judgment? Could it symbolize a source of inner strength?



Jso Maeder

INTERMEZZO (locus solus)
2017. Two visits to the artist's storage, on 4 and 11 March 2017. Public mis a nu par un objet.


B°N-BATTERIE
2017. Video installation.



B°N-BATTERIE. amuse-um/TRICKSTER’S TANK

„We are getting rid of ownership“ - John Cage, „Silence“

The trickster, showing up like sort of keeper of the gap as far as he widens out a line normally/normatively marking a dualities’ explicit distinction/discrimination, that appearingly determines and legitimises a difference between two positions like also hierarchic classification (true/contingent, active/passive, dominant/submitted to etc.), to a proper area in between (thus: a gap), compromising/corrupting these positions and so far the ‚system’ of segregations establishing them as obligatory rules valid by its law/language.

Therefore, like a dissimilation by not correctly choosing a position but taking the gap, the trickster breaks the dialectic matrix of a historiography basically reflecting differences as functions of volition and, by consequence, a notion of rationalism of decision making character, whose logics always justify that some corpus has/is to rule: a fix scheme of continiouity or change in an antagonistic scenario, succession or revolving replacement regarding dominant positions as given by an abstract order within rulers/winners and victims/loosers (reproduced in terms of ‚culture & science‘ by modern disciplinarity in theory like economics as a referential construction of social efficiency). So an agent provocateur, if on purpose or not, disobidient and without respect in a way of not reaching any given part in such dispositions, one hardly can localise the trickster’s ambitions or motivations.

Like an analog concept of dis-sense and an incongruousness under that aspect of being regardless of culturally prevalent principles/the institution’s régimentality, his trouble making behaviour/inter-actement is morelike similar to a setting/display like the one of bricolage’s (a way of disobidience in/through matters of knowledge in comparison to the ingenieur/professional standards): what is brought together/assembled and taking place in a combination, is not functionally predefined by controlling instances nor can consequently become conclusion of this kind - there’s more the occasion/opportunity than a goal in the bricoleurs parapractice, a non-repetitve making of also temporally, not a stepwise efficient development from a to b, or a specific sense that predetermines logically the actions, which also and finally means that they remain conflicting as they cannot automatically be assumed as useful being connected with an intentionally positive assertion.

Text: Jso Maeder



Aya Momose

Lesson (Japanese)
2015. Video, HD, 7′16″, looped.



Employing theatrical techniques, Momose often depicts situations in which voices and bodies diverge, or departures from stated intentions, to generate new shades of meaning. In this work, in the bottom of the screen, there is a Japanese written with a roman character / pronunciation and English translation distorted as an “(fictional) Educational Video for Japanese Language Learners”. The sign language is false after all, the definition and the context which the gesture and the voice (sound) sends becomes separated eventually. The separation is suddenly broad between the expression on her face and the voice, and the parole subjective becomes ambiguity / multiple. Here, there’s a fight for ethnicity and the language, between the sorrow and the grievously of the oppressed / enforced, and the cruelty and deception by the oppressing / enforcing. Beyond its non-expression mask, there’s an alternation theater made by their change of the voice’s intonation.


To Cuddle a Goat, a Poor Grammar Exercise
2016. Single channel video, HD, 13′50″.



Distinguished by its adroit ability to overturn the link between voice and body, Momose’s works have dealt with misunderstandings and discrepancies associated with communication, and reversals in the relationship. In the recent work, To Cuddle a Goat, a Poor Grammar Exercise, which includes scenes filmed in Mongolia, she explores different approach to the previous, and expresses the ambiguous nature of its subjects and the uncertainty of relationships with others. The work implies the oppressed subjects and bodies in the history beyond any boundaries.



Saman Anabel Sarabi & Josefine Reisch

How to sing in the midst of the capitalization of art: the desirable table of Josefine. An orientation device
2017. Installation, table, cloth.



Saman Anabel Sarabi and Josefine Reisch have drafted their own orientation device to orient themselves through the cliffs and institutions, waters and archives, mountains and walls, cities and channels, forests and schools, - finally through the horizontalities and flatnesses of 2017. Extending, stretching and flipping the semi-autobiographical short story of Franz Kafka titled Josefine die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse they use their rather specific orientation device to articulate questions on the autonomy of art in our time within which the capitalization of art has been already fully articulated. Through the perspective and voice of Josefine and with the help of her device they will put urgent questions on the table in the near future, starting at Corner College on 24 February 2017.

18:30h doors open
19:00h panel discussion

Die Podiumsdiskussion findet auf Deutsch und Englisch statt.
The panel discussion will be held in German and in English.


[English below]

Tonjaschja Adler, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Vreni Spieser, und Nina von Meiss und Christina Pfander von Mickry3 im Gespräch mit den Kuratorinnen Nadja Baldini, Dimitrina Sevova und Tanja Trampe. Danach Plenumsdiskussion mit dem Publikum. Und Suppe und Bar.
Die Podiumsdiskussion reflektiert kritisch aus den unterschiedlichen Perspektiven der geladenen Künstlerinnen, wie künstlerische Arbeit heute unter Post-Studio-Bedingungen geleistet wird, inwieweit die Präkarität und Präkarisierung, die den jetzigen wirtschaftlichen Bedingungen und den finanziellen Strukturen innewohnen, die innerhalb der Kultursphäre operieren, die Kunstproduktion, das Arbeitsumfeld der Künstlerin und ihre Lebenssituation prägen.
Das Augenmerk liegt auf der Beziehung zwischen Studio, künstlerischer Arbeit, Herstellung von Kunst, ästhetische Praktiken und deren wirtschaftliche Bedingungen. Das Studio mag ein Raum mit einer gewissen Autonomie sein. Die Podiumsdiskussion stellt die Frage, auf welche Weise die Produktivität in der Kunst heute abhängt von der Beziehung zwischen der Freiheit der Künstlerin und den wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Bedingungen der Kunstproduktion. Das Studio ist Teil des produktiven Flusses von Beziehungen, Orten, Architektur, Materialien, Techniken und Infrastruktur. Gleichzeitig ist es in der Grammatik der Autonomie, der Ästhetik und Politik. Es gibt viele mögliche Orte und Nichtorte des Studios, und doch findet es sich in zwei hauptsächlichen Umlaufbahnen, als unabhängiger Raum der Einsamkeit, in dem das Kunstwerk produziert wird, und als offenere Vorstellung des Studios, wo das Kunstwerk von der Arbeitskraft der Künstlerin geleistet wird.
Welches ist die Rolle des Studios im städtischen Gewebe, und wir wird seine Unterstützung geplant? Welches ist die Rolle der selbstorganisierten Studios auf der wirtschaftlichen Landkarte, und wie ist die Herstellung von Kunst im Studio heute organisiert?
Wie wirkt sich Kulturpolitik und staatliche Finanzhilfe für Studio aus und formt die Kunstproduktion, wie auch das Leben und die Existenz der Künstlerin? Selbst unter Post-Studio-Bedingungen markiert der Arbeitsraum der Künstlerin eine Zone der Autonomie, wo sich ein ‚nicht-sanktionierender‘ Kontext von Kunstpraktiken und ‚ungezähmten‘ Beziehungen abspielen können. Wie, kann ebenso gefragt werden, kann Gesellschaftlichkeit als erweitertes oder versprengtes Studio betrachtet werden? Wie kann das Studio kooperative Formen und selbstorganisierte Strukturen innerhalb des städtischen Gefüges und der Kunstpraktiken, künstlerische Arbeit, Herstellung von Kunst herbeiführen und gleichzeitig pulsierende Formen des Lebens organisieren?
Welchen Pfad der kritischen Befragung und welche Art von Methodologie lässt sich in einer Recherche über die (Post-) Studio-Bedingungen anwenden, um Phänomene der Destabilisierung des Studios, der Mobilität und immateriellen Produktion zu reflektieren? Und doch kennzeichnet und signifiziert das Studio nach wie vor einen Raum, in dem künstlerische Arbeit geleistet wird, und die Formen der Organisierung des Arbeitsprozesses der Kunstproduktion. Es bleibt verhältnismässig im Schatten des Privatraums und der Schattenwirtschaft, im Gegensatz zum Museum, zum Kunstraum und der Kunst, die sich im öffentlichen Umfeld abspielt.
Wie können Künstlerinnen ihr Arbeitsumfeld aufrechterhalten, gestützt auf ein Einkommen aus ihrer künstlerischen Arbeit und der Herstellung von Kunst? Oftmals bewohnen sie das Studio lediglich im Zeitraum zwischen mehreren anderen Jobs, während das Studio transformiert und an die Multitasking-Anforderungen projektorientierter Arbeit, Digitalisierung und Internet angepasst wird. Der produktive Prozess ist zwischen zwei Eingaben für Stipendien automatisiert in einer Vielfalt von Kommandos über E-Mail und weitgehend auf Google-Suche abgestützter Recherchearbeit. Künstlerin zu sein ist ein Alltagsjob professioneller Beschäftigung, und gleichzeitig auch eine Form des Lebens, die in eine neue Gesellschaftlichkeit versprengt werden kann. Hito Steyerl beschreibt die instrumentelle Präkarisierung im dritten Stadium der institutionellen Kritik, die lediglich zur „Integration“ der künstlerischen Arbeit sowie der Arbeits- und Lebensbedingungen „in die Präkarität“ führt.“ „Was darin verborgen bleibt – eine neue ‚verborgne Stätte‘ – die praktizierende Künstlerin bleibt ausserhalb der Anstellung.“ Desgleichen ist die Kunstproduktion heutzutage an digitale Produktionsflüsse angeschlossen, automatisiert und hochgradig professionalisiert durch die beschleunigte Konkurrenz im globalen Massstab, welche die Möglichkeiten für kollektive, gemeinschaftliche Formen der Kunst, der Arbeit und des Lebens.
Künstlerinnen streben oft und offen danach, in der Stadt billige und grosse Orte zum Arbeiten zu erschliessen. Der Kampf um freien Raum und mehr Räume in der Stadt, wie in Zürich und anderen Städten in den 1980ern, bringt das Studio dazu, im Widerstand gegen Gentrifizierungsprozesse nachzuhallen, der bisweilen gar in der Besetzung von Gebäuden endete. Wie kann es neue Formen des Widerstands eröffnen, und inwieweit sind Künstlerinnen und kulturelle Arbeiterinnen heute imstande, eine revolutionäre Kraft und politische Subjektivität zu leisten, während sich die das Wesen der Arbeit verändert? Wie können sie in diesem sozialen Wandel zurückfordern und verhandeln? Lacans Aussage „Ich habe Freuds Energetik durch die politische Ökonomie ersetzt“ geht einen Schritt weiter und konfrontiert die Psychoanalyse offen mit der ‚immanenten‘ Kritik der liberalen kapitalistischen Gesellschaft. Psychoanalytischen Praktiken folgend, schliesst das Projekt Part I: Critique de l’économie politique de l’atelier d’artiste eine ‚immanente‘ Kritik der polit-ökonomischen Beziehungen in der Produktion von Kunst ein, um die jetzigen Verhältnisse der künstlerischen Arbeit und Kunst-Herstellung-Leben sozialen Beziehungen in Bezug auf Bewegungen und Vektoren zu reflektieren und zu analysieren.
Welche Auswirkung hat das offene Studio als Form der Aktivierung und Mobilisierung von Publiken und andere Art, Kunst zu organisieren? Wie reflektiert das Format des offenen Studios die jetzige Tendenz des internationalen Kunstaustauschs, von Residenzen angetrieben zu werden? Wie wirkt es sich auf den Produktionsprozess aus (Arbeitsbedingungen und arbeitswirtschaftliche Bedingungen)? Wie stellt das Studio ‚andere‘ experimentelle Formen des Ausstellungsmachen zur Schau, die sich in ihm entfalten können?

Ausgewählte und überarbeitete Auszüge aus dem Text von Dimitrina Sevova für die Ausstellung Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy. Part I: Critique de l’économie politique de l’atelier d'artiste, in Zusammenarbeit mit Alan Roth

Druckfähige Fassung (PDF 98KB)

Diese Podiumsdiskussion ist Teil des Ausstellungsprojekts Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy. Part I: Critique de l’économie politique de l’atelier d’artiste.



[Deutsch oben]

Tonjaschja Adler, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Vreni Spieser, and Nina von Meiss and Christina Pfander of Mickry3 in conversation with the curators Nadja Baldini, Dimitrina Sevova and Tanja Trampe. Followed by a plenary discussion with the audience. And soup and bar.
The panel discussion critically reflects from the various perspectives of the invited artists how the artist’s labor is performed today under post studio conditions, to what extent the precarity and precarization inherent in the current economic conditions and the financial structures that operate within the cultural sphere signify the art production, the artist’s working environment and living situation.
The focal point is on the relation between the studio, artists’ labor, art-work, aesthetic practices and their economic conditions. The studio might be a space with a certain degree of autonomy. The panel discussion asks how productivity in art depends today on the relation between the artist’s liberty and the economic and social conditions of art production. The studio is part of the productive flow of relations, subjectivities, institutions, places, architecture, materials, techniques, and infrastructures. At the same time it is in the grammar of autonomy, aesthetics and politics. There are many possible places and non-places of the studio, but it can still be found in two main orbits, as an independent space of solitude where the artwork is produced, and a more open idea of the studio, where the artwork is performed by artist-labor.
What is the role of the studio in the urban fabric and how is its public support planned? What is the role of self-organized studios on the economic map, and how is art-work organized in the studio today?
How do cultural policy and state financial support to the studios impact and shape the production of art, and the lives and existence of the artist, too? Even under post studio conditions, the artist’s working space marks a zone of autonomy, where a ‘non-sanction’ context of art practices and ‘unruly’ relations can take place. At the same time, how can sociality be seen as an expanded or scattered studio? How can the studio induce cooperative forms and self-organized structures within the urban tissue and art practices, art labor, art-work and at the same time organize vibrant forms of life.
What path of critical inquiry and what kind of methodology can be applied in a research about the (post) studio conditions, to reflect on the phenomena of unsettling the studio, mobility, and immaterial production? At the same time, the studio still designates and signifies a space where art labor is performed, and the forms of organization of the working process of the art production. It stays relatively in the shadow of the private space and the hidden economy, unlike the museum, the art space or art taking place in the public environment.
How can artists sustain their working environment relying on income from their artistic labor and art-work? Often, they inhabit the studio mostly for a time in-between several other jobs, while the studio is transformed and adapted to multitasked functions driven by project-oriented work, digitalization and internet. The productive process is automated between two applications for grants, in a diversity of institutional commands by e-mail and research work based largely on Google searches. Being an artist is a day-to-day job of professional occupation, and at the same time a form of life that can scatter into a new sociality. Hito Steyerl describes the instrumental precarization in the third stage of institutional critique that leads merely to “integration into precarity” of artist labor and working and living conditions. “What remains hidden in this – a new ‘hidden abode,’ the practicing artist remains outside of the employment.” At the same time, nowadays the art production process has been connected to digital productive flows, automated and highly professionalized by accelerated competition on a global scale that disempowers the possibilities for collective, community forms of art, work and life.
Artists often and openly strive to gain cheap and large places in the city for working. The struggle for free space and more space in the city, as in Zurich and other cities in the 1980s, makes the studio issue resonate within the resistance against gentrification processes, that has sometimes ended up even in the occupation of buildings. How can it open new forms of resistance, and to what extent are artists and cultural workers today able to perform a revolutionary force and political subjectivity when the nature of work is changing? How can they re-claim and negotiate in these social changes? Lacan’s statement “I replaced Freud’s energetics with political economy” goes one step further and openly engages psychoanalysis with the ‘immanent’ critique of liberal capitalist society. Following psychoanalytic practices, the project Part I: Critique de l’économie politique de l’atelier d’artiste incorporates an ‘immanent’ critique of the politico-economic relations in the production of art to reflect and analyze the current conditions of artist-labor and art-work-life social relations in terms of movements and vectors.
What is the impact of the open studio, as a form of activating and mobilizing audiences and a different way of organizing art? How does the format of the open studio reflect the current tendency of international art exchange to be residency driven? How does it impact the process of production (working conditions and labor economic conditions)? How does the studio dis-play ‘other’ experimental forms of exhibition making that can unfold in the studio?

Selected and reworked excerpts from the text by Dimitrina Sevova for the exhibition Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy. Part 1: Critique de l’économie politique de l’atelier d'artiste, in collaboration with Alan Roth

Printable version (PDF 94KB)

The panel discussion is part of the exhibition project Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy. Part 1: Critique de l’économie politique de l’atelier d'artiste.



Tonjaschja Adler



These aus „ein Essay über die Abstraktionsebene der Kategorie Arbeit“ 2015, Tonjaschja Adler

ARBEIT=KUNST=ARBEIT

Was kann ich unaufgefordert tun?
Wohin nehme ich mein Atelier mit?

Als Künstlerin befinde ich mich auf der „Abstraktionsebene“ der Kategorie Arbeit. Arbeit kann nicht ohne Gesellschaft gedacht werden. Der Begriff der Arbeit wird also von der Gesellschaft in der ich lebe definiert. Heisst das, dass die Schwerpunkte auf die alle wir, die in dieser Gesellschaft leben oder die sich in einer Gruppe dieser Gesellschaft in der man sozialisiert wird und sich befindet, definiert was Arbeit ist ? Worin besteht ihr Wert?
Für fast jede Arbeit gibt es ein Taxierungssystem, auf das man sich mal einigen konnte, aber das durchaus immer wieder zur Diskussion steht. Für die Arbeit der Künstlerin, des Künstlers? Auch.



Delphine Chapuis Schmitz



une terrasse de café, a bookstore a library, the street die Welt, a room of one's own, a place where to be and think freely and do nothing - nothing you have to.
a place where to retreat, the possibility of (if only)
atelier: the whole world, a playground


Vreni Spieser

Why should artists, who are in general earning very little money, pay two rents per month?
It’s kind of ridiculous.

I can’t focus and concentrate in a shared studio, I have to be on my own.
But:
Dialogues or having a counterpart is very important in my working process. It’s contradictory.

I don’t like people saying “Oh, it’s so inspiring to visit you in your studio”.

Since I am working at home, I am kind of isolated.

I am thinking about renting a studio again, but I’m afraid it will cut my flexibility and ability to travel.



Nina von Meiss and Christina Pfander / Mickry3

Mickry 3 was founded in 1998 by Christina Pfander, Dominique Vigne and Nina von Meiss in Zurich, right after they finished their studies in fine arts at F+F School for Art and Media Design.
Their collaboration began with “M3 Supermarkt”. Arranged as an installation with over 1’000 self-made unique objects, the palette ranged from happiness pills to human organs to a female orgasm, all wrapped in cellophane and available at bargain prices. The motto was to produce inexpensive art for everybody while at the same time undermining the functioning of the art business. Somehow this subverting procedure became a slogan of the trio.
Their works often relate to art history and copying, interpreting and re-interpretation is an ever-recurring aspect of their work, which has continued to develop strongly over the years. But what runs through the whole body of work created by Mickry 3 is a sense of humour and a critical but never moralistic attitude towards society.
In 2006 the trio – who works exclusively in the collective – joined the Association of Swiss Sculptors AZB and moved to their conglomerate of workshops and exterior working spaces in the peripheral area of former gasworks in Schlieren. The association, founded in 1983 by a group of sculptors, among which artist Heinz Niederer, settled there in 1984. AZB functions as a self-sustaining association, the protected gasworks area, located on a property of the City of Schlieren, is in possession of the City of Zurich. This overall environment has influenced in many ways the artistic practice of Mickry 3. Beside others, questions towards a “Critique de l’économie politique de l’atelier d’artiste” include to what extent such a structure, setting and environment can influence the artistic and political self-conception. Not least because the area seems to be an ideal place not only to work – but to spend time.

The Curatorial Reading Group is a monthly reading session, a platform for contextualizing curatorial approaches and discourse through a continuous series of readings and discussions. Under the theme of ‘Curating, the Curatorial, and the Notion of Time,’ each session of the first season focuses on a selected text from theory to artistic practice.

This upcoming second session we will read the essay Time and Matter by Jean-François Lyotard, which was part of his input into his philosophical seminar following his landmark exhibition at Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1985, Les Immatériaux, and reflects on the philosophical ideas behind that exhibition. The exhibition inspired an entire generation of relational aesthetics, both curators and artists, from Nicolas Bourriaud to Jens Hoffmann, from Philippe Parreno to Pierre Huyghe, as well as the post-digital discourse and new media art context, with theoreticians and curators like Andreas Boeckmann and Yuk Hui.

You can download the text from here. If you are interested in joining our reading session, it is recommended that you to read it before.



As additional reading further contextualizing Lyotard's text, we recommend the short essay by John Rajchman, Les Immatériaux or How to Construct the History of Exhibitions, Tate Papers No.12 (Landmark Exhibitions Issue)
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/12/les-immateriaux-or-how-to-construct-the-history-of-exhibitions

From John Rajchman's text:
“Les Immatériaux was a ‘presentation of ideas’ in the specific sense of ‘presentation’ and ‘idea’ which Lyotard was trying to articulate at the time. It thus linked to another striking aspect of Lyotard’s curatorial experiment – the role and nature of accompanying research, or the role of ‘ideas’ and their ‘address’ in the style of philosophical teaching then current in Paris. With Les Immatériaux, the philosophical seminar would enter into the context of museum research, creating new relations which Lyotard would later evoke in his account of the experience. In the ‘open’ seminar, he would present ideas put forward in a suggestive philosophical text called Time and Matter, later published in a collection of essays entitled The Inhuman. The essay makes interesting reading today, in light of the current interest in exhibitions: in it, Lyotard sets out the larger philosophical ‘idea’ he hoped to ‘present’ through Les Immatériaux. What becomes clear is that Lyotard’s title concept of ‘immateriality’ was different from that of the ‘dematerialisation of art’ associated with the presentation of ideas in what came to be called ‘conceptual art’, and, in particular, ‘institutional critique’. The question thus arises of how this idea and this exhibition are related to that earlier ‘conceptual’ moment in the ‘dramatisation of information’, when the whole idea of the exhibition (or ‘presentation’) was rethought in a manner often opposed to a certain kind of Kantian aestheticism.”




An interview with the philosopher by Bernard Blistène published in Flash Art on the occasion of the exhibition in 1985 provides further background to the thinking behind the exhibition.

And Yuk Hui talks about the updated context of Les immatériaux in the post-digital discourse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13EdYtfmJ0A

For the March session we propose to collectively select a text, possibly from the book 30 years after Les Immatériaux by Yuk Hui and Andreas Broeckmann.



This book features a previously unpublished report by Jean-François Lyotard on the conception of Les Immatériaux and its relation to postmodernity. Reviewing the historical significance of the exhibition, his text is accompanied by twelve contemporary meditations. The philosophers, art historians, and artists analyse this important moment in the history of media and theory, and reflect on the new material conditions brought about by digital technologies in the last 30 years.

Texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Jean-Louis Boissier, Andreas Broeckmann, Thierry Dufrêne, Francesca Gallo, Charlie Gere, Antony Hudek, Yuk Hui, Jean-François Lyotard, Robin Mackay, Anne Elisabeth Sejten, Bernard Stiegler, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein.

Book Launch “Happy Tropics” with Michael Schindhelm (author, culture adviser, theatre and film maker), Damian Christinger (curator, Zurich University of the Arts) and students of Zurich University of the Arts.

This book is an attempt to translate new understandings of transcultural connections into a dialogue. Contributions and insights by important actors in the cultural field such as Eugene Tan, Rem Koolhaas, Benson Puah, June Yap, Gwee Li Sui, and Philip Ursprung, Michael Schindhelm and Damian Christinger frame research by students from the Zurich University of the Arts, and create a multi-voiced and multi-faceted approach to understanding the rapidly-changing cultural topographies of Singapore.

Happy Tropics I consists of two parts that run (literally) parallel throughout the book. The first section, “Why Singapore,” focuses on insights from outside the city state, and consists of a conversation between Rem Koolhaas and Michael Schindhelm, an essay by Philip Ursprung, and an artistic contribution by the U5 art collective, among the contributions by the students of the Zurich University of the arts. The second section, “Learning from Singapore,” gives room to different voices from within, featuring interviews with Glen Goei, Beh Swan Gin, Benson Puah, Eugene Tan, and an essay by Gwee Li Sui.

As Singapore becomes a global leader in both the financial and knowledge-production sectors, increasing emphasis is being put on both the production and dissemination of culture in the island-state. While it was still regarded as an “emerging country” two decades ago, it has become one of the leading nations regarding infrastructure, urbanisation, and service industries. The question as to whether arts and culture will follow suit is being closely followed by other nations worldwide who aspire to similar developmental goals. Singapore can be thought of as a kind of laboratory for the enabling, production, education, and consumption of arts and culture. Understanding culture as a mirror of society, instrument of national identification, and site for dialogue and exchange with other cultures allows us to view it as a litmus test for the resilience of an unprecedented societal concept.

Within this framework, Happy Tropics I can be seen as a case study and a laboratory for different approaches to dealing with the challenges of globalization, as the cultural topographies of Singapore are not only changing, but also constituting themselves in our timeframe. Understanding the city as a responsive network that can be harnessed for research and education projects reflects this reality, and encouraged us to come with our students from the Zurich University of the Arts to Singapore, delving into its mesh and trying to learn that seeing eye to eye is so much more important then perceived hierarchies, a concept that is also reflected in the design and structure of this book.

Happy Tropics I is a publication by Michael Schindhelm and Damian Christinger in collaboration with the Zurich University of the Arts, and is classified as the Connecting Spaces Document # 10.

http://www.connectingspaces.ch/happy-tropics-book-launch-2/

Zum Feierabend ein Freibier für alle die heute nicht blau gemacht haben.

This event is part of the exhibition project Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy. Part I: Critique de l’économie politique de l’atelier d'artiste.

Aaron Schirrmann (Architekt) und Lisa Biedlingmaier (Künstlerin und Kuratorin) berichten über den aktuellen Stand der Container City und die Arbeit des Kunstvereins Wagenhalle in Stuttgart.

Seit einer Woche laufen die Renovierungsarbeiten an der Wagenhalle, die in 2 Jahren wiedereröffnet werden soll.
Ein Ort an dem seit 2004, über 80 verschiedene Ateliers, Werkstätte, Proberäume und der Ausstellungsraum Kunstverein Wagenhalle ihr temporäres Zuhause hatten.

Der Kunstverein hat jetzt ein Interimsquartier auf dem Gelände vor der Halle aufgebaut. Die meisten Künstler und Kulturschaffenden sind vor Ort geblieben und arbeiten weiter in den ca. 140 Containern und einigen Sonderbauten.

images: Aida Nejad
photography: Ferdinando Iannone

This event is part of the exhibition project Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy. Part I: Critique de l’économie politique de l’atelier d'artiste.

The Curatorial Reading Group is a monthly reading session, aimed at enhancing our creativities in curatorial approaches through a continuous series of discussions. Under the theme of ‘Art and the Notion of Time,’ each session focuses on a selected text from theory to artistic practice.

For the first session on 30 January 2017, we will read and discuss the inspiring book It Had Something to Do with the Telling of Time. Spaces in fiction – Constructs of Reality by Annee Grøtte Viken.

If you are interested in our reading session please contact us! We will write you back with a copy of the book, and warmly recommend you to read it before the session.

Contact: Miwa Negoro (Corner College), miwa.negoro (at) gmail (dot) com

A group exhibition with Lisa Biedlingmaier, San Keller, and Maria Pomiansky in collaboration with Vadim Levin

curated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth,
curatorial interns Miwa Negoro and Swati Prasad.

Saturday, 21 January – Sunday, 19 February 2017

Opening: Saturday, 21 January at 18:00h
Finissage: Sunday, 19 February at 17:00h

Artist talks and other accompanying events to be announced.

Opening Hours
Wed/Fri 15:00h – 18:00h
Thu 16:00h – 19:00h

The exhibition/project will take place in two parts, of which this is the first:
Part 1: Critique de l’économie politique de l’atelier d'artiste
Part 2: Der Prozess / The Trial



Part 1: Critique de l’économie politique de l’atelier d'artiste

The focal point is on the relation between the studio, artist labor, art-work, aesthetic practices and their economic conditions. The studio might be a space where a certain degree of autonomy can be detected. The exhibition/project expresses how productivity in art depends on the relation between the artist’s liberty and the economic and social conditions of art production. The studio is part of the productive flow of relations, subjectivities, institutions, places, materials, techniques. At the same time it is in the grammar of autonomy, aesthetics and politics. There are many possible places and non-places of the studio, but it can still be put mainly in two orbits, as an independent space of a solitude where the artwork is produced, and a more open idea of the studio, where the artwork is performed by artist-labor. It is often a shared space, a space of collaboration that engages with the performative domain of the aesthetics and politics of art production and its economic and social reality.

Lacan’s statement “I replaced Freud’s energetics with political economy” goes one step further and openly engages psychoanalysis with the ‘immanent’ critique of liberal capitalist society. Following psychoanalytic practices, the project Part I: Critique de l’économie politique de l’atelier d’artiste incorporates ‘immanent’ critique in the politico-economic relations in the production of art to reflect and analyze in terms of movements and vectors the current conditions of artist-labor and art-work-life social relations.

It also adopts the critique of the political economy as a method to look at the studio space and the practices there, its social and political impact on art, on the labor and life of the artist. To what extent can the studio support the autonomy of the artist’s practices, and what is its emancipatory political potential? Giorgio Agamben attributes to the Situationists an “unavowed awareness that the genuinely political element consists precisely in this incommunicable, almost ridiculous clandestinity of private life.” The art labor and art-work are inevitably incorporated in the critique of a broad socio-economic process. At the same time, they will remain ‘ridiculously clandestine’ attitudes of free labor outside of the labor-power. In this way the project looks at how a return to critique and autonomy practices can perpetuate an emancipatory politics in art. They can be used as a model for an exit from the ‘hegemonic’ capitalist discourse and capitalist production of value. Autonomy practices, aesthetic immanent critique and politics invent new living forms and socio-economic relations outside of capital, like generic commons, undercommons, etc.

The project reflects on self-organized and self-managed aspects of the artist studio space, the conditions of the artist’s labor and the productive process of art-work there. Work is here used not necessarily to designate an art object. The working environment of the studio can be seen from many angles. At the same time, it remains a place where (un)productive forces play disalienated forms of labor in the work and life of the artists. The artist remains a free laborer who betrays the labor-power and slows down, or accelerates a virtuoso productivity.

The project inevitably asks, can the artist make a living from their art? How can they sustain their working environment relying on income from their artistic labor and art-work. Often, they inhabit the studio mostly in the time in-between several other jobs, while the studio is transformed and adapted to multitasked functions driven by project-oriented work, digitalization and internet. The productive process is automated between two applications for grants, in a diversity of institutional commands by e-mail and research work mostly based on Google searches. Being an artist is a day-to-day job of professional occupation, and at the same time a form of life that can scatter into a new sociality.

At the same time there is indeed a reality gap between the image of the autonomous artist and the actual working conditions of living artists, and how their productivity and the conditions of art production are socially evaluated and valued, between the relative ‘autonomy’ of the studio and today’s institutionally driven art, complemented by the erosion of the autonomy of art by different neoliberal dynamics and the restructuring (financialization, digitalization, gentrification) and the ideology of the free market that inevitably machinically signifies the social production and art, too. Although the artist precariat is potentially revolutionary and resistive, Hito Steyerl describes the instrumental precarization in the third stage of institutional critique that leads merely to “integration into precarity” of artist labor and working and living conditions. “What remains hidden in this – a new ‘hidden abode,’ the practicing artist remains outside of the employment.” At the same time, nowadays the art production process has been connected to digital productive flows, automated and highly professionalized by accelerated competition on a global scale, that disempowers the possibilities for collective, community forms of art, work and life.


Theorem 4. Aesthetic Agency and the Practices of Autonomy

The operations of Moral and Politics, Aesthetics and Immanent Critique, invite a re-thinking in the sense of the moral fight (Nietzsche), as Gilles Deleuze puts it in his essay about Foucault: “A man-form, then, appears only in very special and precarious conditions,” as a dissolved man. All form is a combination of all forces, a mix of human and non-human in the process of individuation. This precarious man-form is the extra-human ethical being of politics. Indeed, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “Politics precedes being. Practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their relations, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines; it confronts the same dangers and the same variations as the emplacement does.”

The notion of autonomy is investigated and reflected from various perspectives, without a model, as it takes place in the realms of aesthetics and of politics, in the social and the personal, art and practices. Autonomy is distinct from knowledge. As an intensification of power it regroups and redistributes. Despite this, the term of Autonomy has become increasingly derided in art and criticised as egotistical or even attributed to the hegemonic western ideology of the individual, as a result of the connection between the autonomy of art and the autonomy of the artist, and the equalization of both to aesthetic autonomy.

Aesthetic autonomy goes beyond the art context to embrace life as a whole. Aesthetic experience as a practice of philosophy has never been necessarily attached to the field of art and the artwork, and has mutated to the concepts of aesthetics of existence and of life as a work of art (in Foucault’s conceptualization) – “existing not as a subject but as a work of art.” The aesthetics of the ephemeral of the event of political subjectivity and of temporary autonomous zones are dispositions of time or of a brain. They draw “new cerebral pathways, new ways of thinking.” As Deleuze says: “I think subjectification, events, and brains are more or less the same thing.” What can emerge from these practices is the creative struggle that is resistance and invention. Art is resistance, too. These new subjectivities are precarious minor social formations, and to the extent that the artist is part of the precariat in the informal economy, they practice aesthetic autonomy, too. Peter Osborne writes that “aesthetic autonomy is indifferent to the art/non-art distinction,” which is close to Jacques Rancière: “To the extent that the aesthetic formula ties art to non-art from the start, it sets that life up between two vanishing points: art becoming mere life or art becoming mere art.” 


Excerpt from the curatorial text by Dimitrina Sevova in collaboration with Alan Roth (in printable format as PDF, 276KB)



Lisa Biedlingmaier

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2014. HD video.



For centuries, the studio has been perceived not only in its pragmatic function as a workshop or thought laboratorium but to a much larger extent as a place in which the premises of individual artistic identity can be fathomed.

The interior, whether a home office or a study room, provides clues to the personality living or working there.


Das Atelier wurde über Jahrhunderte nicht nur in seiner pragmatischen Funktion als Werkstätte oder gedankliches Laboratorium registriert, sondern in viel grösserem Masse als ein Ort empfunden, an dem die Prämissen für die individuelle künstlerische Identität ergründet werden können.

Das Interieur, ob Privatzimmer oder Arbeitszimmer liefere Indizien über die in ihm wohnende bzw. arbeitende Persönlichkeit.



San Keller

At Work (Cuckoo)



In At Work (Cuckoo) lässt sich San Keller von seinen Künstlerfreunden in deren Ateliers und an deren Arbeit fotografieren.


The L-Word - No mas metales
2015. HD video, 56 min.

Der Schweizer Konzeptkünstler San Keller (1971) reist mit der Absicht nach Los Angeles, auf der Strasse einen Kunstsammler anzutreffen, der ein Werk der amerikanischen Pop-Art-Ikone Andy Warhol (1928-1987) aus seiner Sammlung gegen sämtliche Werke des politischen Zeichners und Karikaturisten Martin Disteli (1802-1844) im Besitz des Kunstmuseum Olten tauschen würde.

Auf seinen Streifzügen rund um Hollywood entfernt sich San Keller immer weiter vom ursprünglichen Ziel, einen Sammler zu finden, der einen Warhol gegen den Oltner Disteli-Nachlass tauschen würde. In den Vordergrund rückt stattdessen die Suche – die Suche an sich, oder aber die Suche nach dem Bild. The L-Word - No mas metales ist jedoch auch eine filmische Reflexion über ein mysteriöses L-Word (Los Angeles, Liebe, Langeweile, Loch oder Liberalismus?), über die Suggestionskraft von Bildern, die Macht des Geldes und vor allem über die Freiheit - die Kernthemen Distelis also.



Maria Pomiansky in collaboration with Vadim Levin

In situ studio



What is the role of the painter's atelier in contemporary art practice? The archaic features are mixed with the needs of today's life. A painter 's atelier is one of the last bastions of non-computer activities. It can be interpreted as a manifestation of humanity. And it’s not by chance that technique is put back on stage and reworked through the lenses of conceptual art to produce paintings that elaborate on the reality surrounding us.

I would like to produce a painting which would change during the time of the exhibition and would be an attempt to view the atelier as a sacral symbol, a game where the human brain, the hand and the eyes play the leading roles.

Mapping Graphic Design History in Switzerland is not just another book that retells the success story of Swiss graphic design. It is a collection of eleven selected essays deriving from academic research that explores historical dimensions of graphic design in Switzerland – from producing it, to archiving and exhibiting it.

The book is also an endeavor to open up a space for graphic design history by providing new perspectives, ideas and tools that enable historical research in such a crucial field for Switzerland as graphic design and typography.

On this occasion, the editors Davide Fornari and Robert Lzicar and publisher Triest invite you to celebrate the launch of the book. A presentation of the book will be followed by a number of talks by contributors and sponsors on why they did support / contribute. The evening will end with a toast on the publication.

Program

19:00–19:10 Greeting: Kerstin Forster (publisher at Triest Verlag)
19:10–19:30 Presentation of the book: Davide Fornari, Robert Lzicar (editors of “Mapping Graphic Design History in Switzerland”)
19:30–19:40 Speaker 1: Sarah Owens (ZHdK and Swiss Design Network SDN)
19:40–19:50 Speaker 2: Marina Oliveira (Designer of Visual Essays, Graphic Designer, Zurich)
19:50–20:00 Speaker 3: Peter Vetter (Coande, ZHdK)
20:00–20:10 Speaker 4: Bettina Richter (Poster Collection, MfG - auf Deutsch/in German)
20:10–20:15 Questions & Statements
20:15–21:00 Apéro

Davide Fornari is associate professor at ECAL University of Art and Design in Lausanne, where he leads the research and development sector. He has previously been teacher and researcher at SUPSI University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland.

Robert Lzicar is a designer, educator and researcher. At the HKB Bern University of the Arts, he is head of the MA Communication Design, researcher at the Department of R+D Communication Design, and professor of design history.

Jennifer Bennett stellt ihr Buch SAVE vor, welches im September im Textem Verlag Hamburg erschienen ist. Dieses enthält wahre Begebenheiten und schildert Begegnungen und Gespräche mit existierenden Personen. Auf einer Reise werden unterschiedliche Protagonistinnen und Protagonisten gesucht und gefunden, um sie zu den Themen Selbstorganisation, Rebellion, Netzwerke, Territorium, Nation, Staatsangehörigkeit und mehr zu befragen. Es wird darin exemplarisch, welche Rolle Einzelne in der Gesellschaft und im eigenen Umfeld annehmen, und ist auch eine ganz persönliche Auseinandersetzung mit dem In-eine-Welt-geworfen-Sein, die von systemischen Aspekten bestimmt wird.

Aufgrund aktueller Ereignisse in den USA um die Dakota Access Pipelines wird die Buchvorstellung mit einigen Videobeispielen und einem gemeinsamen Brainstorming zur Frage der Solidarisierung und Formen von Engagement verbunden. Es zeigt sich, dass bei geplanten Grossprojekten 1000e Stimmen, die sich dagegen auflehnen, nicht berücksichtigt werden und häufig mit massiver Gewaltanwendung von Seiten des Staates zum Schweigen gebracht werden. Kurzfristige Profite stehen über der Erhaltung von Lebensgrundlagen, reichhaltige Umgebungen werden der Aufrechterhaltung des Kapitalismus geopfert. Die Frage, die sich stellt, ist das wirklich in unserem Sinn oder werden uns Bedürfnisse verkauft, welche uns die Opfer die wir bringen, vergessen lassen? Sind wir so resigniert, dass wir den Kopf noch tiefer in den Sand stecken oder möchten wir aktiv und miteinander überlegen, wie eine gangbare Überwindung des Gefühls der Hilflosigkeit aussehen würde? Wie müsste sich das Kräfteverhältnis verändern, damit die Stimme der Menschen genauso relevant wird, wie die Sprache des Geldes? Wie können diese Fragestellungen ins Zentrum der gesellschaftlichen Debatte gebracht werden und macht Kunstproduktion, welche im weitesten Sinn die Gegenwart archiviert Sinn, wenn parallel dazu alles getan wird, um eine mögliche Zukunft für alle zu verunmöglichen?

In diesem Brainstorming kann es nicht darum gehen, uns zu beklagen oder schnelle Lösungen zu finden, aber darum, dass wir uns diesen Fragestellungen mit ganzer Aufmerksamkeit zuwenden.

Weiterführende links zum Entstehungsprozess von SAVE und bisherigen Veranstaltungen:
http://jentleben.jbbooks.net/97-2/
http://www.oslo10.ch/episode5
http://www.2025ev.de/aktion_142.html

19:00h Talk by Federica Martini: Pérruques, homers and pirate radios.

The « pérruque » is a tactic for diverting time from the factory work and indulge in creative no-profit labour. Like pirate radios, pérruques infiltrate production narratives with notions of desire and liberated time. Like quilts, the pérruques are a non-hegemonic class practice that is based on appropriation, storytelling and generosity. In resonance with Cora Piantoni's exhibition Buon Lavoro! Prose of The Day – Poetic Resistance at Corner College, in this talk the pérruque will play as a magnifying glass and a metaphor to read collaborations between artists and workers in factories in 1960s-1970s Italy. Focusing on proximities and correspondences between artistic processes, factory culture, and alternative radio strategies, context will be given to Gianfranco Baruchello, Gruppo N, Maria Lai, Olivetti and Italsider.


20:00h Conversation between Federica Martini, the artist Cora Piantoni and the curator Dimitrina Sevova, in the context of Federica Martini's talk and on the occasion of Cora Piantoni's personal exhibition Buon Lavoro! Prose of The Day – Poetic Resistance.

Efferveszenz
Im Herzen der Zeitgenössischen Mythologie
Text, Installationen und Konzept: Isabelle Capron Illustrationen: Marianne Smolska

Was haben ein Staubsauger, ein Kernreaktor eine Datingplattform, ein Musikvideo von David Bowie, eine Cola-Dose und ein Satellit gemeinsam? Es sind alles Kultobjekte, Symbole unserer indistrualisierten Gesellschaft. Durch sie äussert sich unser Glauben an dem technischen Fortschritt, genauso wie wir früher an Götter geglaubt haben. Aber wie alle mythologische Phantasmen neigen auch diese Dinge dazu sich wieder in Luftblasen aufzulösen und zu verschwinden.

Efferveszenz vereint drei poetische Installationen, die im Rahmen des Openair Literatur Festivals Zürich ausgestellt wurden. Ergänzt werden sie durch Illustrationen von Marianne Smolska. Efferveszenz, schreibt Capron, ist eine Frechheit, sie verkörpert alles Wilde, Flüchtige und vollkommen Freie, alles was lebendig, pulsierend, atmend, widerständig ist. Auf poetisch-satirische Weise untersucht Capron unseren Glauben in den technischen Fortschritt, sie lädt uns ein auf eine Reise ins Reich der zeitgenössischen Mythen.

Die kleine Apotheke der Liebe nähert sich dem neuen Imaginären der Liebe in Form von literarischen Heilmitteln. Das Horoskop der Hypermonster ist eine Galerie von zwölf Ungeheuern, gezeugt durch die Massenkultur der Hyperindustrie. Und die Fragmente der Installation Generation umkreist die Frage, was aus dem Sein im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit wird.

Das Buch ist ein Plädoyer für einen verantwortlichen, pazifistischen Umgang mit den modernen Technologien. Ein Aufruf, sich auf die Menschlichkeit mit all ihren Facetten zu besinnen.

Die Autorin Isabelle Capron kam vor 20 Jahren als Korrespondentin von Paris nach Zürich, wo sie heute noch lebt. Sie studierte Philosophie an der Sorbonne. Heute unterrichtet sie Französisch an der ZHAW an den Studiengängen Kommunikation und Journalismus. Sie arbeitet an Projekten im Bereich plastischer Literatur und ist Mitglied des Autorenkollektivs Index, des AdS und der SSA.

Die Illustratorin Marianne Smolska kommt ursprünglich aus Paris und lebt heute in Hanoi. Sie arbeitet im Bereich der Illustration, Grafik und Gestaltung an verschiedenen Projekten für öffentliche und private Institutionen oder Unternehmen, sowie für internationale NGOs.

[English below]

Lena Maria Thüring ist zu Gast bei Home of the Brave: Archeology of the Moving Image. Eine Veranstaltungsreihe des Corner College.

[Deutsch siehe oben]

Lena Maria Thüring is guest at Home of the Brave: Archeology of the Moving Image. A series of events by Corner College.

Lena Maria Thüring’s work explores individual stories in a reflection on social systems and their underlying constructions using various media, such as photography, performance, video or installation.

The interview forms both the starting point and the staging ground for much of Lena Maria Thüring’s recent filmic work. Her films and videos explore how individuals forge their identities and shield their memories in the shadow of larger group dynamics and the socio-political systems in which they are cast, using personal narrative — its gaps and elisions, its specificity and opacity — to reveal how meaning is constructed, projected, protected, and perhaps deconstructed. Detaching the spoken narrative from the subjects’ bodies and even their voices, Thüring creates a fissure between seeing and hearing, identity and biography. Within this space we can consider the nature of memory, the power of words, and the significance of all that remains unsaid.

Born in Basel 1981, lives and works in Zurich.

Thüring’s work had been shown in solo exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Baselland (2012) and the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel 2013 and in groupshows and screenings at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunsthalle Basel, Haus der Kulturen Berlin, the Reina Sofia National Museum Madrid in Spain and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. She received several awards including Swiss Art Award (2008), Kiefer Hablitzel Foundation Award (2011), Grant from Zurich City (2012), Manorkunstpreis Basel (2013) and two artist residencies in Paris (2009) and New York (2010).

Thüring is a member of the Fachausschuss Audiovision und Multimedia BS / BL.

http://www.lenamariathuering.ch/

On Thu / Fri / Sat, 27 / 28 / 29 October
each day from 14:00h to 18:00h
Public talk and discussion on Saturday, 29 October at 19:00h


Mohammad Namazi presents 'Entropische Iteration' (Entropic Iteration) as a reflection on his residency experience as part of the Freiraum-Stipendium – the index collective residency programme. The artist installs a three-days open laboratory at Corner College, which will end in a public talk and discussion. Namazi shows new work made during his residency in Zurich that utilises the Internet, installation and video formats. In his talk he presents his new experiments and talks about his research and practice in general.

Locating the numerous water fountains that are a feature specific to the urban experience of Zurich, Namazi re-imagines these sites as physical manifestos that are actualised as temporary non-hierarchical social platforms. A series of web pages have been created to map out a selection of these encounters. Through these online networks, linkages and locations - sound recordings, image editing and HTML programming are used to spatialize and demonstrate the physical and off-line reality on the virtual and online environment.

Aus Anlass des 10. Todestages von Ted Serios präsentiert der Hamburger Textem Verlag einen Fotoband mit bislang unveröffentlichten paranormalen Polaroid-Serien aus den 1960er Jahren. Der Bildband widmet sich mit Ted Serios’ übersinnlicher Fotografie “dem vermutlich bestdokumentierten Medium der Parapsychologie” überhaupt. Herausgeber des Bandes ist der Hamburger Filmemacher und Regisseur Romeo Grünfelder. Nach der Auftaktveranstaltung im Metropolis Kino Hamburg wird der Forschungszusammenhang am 20.November zur Matinee um 11:00 Uhr im Corner College in Zürich vorgestellt. Weitere Stationen in Deutschland, der Schweiz und Österreich schließen sich an.

Ted Serios wurde bekannt dafür, Gedanken mittels psychischer Energie auf Sofortbild übertragen zu können, was Wissenschaftler bis heute vor ein ungelöstes Rätsel stellt. In umfangreichen Experimenten entstanden über 400 paranormale Polaroids, die Grundlage der ausgewählten Fotoserien des Fotobandes bilden.


Ted Serios. Serien
Romeo Grünfelder (Hrsg.)
564 Seiten mit 352 Abbildungen
Mit Beiträgen von Philippe Dubois, Prof. Dr. Peter Geimer, Romeo Grünfelder (Hrsg.) und Prof. Dr. Bernd Stiegler Textem Verlag
978-3-941613-46-1
http://www.textem.de/index.php?id=2734


Zu Ted Serios

geb. 27. November 1918, arbeitete als Hotelpage in Chicago, als er für seine Produktion von »Gedankenfotografien« auf Polaroid-Film im Laufe der 1960er Jahre bekannt wurde. Er behauptete, Grundlage seien allein seine psychischen Kräfte, was Fotografen und Skeptiker seither zu widerlegen versuchen. Ted Serios starb am 30. Dezember 2006 in Chicago.


Zum Psychiater und Parapsychologen Jule Eisenbud

geb. 20. November 1908 in New York, USA, arbeitete nach der Erlangung der Doktorwürde an der Columbia University als Psychiater und eröffnete 1938 eine Praxis für Psychiatrie und Psychoanalyse in New York. Im Jahr 1950 wechselte er als außerordentlicher klinischer Professor für Psychiatrie nach Denver. Eisenbud widmete sich den Forschungsgebieten der Psychiatrie, Psychoanalyse, Anthropologie und Hypnose. Er war einer der Ersten, der Gedankenübertragung und andere PSI- Fähigkeiten als Kommunikationsmittel in die Psychoanalyse mit einbezogen hat. Bekannt wurde er vor allem durch sein Buch The World of Ted Serios, New York 1967, in dem er seine Forschungsergebnisse zu Ted Serios zusammenfasste. Jule Eisenbud starb am 10. März 1999 in Denver, Colorado.


Zum Herausgeber Romeo Grünfelder

geb. 1968, ist Autor, Filmemacher und Regisseur, studierte in Hamburg Musik, Medienphilosophie und Kunst. Stipendiat u. a. der Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades. Von
2008 bis 2010 unterrichtete er Dramaturgie und Philosophie an der Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg. Fokus seiner Arbeit liegt auf paranormalen Themen. Seine ausgezeichneten Filme werden im Kino als auch auf Festivals und in Galerien gezeigt.
Er lebt & arbeitet als Regisseur in Hamburg und Berlin.
http://felderfilm.de


Zum Textem Verlag

Gegründert im Jahr 2004 von Nora Sdun und Gustav Mechlenburg mit Sitz in Hamburg. Der Verlag ist spezialisiert auf Veröffentlichungen von Literatur, Theorie, Künstlerbücher und Ausstellungskataloge. Seit Juli 2006 verlegt der Textem Verlag das Printmagazin Kultur & Gespenster. Bisherige Veröffentlichungen, das Verlagsprogramm und weitere Aktivitäten des Verlags unter
http://www.textem-verlag.de/

[English see below]

Einzelausstellung von Cora Piantoni
kuratiert von Dimitrina Sevova

Samstag, 19. November - Freitag, 30. Dezember 2016

Eröffnung: Samstag, 19. November 2016, ab 17:00h.

Öffnungszeiten
Mittwoch, 15:00h – 18:00h
Donnerstag, 16:00h – 19:00h
Freitag, 15:00h – 18:00h

Kuratorischer Text

Cora Piantonis Einzelausstellung im Corner College stellt eine Auswahl des Werkes der Künstlerin vor, basierend auf ihrer langjährigen Recherche zu arbeitenden Menschen und ihren Gemeinschaften, sowie zum Wandel der Arbeit in der sozialen Fabrik und zur Geopolitik der Arbeit.

“Langsam arbeiten” ist ein Protestlied und eine eingängige operaistische Hymne der 1970er Jahre in Italien: “Arbeite langsam / Und mühelos / Arbeit kann dich verletzen / Und du kommst ins Spital / Wo kein Bett frei ist / Und du gar sterben kannst. / Arbeite langsam / Und mühelos / Gesundheit ist unschätzbar.” Im Gegensatz zu den Slogans des italienischen operaistischen Widerstands der 1970er wählt Cora Piantoni als Haupttitel der Ausstellung einen affirmativen Ausdruck der Auffassung von Arbeit und greift damit feinsinnig die für die neoliberale Wirtschaft des Spätkapitalismus charakteristische, systematische Präkarisierung auf, das Bedürfnis, dass alle einen Job haben, und eine positive Einstellung zur Arbeit, die den Kämpfen der Arbeitenden für ein besseres Leben Kraft verleihen kann. Der italienische Gruss “buon lavoro” ist positiv besetzt als Wunsch, der die eigene emotionale Anteilnahme an jemand anderer Arbeit ausdrückt. Die deutsche Sprache kennt keine Redewendung, die dem direkt entsprechen würde. Gelegentlich werden Ausdrücke wie diese verwendet: Viel Spass bei der Arbeit! – Ich wünsche dir Erfolg bei deiner Arbeit! – Hals- und Beinbruch!

Als Geschichtenerzählerin folgt die Künstlerin den kleinen Erzählungen und der undokumentierten mündlichen Überlieferung gewöhnlicher Arbeitender, vor dem Hintergrund historischer Ereignisse wie des Falls der Berliner Mauer, der die Breiten- und Längengrade von Ost-West und Nord-Süd in der Dynamik der Wirtschaft, der Arbeitsmärkte und der Neuausrichtung der Produktionsprozesse erschütterte, die sich in Veränderungen in der Auffassung von Arbeit und Alltag niederschlugen, insbesondere jener von Handwerker_innen und eher marginalisierter, verkannter oder aussergewöhnlicher Formen unsichtbarer Arbeit wie Putzdienste, eine Kletterbrigade, Platzanweiser_innen in einem DDR-Kino, Operateure in Studio-Kinos oder, in einer früher Arbeit, Konzept-Künstler_innen, die sich in der Tschechoslowakei dem sozalistisch-realistischen Kanon verweigerten und es vorzogen, ihren Lebensunterhalt als Heizer_innen zu bestreiten. Die Ausstellung baut auf der Konsequenz des Konzepts der Künstlerin einer Archeologie der Arbeit, der Materialität der Begegnung, und der Alltagskämpfe und Poetik des Widerstands von Arbeitenden. Der ausgestellte Werkkomplex beinhaltet anachronistische und rückwirkende Aspekte. Mit der Verwendung von Videobändern anstatt der neuesten HD-Formate geht Piantoni Videotechnologie an sich sowie als Arbeitsmethode an. Die Videoarbeiten bauen auf Interviews auf, realistischen Porträts, die den Arbeitenden Raum lassen, in denen die Künstlerin als Zeugin hinter dem mechanischen Auge erscheint, wobei sie konzeptionell von Spezialeffekten absieht, wie auch davon, bei den Dreharbeiten oder beim Schnitt eine vorgefasste künstlerische Sprache darüber zu legen. Das Bild selbst ist nüchtern, ohne zu formalisieren. Mit dieser Vorgehensweise stellt die Künstlerin eine unerwartete Anwesenheit heraus, und nicht eine Repräsentation der Subjekte – das Leben gewöhnlicher Arbeitenden als Kunstwerk in einer Mischung aus dokumentarischen Fragmenten, Archivmaterial und poetischen Momenten, angetrieben vom Rhythmus der direkten Rede der Subjekte.

In der Geschichte der bewegten Bilder und des Kinos gibt es zwei Hauptströmungen, die eine in Anlehnung an D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, die andere die molekulare Revolution des Alltags von Dziga Vertovs Der Mann mit der Kamera, ein Sammler der Nichtlinearität der Anwesenheit. In Cora Piantonis Werk findet sich etwas von Vertovs molekularer Empfindsamkeit. Die Künstlerin fragt unweigerlich nach den Grenzen zwischen Kunst und Alltag, Arbeit und Herstellen. Die Arbeiten sind ästhetisch und politisch engagiert, das Vermögen der Betrachterin zu entwickeln, die Subjekte aus einer Vielzahl von Perspektiven heraus zu sehen. Diese Konsequenz zeigt sich auch in der neuesten Arbeit der Künstlerin, Eine andere Information. Die Interferenzen von Terzo Radio GAP, die als Premiere in dieser Ausstellung zu sehen ist. Diese neueste Arbeit enspringt einer Residenz 2015 in Genua, während der die Künstlerin einer lokalen Geschichte antifaschistischen Widerstands in den frühen 1970er Jahre begegnete, die ihr als Inspiration diente, weiter zu recherchieren und den beteiligten Personen nachzugehen. Sie hat etwas vom ungewöhnlichen Genre der Nebula, verkörpert im neuen italienischen Epos gesichts- und namenloser Kollektive von Aktivist_innen und Schreibenden als kollektive Persönlichkeit, jenem politischer Romane, die sich der Mittel der Kommunikationsguerilla bedienen, und kündigt neue Formen affirmativen Widerstands und direkter Aktion an, die in den Prozess der Kommunikation und der Massenmedien als ideologische und technologische Dispositive der Gesellschaft eingreifen und sich von anderen Mittel politischer Aktion wie auch vom Hacktivismus in Raum des Internets unterscheiden.

Text: Dimitrina Sevova in Zusammenarbeit mit Alan Roth



[Deutsch siehe oben]

A personal exhibition by Cora Piantoni
curated by Dimitrina Sevova

19 November - 31 December 2016

Opening: Saturday, 19 November, 17:00h


Opening Hours
Wednesday / Mittwoch, 15:00h – 18:00h
Thursday / Donnerstag, 16:00h – 19:00h
Friday / Freitag, 15:00h – 18:00h


Cora Piantoni’s personal exhibition at Corner College presents a selected body of works based on the artist’s continued research about working people and their communities, and the transformation of labor in the social factory and the geopolitics of work.
“Working slowly” is a protest song and popular workerist anthem in 1970s Italy: “Work slowly / And effortlessly / Work may hurt you / And send you to the hospital / Where there’s no bed left / And you may even die. / Work slowly / And effortlessly / Health is priceless.” In contrast to the slogans of the Italian workerist resistance in the 1970s, Cora Piantoni chooses as the main title of the exhibition an affirmative expression of the notion of work, sensitive to the systematic precarization characteristic of the neoliberal economy of late capitalism, the need for jobs for everyone, and a positive relation to work that can empower the struggles of the workers for a better life. The Italian greeting “buon lavoro” has a positive connotation and is used as a wish expressing one’s own emotional involvement in the work of someone. The English language has no idiom it could directly translate to. Occasionally, one might use phrases such as: I wish you every success in your work! – Have a good day at work! – Good luck with your work!

As a story teller, the artist follows the small narratives and undocumented oral history of ordinary working people, on the background of historical events like the Fall of the Berlin Wall, which shook the latitude and longitude of East-West and North-South in the economic dynamics, labor markets and the reorganization of production processes, reflected in changes in the notion of work and everyday life, with a special focus on manual workers and rather marginalized, unrecognized or unusual forms of invisible labor, like cleaning services, a climbing brigade, or ushers working in a GDR cinema, operators in studio cinemas, or, in an earlier work, conceptual artists who in Czechoslovakia did not follow the socialist-realist normative canon and preferred to make a living as stokers. The exhibition is set up on the consistency of the artist’s concept of an archeology of work, the materiality of the encounter, and the struggles of daily life and poetics of resistance of working people. The exhibited body of work contains anachronistic and retroactive aspects. Through the use of video tape rather than the newest HD formats, Piantoni addresses video technology as such, and as a method of work. The video works are based on interviews, realistic portraits that give space to the workers, in which the artist appears as a witness behind the mechanical eye, conceptually avoiding special effects or superimposing a preconceived artistic language either in the shooting process or in the montage. The image is sober, without formalization. With this approach, the artist foregrounds an unexpected presence rather than a representation of the subjects, the life of the ordinary workers as a work of art, mixing documentary fragments, archive material and poetic moments, driven by the rhythm of the direct speech of the subjects.

In the history of moving images and cinema, there are two main streams, one in the line of D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, the other, the molecular revolution of everyday life of Dziga Vertov’s Man With the Movie Camera, who is a collector of the non-linearity of presence. In Cora Piantoni’s works, there is something of Vertov’s molecular sensibility. The artist inevitably asks about the borders between art and daily life, work and labor. The works are aesthetically and politically engaged to develop the ability of the viewer to see the subjects from a multiplicity of perspectives. This consistency manifests itself again in the artist’s newest work, Another Information: The Interferences of Terzo Radio GAP, which premieres in the exhibition. This latest work comes out of a residency in Genoa in 2015, where the artist encountered a local story from the Italian antifascist resistance of the early 1970s that became a motivation to further investigate and follow the characters involved. It has something of the unusual genre of Nebula, embodied in a new Italian epic of revolutionary faceless and anonymous collective of activists and writers, as a collective persona, of political novels as guerilla communication, and prefigures new forms of affirmative resistance and direct action that intervene in the process of communication and mass media as ideological and technological dispositives of the society that are distinct from other means of political action, as well as hacktivism in the space of the Internet.

Text: Dimitrina Sevova in collaboration with Alan Roth

Design education is primarily learning by doing. And the layer of language that runs alongside this process is often neglected. Words fly out of a teacher’s or student’s mouth and quickly disappear into thin air. Instructions and specifications, corrections and questions, fuse with practical work. And assignments, if written down at all, are rarely considered something worth saving. So how can we access and bring back assignments lost to the past? What are the means of historic reconstruction? And what are the consequences of such methods? How does reconstruction differ from reenactment? How can historical assignments be made relevant for the present time?

Guests:
Sarah Klein, designer and researcher, HGK Basel and Ecal Lausanne, CH
Leslie Kennedy, designer and researcher, Basel School of Design, CH
Michael Renner, director Institute Visual Communication, Basel School of Design, CH

Mediated by:
Nina Paim and Corinne Gisel

This conversation is part of a series of events investigating current issues in design education in relation to giving, writing, and preserving assignments, initiated by the authors of the book Taking a Line for a Walk, published by Spector Books Leipzig in 2016.

Assignments can give instructions, describe an exercise, present a problem, set out rules, propose a game, stimulate a process, or simply throw out questions.Taking a Line for a Walk brings attention to something that is often neglected: the assignment as a pedagogical element and verbal artefact of design education. This book is a compendium of 224 assignments, edited by Nina Paim and coedited by Emilia Bergmark. A reference book for educators, researchers, and students alike, it includes both contemporary and historical examples and offers a space for different lines of design pedagogy to converge and converse. An accompanying essay by Corinne Gisel takes a closer look at the various forms assignments can take and the educational contexts they exist within. Taking a Line for a Walk derived from an exhibition of the same name at the International Biennial of Graphic Design Brno 2014.


http://spectorbooks.com/taking-a-line-for-a-walk
Taking a Line for a Walk: Assignments in design education

Conceived by Nina Paim, Corinne Gisel, and Emilia Bergmark
280 pp.
15 black-white images
Wire-o with softcover in reverse binding
Spector Books Leipzig 2016
ISBN: 9783959050814
Edition Number: 1st
Size: 22 cm x 25.5 cm

On/Off Booth B1, ABB Event Hall, Zürich-Oerlikon | http://www.onoff.today/

With the participation of Nicolasa Navarrete, Cora Piantoni, Saman Anabel Sarabi, Anne Käthi Wehrli

Assistant for the Corner College presentation at On/Off: Alicia Olmos Ochoa
Corner College Intern: Miwa Negoro

Wednesday, 26.10.2016 - Sunday, 30.10.2016

Sunday, 30.10.2016

13:00h-15:00h Anabel Sarabi, zwei Runden Klans und Kompliz_innen, Tischspiel für 2 oder mehr Spieler_innen.

16:00h Gedichte und theoretisches Saxophon Wieso merkt niemand dass dieser Stuhl eine Brennnessel ist! by Anne Käthi Wehrli. Danach Preview ihres neuen Zines In den Lebensmitteln drin geht es zu und her wie in einer Stadt.



Nicolasa Navarrete

Illustrating Das Kapital. Volume one, 1
The end of truth
2014. Graphite on paper. 200cm x 100cm.

The first chief function of money is to supply commodities with the material for the expression of their values, or to represent their values as magnitudes of the same denomination, qualitatively equal and quantitatively comparable. It thus serves as a universal measure of value. And only by virtue of this function does gold. The equivalent commodity par excellence, become money.



Cora Piantoni

Songs of Work
2 channel video installation, sound, 11:25 min, 2014.



Cora Piantoni develops her films on the basis of interviews together with moving images and re-enactments of past events. For an exhibition at the stonemason’s cooperative in Porto, she continued her research about worker‘s communities, focusing on the worker's tradtional songs and the sound of the working process. Do the traditional songs still exist which reflect the monotony of the work, but also help to perform it? In what other way sound / rhythm / music plays a role at work? Besides the masons, Piantoni was interested in the background and culture of the students of the school which is now located in the building of the cooperative. She connected the young generation of the students with the older generation of the masons who are working at the factory and are aware of the history.



Saman Anabel Sarabi

Klans und Kompliz_innen
Tischspiel für 2 oder mehr Spieler_innen
konzipiert von Saman Anabel Sarabi and Josefine



The card game Klans und Kompliz_innen investigates through joyful and playful conversations the different links and alliances between people within the Zürich art scene and beyond. The table game offers a situation for curious and open people to contact with each other in a playful setting. It allows to inform each other and share and connect information and knowledge.

Curious to play with us? Please register here! And: bring some values with you. We are expecting you with pleasure and curiosity!

We are there on Sunday, 30 October, for two sessions of the game, 14:00h-15:00h, and 17:30h-18:30h.

Corner College in collaboration with Saman Anabel Sarabi and Josefine

http://www.hightimepublishers.com/



Anne Käthi Wehrli

Wieso merkt niemand dass dieser Stuhl eine Brennnessel ist!
Gedichte, Theoretisches Saxophon



Mütterlich lachten die Pflanzen.
Es war in Ordnung. Ich durfte über sie reden und mir Sachen über sie vorstellen.
Es störte sich nicht.

Sogar die Giftpflanzen sagten jedesmal wenn ich eine essen wollte: Nein! Wir sind giftig!
Weil wir Freunde waren.


In den Lebensmitteln drin geht es zu und her wie in einer Stadt
2016. 96 Seiten. Gedichte, Texte und Zeichnungen.

Zine-Vernissage am Sonntag, 30. Oktober um 16:00h.



In den Lebensmitteln drin geht es zu und her wie in einer Stadt. Der Titel dieser Publikation stammt aus einem Gedicht, entstanden bei der Arbeit an einem Beitrag, der Performance „These we have tried …“, für den Anlass „Alice Toklas reads her famous hashish fudge recipe“, der 2015 in Wien stattfand. In dieser Performance geht es um die Zubereitung von Fudge und um das berühmte Haschisch Fudge Rezept von Alice Toklas, um Hausfrauen, Sprache, Chemie, Zufall und feine Unterschiede. Ein Teil daraus findet sich in dieser Publikation.

Der Text „Die Frau als Einstiegsloch“ ist während der Gruppenausstellung No‑where? No-here! The Molecular Books of Life – Colleges of Unreason 2016 im Corner College entstanden. Mehrmals während der Ausstellungsdauer erschien eine neue Fassung des Texts als Fanzine. Der Text ist noch nicht abgeschlossen.

Auch weitere Beiträge dieses Buchs kamen schon an anderen Orten und in anderen Formaten vor. In Fanzines, Ausstellungen, Radiosendungen. Zeichnungen an Performances, Gedichte als Teil von Texten. Einige waren bisher unveröffentlicht. Die Zeichnungen und Collagen sind aus der Zeit von ca. 1993-2016. Zusammen mit den Texten, die alle neueren Datums sind, sind sie jetzt für dieses Buch neu versammelt worden.

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).

Starting from Lia Perjovschi’s early performance work of the 1980’s and scrutinizing how it relates to her current artistic practice of opening new spaces of knowledge and re-organizing those spaces, Louveau & Perjovschi want to propose a conversation about performance art, the connection of art and research, and different approaches to filling gaps with art, thus shortcutting 30 years of artistic practice and its context from communism to capitalism, from the local to the global art scene.

An exhibition by Gregory Hari

with the support of Lavdrim Dzemailji

curated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.

Opening: Saturday, 08 October 2016, starting at 18:00h
with a performance by Gregory Hari at 19:00h.

Saturday, 08 October 2016 - Friday, 21 October 2016

Further performances by Gregory Hari on Friday, 14 and Friday, 21 October 2016, 20:00h (door opens 19:00h).


Opening hours during this exhibition / Öffnungszeiten während dieser Ausstellung

Wed 15:00h - 18:00h // Mi 15:00h - 18:00h
Thu 16:00h - 19:00h // Do 16:00h - 19:00h
Fri 15:00h - 18:00h // Fr 15:00h - 18:00h


begone before somebody drops a house on you too

“Suddenly, this story came in and took possession. It really seemed to write itself.” L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

With his exhibition project at Corner College, Gregory Hari undertakes an experiment with the medium of exhibition and performativity, site specificity and the relation between mapping and performance. He further explores issues on belonging and territory, home and journey, inspired by the contexts of the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written by Lyman Frank Baum and published in 1900, and its most successful and popular movie/musical adaptation starring 13-year-old Judy Garland, which launched in 1939 to six Oscar nominations, and become influential for the new era of Walt Disney and the later Disney Empire, and by their aesthetic, social and political impact in the mainstream and in subculture.

The artist generates a performative map or diagram of movements and fragments that will open up a process, and project power-knowledge relations that reveal the hidden social and political issues and their potential to aesthetically and critically engage the audience. But the production of the event is not an ‘exchange of knowledge for power,’ nor a symbolic force. The performance confronts the audience with its archival moment across various narratives structures, and scatters in an-other geography of a journey as a vehicle for metamorphoses that go through contradictory permutations, as every act activates on this topography the performing strategies of an Odyssey. The topography becomes a “science of the sensible – the science of total joy,” a chaosmos journey of micro-physical mapping and mind-map of micro-desires. They are a journey as a cognitive concept and narrative future of a body, interwoven with Gregory Hari’s research materials, which displays the source of his movements and directions.

The artist situates himself on a yellow strip around one meter wide, where his performance takes place. He improvises ‘across seemingly exhaustive ground.’ It is a process of taking place – a particular place and a particular time. The performance transforms these temporal and spatial categories to a “threshold” that un-rolls an-other flexible and self-multiplying strip of impersonalized and individuated, self-constructed temporal and spatial relativity that constitutes a world yet to be explored. The artist’s performance starts from this particular coordinate of time and space where it takes place and places things in context. With this, the artist emphasizes a dependence of his performance on its specific chronotope (Bakhtin) that animates a process of ‘endlessly’ expanding its performative territory with the time of the body’s movements and the “time space” of the traveler who carries this place with themselves as they travel through it. A journey like a blank page.

“Green clothes the earth in tranquillity, ebbs and flows with the seasons. In it is the hope of Resurrection. We feel green has more shades than any other colour, as the buds break the winter dun in the hedges. Hallucinatory sunny days.” (Derek Jarman)

“Did they secretly drag up in all those emerald dresses that the girls had cast off?” (Derek Jarman)

Hallucinatory sunny days and perception of landscape in a journey, a journey in colors separated in a three-strip process by diffraction and subtraction! Transferences! For this dazzling rainbow palette, “brilliant, gorgeous, painted, gay”:

Red stands for the ruby slippers/red shoes
Yellow stands for the yellow brick road
Green stands for the Emerald City of Oz
(Gregory Hari)

Green: “Green is a colour which exists in narratives … it always returns. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.”
Yellow: “The nimbus of the saints, haloes and auras. These are the yellows of hope.
The joy of black and yellow Prospect Cottage. Black as pitch with bright yellow windows, it welcomes you.
Yellow is a combination of red and green light. There are no yellow receptors in the eye.”
Red: “Red protects itself. No colour is as territorial. It stakes a claim, is on the alert against the spectrum.”
“Red explodes and consumes itself.”
“Liverpool. Early 1980s. I join the march. V. (REDgrave) says, ‘Derek, you carry a red flag.’ There are fifty of us. The ghostly galleon of revolution past. We march through the deserted and derelict city with the sound of the wind whipping through the flags, a rosy galleon on the high sea of hope. The sunlight dyeing us red. Shipwrecked on the last coral-reef of optimism. Someone says to me, ‘The red of the square is beautiful. The root of the red is life itself.’”
(Derek Jarman)

Excerpts from the curatorial text by Dimitrina Sevova (PDF, 181KB).


Diese Ausstellung ist Teil der Plattform Transferences: The Function of the Exhibition and Performative Processes in the
Practices of Art – Questions of Participation von Corner College, konzipiert von Dimitrina Sevova und Alan Roth, und wird unterstützt vom Nachwuchsförderungsprogramm der Pro Helvetia.

I regularly lose a lot of hair.

Often, I’d get lost in thoughts while twisting it.

As hairs slide off, small rings form around my finger.




I started collecting the rings.




I decided to take this ritual into a public performance.

Losing myself, repurposing myself, I invite the audience to co-experience and participate in the destruction and rebuilding of (my) physical transformation.



This public event follows three days of a durational performance with streaming.

Durational performance on 27 - 28 - 29 September.

Open to the public during the following hours:
Tuesday, 27 September: 12:00h - 17:00h (streaming 14:00h - 15:00h)
Wednesday, 28 September: 12:00h - 17:00h (streaming 14:00h - 15:00h)
Thursday, 29 September: 16:00h - 21:00h (streaming 20:00h - 21:00h)

Link for the streaming, for those who cannot attend in person:
https://youtu.be/KLJbdMmpzeM (27 Sept)
https://youtu.be/79Gj5rkqPjY (28 Sept)



Followed by a public live event on Thursday, 29 September at 20:00h.

One hair is trash. Million hairs is a woven record of my self.

I regularly lose a lot of hair.

Often, I’d get lost in thoughts while twisting it.

As hairs slide off, small rings form around my finger.

I started collecting the rings.

I decided to take this ritual into a public performance.

One Hair One Purpose is a 3-day long-durational performance taking this daily ritual into a conscious act of transformation.

Losing myself, repurposing myself, I invite the audience to co-experience and participate in the destruction and rebuilding of (my) physical transformation.

One hair, the simple, single element that makes any transformation possible. It always starts with one thought, one action, the celebration of one disposable event.

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.

The main topic of my videos could be defined as immigration, and following transformations of a personality. I think each immigration takes a minimum of 5 years of your life till you start to feel connected to a new place, understand the language, unspoken rules, and so on. So it’s a traumatic process for everyone.

Somehow the fact that the Soviet Union (where I was born) doesn’t exist anymore reduces any possibility of going back, makes me look forward and try to adapt myself to an always new reality and new places. It became an important issue for me to learn a lot about the place where I live (first Tel-Aviv, and now Zurich) and try to build a dialog through my art practices (video and painting). The longer I live in Western Europe, the more interesting it becomes to analyze certain things about Soviet life. Sometimes the Soviet, Eastern European utopia I grew up with becomes thus a distorted reality in the West.

The earlier videos, filmed in Israel, were all based on one principle. I was filming people doing some similar action. That trick is now widely used in cinema, advertisement and music clips. But at the end of the nineties, when I made those films, it looked quite fresh and original. I did quite many short videos with the same people, mostly Russian immigrants in their first years in Israel. It wasn’t a random choice: these people were my friends. They were artists, musicians, actors, fashion designers, etc. That created a special mood and atmosphere.

Filming the raw material for my Trilogy documentary about the perception of beauty, fears and happiness, I had to travel to Tel Aviv and back to Zurich, and Moscow was initially in my mind as well which led me back to my roots. Trying to answer a question, where do I belong, I realized that there is no answer and I just have to let myself flow with stream of life and not be obsessive about the past.

Esther Eppstein über Maria Pomianskys Trilogie

Maria Pomianskys Film «Glück это глюк» (Happiness is a trip) ist der letzter Film aus der Trilogie (Beauty 2006, Fears 2009), einer Langzeitstudie über die Frage menschlicher Zustände, Sehnsüchte und Ängste. Maria Pomiansky ist im sowjetischen Moskau geboren, emigrierte Anfang der neunziger Jahre als Jugendliche nach Israel und lebt heute, seit bald zehn Jahren in Zürich. In diesen drei Städten ihres Lebenslaufs befragte Maria Pomiansky für ihre in 2005 begonnene Trilogie Bekannte, Freundinnen und Freunde über deren Einstellung zum Leben, zur Kunst, zur Liebe, zum Rausch, zur Ewigkeit und zur Vergänglichkeit. Jugend in Moskau, in Tel Aviv, in Zürich ... Die Künstlerin reist zwischen den Städten, findet das Verbindende, das Einzigartige und das gegenseitig Fremde zwischen Nahem Osten, West- und Osteuropa. Es wird Russisch, Hebräisch, Deutsch und Englisch gesprochen. Die Filmemacherin ist die kosmopolitische Weltbürgerin und distanzlose Beobachterin, wobei auch immer wieder unvermittelt ein diffuses Gefühl der Heimatlosigkeit, Verwirrung und Melancholie mitschwingt. Die Künstlerin führt ihre Protagonisten und die Zuschauer von leichten, verspielten Plaudereien zu tief berührenden existenziellen Gesprächen, die Kamera zeigt komponierte Bilder mit Gesichtern und Landschaften. Die Trilogie, während eines Zeitraum von fast zehn Jahren entstanden, zeigt die Veränderung und die Entwicklung der jungen Freunde. Die stark autobiografisch gefärbte Filmsprache bewegt sich zwischen Dokumentar- Reise- Experimental- und inszeniertem Kunstfilm. Maria Pomiansky sucht in ihrer Filmreise Antworten auf ihre ganz persönliche Frage der Zugehörigkeit. Der Film zitiert und mischt in Inhalt und Ästhetik das Kino jüdischer Diaspora, den russischen und sowjetischen Pathos und die Popkultur des Westens. Musik spielt in allen drei Filmen eine wichtige Rolle, ist für Maria Pomiansky ein Verbindungsglied zwischen den Kulturen in denen sie sich bewegt und die sich neben vieler Ähnlichkeiten, Gemeinsamkeiten und der Universalität menschlicher Bedürfnisse und Ängste doch auch sehr unterscheiden.


The text above by Esther Eppstein, along with a text about Maria Pomiansky's work more generally by Vadim Levin, is also available in printable layout as PDF (106KB).

An exhibition by Johanna Bruckner and Discoteca Flaming Star

curated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.

Opening: Saturday, 20 August 2016, starting at 18:30h

with a performance by Discoteca Flaming Star at 20:00h.

Saturday, 20 August 2016 - Friday, 23 September 2016


Opening Hours / Öffnungszeiten
Wednesday / Mittwoch, 15:00h – 18:00h
Thursday / Donnerstag, 16:00h – 19:00h
Friday / Freitag, 15:00h – 18:00h
Saturday / Samstag, 14:00h – 16:30h
(Closed on Thursday, 15 September 2016)


[English below]

Die Ausstellung #work #dance #labor #movements vereint die Installation und Performance Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End von Discoteca Flaming Star mit den Research-Prozess-basierten Video Installationen Rebel Bodies (Episodes I & II) und Total Algorithms of Partiality von Johanna Bruckner.

Beim Ausstellungsprojekt geht es um die Freude am Anderen, und darum, aus polyphonischen Melodien und gemeinschaftlichen Rhythmen einen unpersönlichen Refrain zu erzeugen. Die Ausstellung bezieht bewusst die aktuellen post-fordistischen Bedingungen und die prekäre Lage kreativer Arbeiter_innen und immaterielle Aspekte der Produktivität heute ein, um auszumalen, wie wir alle als Agent_innen in einem Netzwerk von Beziehungen dringend unsere materiellen Körper am Limit tanzend erfinden müssen. Das veranlasst jede_n von uns unweigerlich, unsere Beziehungen zum Anderen neu zusammen zu setzen. In dieser Bewegung des Zusammenspiels, in der man sich um den Anderen sorgt, „kann das Limit nicht ausgeschöpft werden.“ Das, was Franco „Bifo“ Berardi als für die Produktion von Affekt und Potentialität notwendiges Limit definiert, für ein positive und aktive Verfremdung, die es erlaubt, der technologischen Entfremdung zu entgehen, die auch eine soziale ist. In der Überschneidung der Praktiken von DFS und Bruckner zeigt die Ausstellung Techniken der Bewegung, die für das tägliche Proben in unserem Alltag verwendet werden können, um ihr Publikum linguistisch, affektiv und politisch einzubeziehen. Dazu sind keine besonderen Tanzfähigkeiten vonnöten. Es kann experimentiert und improvisiert werden, um einen „Mutationspunkt“ der Bewegungen eines Körpers zu finden, der präzis eine Praxis des Tanzes definiert – eines Tanzes, der nichts Exklusives verlangt. Die Arbeiten von DFS und Bruckner gehen alltäglichen Praktiken von Tanz und Bewegung nach, Praktiken, die der Wiederholung und der konsistenten Imperfektion bedürfen. Die Probetechniken der Improvisation sind molekulare Werkzeuge, die dazu dienen, Sand ins Getriebe der Kontrollapparate und der kognitiven Automation, die sie im Sinn einbetten – Werkzeuge zur Herstellung anderer Dynamiken in der Beschleunigung der Alltags im maschinischen Kapitalismus. Die flexiblen tanzenden Körper, die wie ein Fischschwarm Bogen schlagen zwischen persönlicher und sozialer Zeit, entrinnen den üblichen Koordinaten des Bodens.

#work #dance #labor #movements ist ein Ausstellungsprojekt in Bewegung, das Tanzbewegungen als persönlichen/sozialen Prozess betrachtet, der den sozialen Körper neu zusammen setzt, einen Körper als besonderes Ding, als temporär stabile dauerhafte Konstruktion aggregierter Teile, eine Konstruktion, die niemals ausserhalb ihres Wesens als Beziehung erfasst werden kann. Sie ertastet, wie der konkrete Körper kollektiv hergestellt wird in Bezug auf Bewegung und Ruhezustand seiner zusammengefügten Teile und deren affektive Resonanzen. Die Bewegung hat ihre eigene Präsenz, schreibt Simone Forti, eine individuierende Kraft des unpersönlichen, verkörperten sozialen Wissens, das es in biopolitischen Begriffen, also mit dem Körper zu denken gilt. Affekt ist eine andere Art, über Macht und die innerliche Konstruktion des Körpers, die Macht zu affektieren oder affektiert zu werden. Der Affekt ist die Macht des widerständigen Körpers, des tanzenden Körpers, von Körper-Kämpfen. Der Affekt verteilt die Körper über einen grossen Raum, offen gegenüber mannigfaltigen Dauern. Der Affekt ist eine Körperpolitik. Foucault stellt fest, dass in Machtkämpfe immer „Körperaktionen“ wirken, und affektive Macht ist produktiv, da sie „die Wirklichkeit ebenso postuliert und herstellt, als sie ihr Grenzen auferlegt.“ In Deleuzes Worten: “Was ein Körper tun kann, entspricht dem Wesen und den Grenzen seiner Fähigkeit, affektiert zu werden.“ Am Limit zu tanzen, affektiert den Körper mehr, als es die Repräsentation tut. Es gibt uns den Schlüssel zum Verständnis affirmativer Politik. Der tanzende Körper vermag es, Negativität zurück zu drängen, sich von ihr zu entflechten.

Affirmative Praktiken betreffen alles, was zum Sinn gehört, affektive Resonanzen zwischen den Teilen der Körper und ihre Differenz, alle Mannigfaltigkeiten und ihre Variabilität und Intensitäten totaler Freude im körperlosen, immateriellen und unpersönlichen Ereignis. „Die Frage des Sinns wird eins mit der Politik.“ Die Ästhetik und Politik des Sinns, in Bezug auf radikale Metaphysik und Bio-Macht gedacht, erotisiert den Körper sowohl in seiner Alltags-Existenz, als auch in der digitalen Sphäre, unregelmässige Körper miteinander verbindend, um die wettbewerblichen Prinzipien in jedem Fragment des sozialen Lebens zu hintertreiben – sinnliche Körper der Solidarität, der Gerechtigkeit und des Rechts. Die Art und Weise, wie sie in ihren künstlerischen Praktiken die Ästhetik des Sinns und die Biopolitik angehen, überschneidet sich in den Positionen und den Arbeiten für diese Ausstellung der Künstler_innen Discoteca Flaming Star und Johanna Bruckner.

Auszug aus dem kuratorischen Text von Dimitrina Sevova und Alan Roth.


[Deutsch siehe oben]

The exhibition #work #dance #labor #movements brings together the installation and performance Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End by Discoteca Flaming Star, and the research-process-based video installations Rebel Bodies (Episodes I & II) and Total Algorithms of Partiality by Johanna Bruckner.

The exhibition project is about the pleasure of enjoying the other, and sets out to produce an impersonal refrain made of polyphonic tunes and collaborative rhythms. It consciously considers the current post-Fordist conditions and the precarious situation of creative labor and the immaterial aspects of productivity today, to outline how all of us as agents in a network of relations, urgently need to invent our corporeal bodies dancing at the limit. It inevitably prompts each of us to recompose one’s relation to the other. In this movement of interplay, when one takes care of the other, “the limit cannot be exhausted.” What Franco “Bifo” Berardi defines as the limit necessary to the production of the affect and of potentiality, for positive and active estrangement to overcome technological alienation, which is also social alienation. At the intersection of the practices of DFS and Bruckner, the exhibition dis-plays techniques of movement that can be used for rehearsals every day in our daily life, to linguistically, affectively and politically engage its audience. It does not require particular dance skills. One can experiment and improvise, to find a ‘mutation point’ of a body’s movements that precisely defines a practice of dance – a dance that does not require something exclusive. The works of DFS and Bruckner trace the everydayness of practices of dance and movement, practices that need repetition and a consistency of imperfection. The rehearsal techniques of improvisation are molecular tools for putting a spoke in the wheels of apparatuses of control and the cognitive automation they embed in the sensible, tools for introducing other dynamics in the acceleration of everyday life in machinic capitalism. The flexible dancing bodies that arc as a fish swarm between personal and social time, elude the usual coordinates of the floor.

#work #dance #labor #movements is an exhibition project in motion that considers dance movements as a personal/social process that recomposes the social body, a body as a particular thing, as a temporally stable, durational construction of aggregated parts, a construction that can never be conceived outside its conjunctional nature. It probes how the concrete body is collectively produced with respect to motion and rest of its conjoined parts and their affective resonances. The movement has its own presence, writes Simone Forti, an individuating power of impersonal, embodied social knowledge, to be thought in biopolitical terms, i.e., thought with the body. Affect is another way to talk about power and the body’s internal construction, the power to be affected and to affect. Affect is the power of the resisting body, of body struggles, of the dancing body. Affect distributes bodies across a larger space open to multiple durations. Affect is a body politics. Foucault asserts that power struggles always involve ‘body actions,’ and affective power is productive since it “posits and produces reality as much as it sets limits on it.” As Deleuze put it: “What a body can do corresponds to the nature and limits of its capacity to be affected.” To dance at the limit affects the body more than representation. It gives the key to an understanding of affirmative politics. The dancing body can de-limit negativity, disentangle itself from it.

Affirmative practices concern everything that belongs to the sensible, affective resonances between the bodies’ parts and their differences, all multiplicities and their variabilities or intensities of total joy in the incorporeal, immaterial and impersonal event. “The question of sensibility becomes one with politics.” The aesthetics and politics of the sensible, thought in terms of radical metaphysics and biopower, eroticizes the body both in its everyday existence and in the digital realm, conjoining irregular bodies to undermine competitive principles in every fragment of social life – sensible bodies of solidarity, justice and rights. The way they treat, in their artistic practices, the aesthetics of the sensible and biopolitics, intersects in the positions and the works for this exhibition of the artists Discoteca Flaming Star and Johanna Bruckner.

Excerpt from the curatorial text by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.



Johanna Bruckner

Rebel Bodies
Episodes I & II

The artist Johanna Bruckner continues her research on the organization of collective bodies with “Rebel Bodies”, part II. This large-scale work picks up the Workers Dance League’s inquiry into the possibilities of forming subversive embodied collective subjects. Bruckner’s research based approach sets off from an approximation to marginalized archives of knowledge, and thus creates space for the enunciation of matters which were excluded from hegemonic historiographies. Yet, this process can in no way be reduced to a purely discursive revision or alternative representation (of historiography). “Rebel Bodies” does not only present past (labor) struggles corporeally, but also calls them into the present performatively. Bruckner’s work transposes aspects of subversive choreographic approaches and of worker struggles from the 1930s, the times of industrial capitalism, into the present post-crisis phase of “cognitive” finance capitalism, temporally and spatially; to be more precise, to the Hafencity, which is a prime example of neoliberalism and proceeding gentrification.

(Marius Henderson)


Total Algorithms of Partiality

Hamburg’s Hafencity is currently characterised by continuous transformation. Interest in the most ʻintelligentʼ possible management of the districtʼs infrastructure is being tested by the introduction of new monitoring systems in Hafencity. The concept of logistics is becoming increasingly centralized, to enable optimal co-ordination of commercial, digital and social interactions. In Total Algorithms of Partiality dance scores examining the potential of an altered social logistics in Hamburgʼs Hafencity are developed, during the course of which I look at the current role of contemporary labour organisation and its possible course of action as it is confronted with the controversial developments in Hamburg’s Hafencity. What stance does the trade union take in relation to the complex, unstable situation in the new ʻghost townʼ and what forms of co-operative resistance are set in motion? The artistic work is to be presented in the form of a video installation, a performance, and research material.

This project is concerned with the possibilities of understanding art as an affirmative practice within society and its interwoven infrastructures, deriving from an intensive artistic and scientific examination of the complex logistical developments in Hamburg’s Hafencity and its significant international position.




Discoteca Flaming Star

Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End



Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End is a spatial installation and dance performance construction in two different planes. Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End is a dance piece in which no one ever appears to dance, like in Dance Construction Clothes by Simone Forti. The fabric and its surface are the interiority of the movement itself, which produces an immersive environment not only to look at, but one which the audience walking in the space can feel or inhabit through their moving bodies. Pieces of fabric cut to different sizes, cut across the existing space other temporalities. They are part of the long-term practices of Discoteca Flaming Star with banners, pieces of fabric, glued together and painted or collaged with text which appears irregularly on their surface in poetic lines that make another movement to that of the freely folding, hung fabric. They serve both as backdrop curtains for performances and as an independent, formless architecture within the existing architecture that unframes the space. The movements of the banners shuffle the space; they are a spatial deterritorialization whose disorder forms into words. The interplay between the words makes a sensitive bricolage of Discoteca Flaming Star’s own reflections and the cryptic thoughts that pass through them on everything they are interested in at the moment, which they sometimes carry around with them for months. Sometimes they are concepts, or poems. In the words of DFS, they are think-text-iles.

For their live performance dance construction Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End, Discoteca Flaming Star take the case of the little girl Esther who trained ambitiously to become a rhythmic gymnast. She wishes to develop to the extreme in her exercises her athletic excellence, to display perfect physical agility, coordination and grace. As it turns out, under the pressure of her parents, Esther eventually left the field of gymnastics to undertake another education that would give her a better future. Now Esther is a woman who graduated from university, which has indeed given her greater opportunities in her life. Her memory has retained, inscribed in her body, the rigorous training of the movements of rhythmic gymnastics. These inscriptions in her body remind her that she did not manage to realize her childhood dream. In the duration of the performance, the dance movements bring her back to the time of her childhood, as they evoke her memory through her body. They follow the dance score of Esther’s 90 seconds of multiple becoming in its imperceptible time, becoming child, becoming animal – A-ESTHER-BECOMING-DIVINE HORSEWOMAN, becoming an imperceptible-impersonal molecule, becoming one and many at the same time in the vanishing time of a 90 seconds duration. A molecular becoming of one/many, to the event of the groundless and infinitely small milieus of a collective action. Esther does not designate a proper name. Esther does not represent a subject, but a desiring assemblage, a collective persona of three and more, as everything written above in capital letters. She is a collective enunciation. The instruction is to love any out of these 90 seconds. To love. A verb in the infinitive! To mark processes like to walk, to love, to dance. The infinitive marks movements of deterritorialization.

Esther dances together with Cristina, and Wolfgang sings. Their dance supposes proximity and distance at the ground level, but in the proximity of their dancing bodies they do not necessarily follow each other’s movements. Their disjointed movements start to intersect more and more often to modulate an invisible diagram of individuation. “I am you” in this passage, with all its intensive components of variability at once. Their movements are at the limit of their bodies and at the limit of their language. Logomotions and body movements interrelate. They double in the becoming of Esther. She is an assemblage – a material production of desires. Esther starts betraying her own memorized techniques of rhythmic gymnastics, displacing them with more improvisational and free movements, eluding the repressive apparatus and disciplining process to lose control, to push her desires to the real life experience, with the sensible quality of emotions and the fabulating movements coming from language. Cristina’s movement techniques are elaborated on the basis of Maya Deren’s and Simone Forti’s systems of movements and techniques, and philosophy.

Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End opens a new path of imaginary/experience in order to give her a score to become conscious of her difference, embodied in the singularity of the therapeutic process. It is not remodeling Esther’s subjectivity. It is a new production in the dance movements “to recompose her existential corporeality and to get out of her repetitive impasses.” It is both a politics and an aesthetics of irreversible duration.

Love makes the movements a dance of refusal. Love is not work! “dance! no work!” Dance forms life! Dancing molecules, disconnected and at the same time all together. Every movement becomes a joyful autonomous event in a mass tune that gives the courage to Esther to traverse the abyss of the 90 seconds of death, of non-being and crying. “I die. I die.” Which means, paradoxically “I leave. I leave.” And give her the power to fight for the world. “I am you.”

Excerpt from the text on DFS's work in the exhibition, by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.

[English see below]

Corner College führt seine Veranstaltungsreihe The Artist as The Curator as The Artist (The Art of Curating or How about a Paracuratorial Turn?) fort.

In der fünften Veranstaltung lädt Corner College das Künstlerinnen-Kuratorinnen-Duo peekaboo!, bestehend aus Lisa Biedlingmaier und Bernadette Wolbring, sowie die Künstlerin Erica van Loon ein, ihre kuratorische Praktiken vorzustellen und untereinander und mit dem Publikum zu diskutieren.

Das kuratorische Konzept der Veranstaltungsreihe von Dimitrina Sevova in Zusammenarbeit mit Alan Roth (auf Englisch): http://materials.corner-college.com/2016/201602/201502-the-artist-as-the-curator-new-series.html


[Deutsch siehe oben]

Corner College is continuing its series of events The Artist as The Curator as The Artist (The Art of Curating or How about a Paracuratorial Turn?).

In the fifth event, artists das Künstlerinnen-Kuratorinnen-Duo peekaboo!, consisting of Lisa Biedlingmaier and Bernadette Wolbring, as well as artist Erica van Loon are invited to present their curatorial practices and discuss them between themselves and with the audience.

Curatorial concept of the series of events by Dimitrina Sevova in collaboration with Alan Roth: http://materials.corner-college.com/2016/201602/201502-the-artist-as-the-curator-new-series.html



peekaboo! (Lisa Biedlingmaier & Bernadette Wolbring)

Welche Stellung nimmt man als KünstlerIn im urbanen Raum, der fortwährend von Gentrifizierung bedroht wird, ein? Dieser Raum, der immer auch ein politischer und sozialer Raum ist? Lässt man sich als KünstlerIn für die Aussenwirkung Anderer instrumentalisieren? Beteiligt man sich durch künstlerisches Handeln aktiv an politischen Prozessen?
Neben diesen Fragestellungen, die die Künstlerinnen Lisa Biedlingmaier und Bernadette Wolbring dazu gebracht haben ihre künstlerische Arbeit mit kuratorischen Formaten zu erweitern, werden Erfahrungen über das Arbeiten in Kollektiven und über Synergien, die sich zwischen künstlerischer und kuratorischer Praxis ergeben, ausgetauscht.

Das Künstler-Kuratorinnen-Team peekaboo!, bestehend aus Lisa Biedlingmaier und Bernadette Wolbring, hat sich zusammengetan um gleich einer Band, die an verschiedenen Orten Konzerte spielt, in verschiedenen (Kunst)räumen aufzutreten – in Form von Publikationen, Screenings und Ausstellungen. Da beide in jeweils zwei Ländern leben (Stuttgart / Zürich und Stuttgart / Stockholm), bieten sich dafür internationale Kooperationen an.
2014 bis 2016 lud das Künstler/Kuratoren-duo zu einer Reihe von drei internationalen Gruppenausstellungen ein, in der Absicht einen am Rande des Städtebauprojekts Stuttgart 21 stattfindenden Gentrifizierungsprozess zu thematisieren. 2016 stellte peekaboo! ihre bisherige Tätigkeit im Künstlerhaus Stuttgart im Rahmen des Post-Graduate Program in Curating der Zürcher Hochschule der Künste vor.



Erica van Loon



With her recent work, Erica van Loon reflects on the physical interconnection between the human body and that of the earth, but also searches for ways to relate to their less tangible inner worlds, that we access almost exclusively by the mind; like processes inside our planet or the human (sub)conscious.
She often works with repetitive actions or visual and auditory rhythms, that she sees as an instrument for creating a state of mind that intensifies our sensory perception, and with that, our ability to connect with what is outside and inside of us.

In June 2016 Van Loon took this ambition to sharpen the sensory perception, as a starting point for curating the Breakfast Show at project space PuntWG in Amsterdam.

Breakfast literally means ‘breaking the fast’ of the night. During night-time our attention turns inward and almost all input from the outside is paused. We temporarily shift to another state of mind.
Most of the time, an encounter with an artwork is preceded by a multitude of sensory, emotional and intellectual interactions. What happens if an exhibition is the first thing we are exposed to after waking up, when we have had little sensory activity and almost no interactions with our surroundings.
By moving the usual timeframe in which we look at art, the viewer has a slightly altered state of consciousness. Does this result in a different susceptibility, a different reflection on the works? Does it affect how we perceive the succeeding reality of a day?
The shown video works by Charlotte Dumas, Priscila Fernandes, Rosie Heinrich, Erica van Loon and Timmy van Zoelen each in their own way, could be connected to the above questions. At the same time they allowed for a broader reading, leaving scope for one’s own interpretation and for discussion at the breakfast table.
As the exhibition was only open in the early morning, from sunrise (around 5.20 AM), visitors were invited to see the video works before engaging in other activities. And indeed people took the effort to get up early; some of them even arrived earlier than the curator (or was she a performing artist?) who was racing the sun to get to the exhibition space every morning. Where she served breakfast, which stimulated visitors to reflect in dialogue.

During The Artist as The Curator as The Artist on 4 September, Erica van Loon will reflect on these mornings and how she links them to her artistic practice.

[English below]

In Tritonics+ erzeugen Akteure einen Performance-Raum aus zeitgenössischer Praxis rund um das Saxophon, wobei das Saxophon der gemeine Gegenstand ist, der Leute vom Hauptbild addiert oder subtrahiert. Dies erlaubt es, unterschiedliche Formen des Repertoires aber auch Improvisationen vorzubringen. Tritonics+ zielt darauf ab, einen Raum zu erzeugen, in dem Leute offen interpretieren können, unterschiedlicher Sound-Formationen und Urbanisierung des Raums ausgesetzt sind.

Corner College stellt einen Raum zur Verfügung, in welchem Tritonics+ einen Bereich für gegenseitige Zusammenarbeit mit den Arbeiten Johanna Bruckners und Discoteca Flaming Star erzeugt.

Beteiligte Akteur_innen sind Kay Zhang, Manuela Villiger, Vera Wahl, und Benjamin Ryser.


[Deutsch siehe oben]

In Tritonics+, actors create a performance space made up of contemporary practice centered around the saxophone, the saxophone being the common object that adds and subtracts people from the main picture. This allows putting forward different forms of repertoire but also sound improvisation.
Tritonics+ aims to create a space for people to openly interpret, be exposed to different sound formation and space urbanisation.

Corner College provides a space in which Tritonics+ creates an area for cross-collaboration with works of Johanna Bruckner and Discoteca Flaming Star.

Actors involved are Kay Zhang, Manuela Villiger, Vera Wahl, and Benjamin Ryser.


Program

Two Pieces (1983) 5’ – Edison Denisov
Rough Winds Do Shake the Darling Buds (1999) 12’ – Eric Moe
Impro 5’
Reed Phase (1992) 6’ – Steve Reich
Next to Beside Besides (2003-2006) 5’ – Simon Steen-Andersen
Megaphone Duo featuring Benjamin Ryser

20:00h Lesung von Anne Käthi Wehrli
21:00h Konzert von Mosh Mosh


Anne Käthi Wehrli
Lesung

Wieso merkt niemand dass dieser Stuhl eine Brennnessel ist!
Gedichte, Theoretisches Saxophon

Mütterlich lachten die Pflanzen.
Es war in Ordnung. Ich durfte über sie reden und mir Sachen über sie vorstellen.
Es störte sich nicht.

Sogar die Giftpflanzen sagten jedesmal wenn ich eine essen wollte: Nein! Wir sind giftig!
Weil wir Freunde waren.


Reading
Why doesn't anybody notice that this chair is a nettle!
Poems, Theoretical Saxophone



Mosh Mosh
Konzert



Nicht umsonst bezeichnen sich Lady Mosh und Posh Mosh selbst als divenhaftes Duo. Und tatsächlich könnte man sie zu Beginn ihrer Performances mit zwei feinen Damen verwechseln, die unterwegs zu einem Gala-Dinner sind. Allerdings bleibt am Ende jedes Mosh Mosh-Live-Auftritts von diesem Eindruck nicht mehr viel übrig. Denn im Eifer des Gefechts sind sich die Diven weder zum Stagediven noch für ekstatische „Bühnenakrobatik“ zu schade. Im ramponierten Zustand scheinen sich die beiden Ladies am wohlsten zu fühlen - immer fleissig damit beschäftigt, die Codes der Damenhaftigkeit neu zu definieren.
Let‘s deconstruct and your body will follow!
Mosh Mosh entführen dabei in Paralleluniversen ebenso faszinierender wie unheimlicher Gegendarstellungen zur Absurdität normierter Lebensentwürfe. Immer funky und kinky entfalten sie schwärmerische Ambivalenzen für Agent Cooper aus „Twin Peaks“, preisen als verwuselte Enkel_innen von Divine die Vorteile von „Robotic Love“, zeigen uns erneut die spooky Zwiespältigkeit geisterhaften Mondlichts im
Angesicht essentieller Fragen anti-essentialistischen, beziehungsweise extraterrestrischen Inhalts („The Mooon“) und treiben schlussendlich auch den heteronormierten Schwefelgeruch aus der Einbauküche hinaus („Junkies in Bikinies“), leider jedoch ohne das unbeschreiblich gruselig auf dem Linoleumboden herumkriechende Etwas wirklich ganz loszuwerden. Denn Mosh Mosh sind zwar Querfeldein-Utopist_innen aber eben auch sezierende Realist_innen.


Lady Mosh and Posh Mosh don't describe themselves as a diva-esque duo for nothing. Its true that at the start of their stage show, one could mistake them for two, fine ladies who are about to go to a 'Gala' dinner. The truth of the matter is that there is little left of this impression after every Mosh Mosh live show. The divas become stage divers and are not scared of ecstatic and extravagant 'stage acrobatics'. In brief: Mosh Mosh seem to be most at home when they are in tatters. And it is only thus that the codes of 'ladylike behaviour' can be redefined.
Let's deconstruct and your body will follow!


Vielen Dank an Deborah Keller, die diese Veranstaltung auswählte für ihr Meine Wahl, Züritipp 32, 11 August 2016!

Finissage: Friday, 05 August 2016, at 18:00h in the presence of the artists.

An exhibition project by Adrien Guillet and Quentin Lannes

curated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.

Sat 09.07.2016 - Wed 04.08.2016


Emporium of Benevolent Data is an exhibition project by Adrien Guillet and Quentin Lannes, in collaboration with Corner College, based on the two artists’ long-term friendship and discussions. It puts on display their recent works Citracit, a site-specific research-based installation by Adrien Guillet, and the two video installations #IamRebekah and The Next Round by Quentin Lannes.


This exhibition was made possible by the kind support of the French Embassy in Switzerland.

DIK Fagazine is the first and, so far, the only art magazine from Central and Eastern Europe concentrated on homosexuality and masculinity. It combines queer archival research with contemporary art contributions. Founded in 2005 by artist Karol Radziszewski. Currently designed by Martin Falck. The journal is based in Poland, published in English and distributed worldwide.

DIK Fagazine ist die erste und bisher einzige Kunstzeitschrift aus Zentral- und Osteuropa, die Homosexualität und Männlichkeit fokussiert. Sie verbindet Recherchen in Queerarchiven mit Beiträgen zeitgenössischer Kunst. 2005 vom Künstler Karol Radziszewski gegründet. Derzeit Design von Martin Falck. Das Journal ist in Polen angesiedelt und wird auf Englisch herausgegeben und weltweit verteilt.

http://dikfagazine.com/

[English see below]

Corner College führt seine Veranstaltungsreihe The Artist as The Curator as The Artist (The Art of Curating or How about a Paracuratorial Turn?) fort.

In der vierten Veranstaltung lädt Corner College die Künstler Livio Baumgartner, Pascal Häusermann und Karol Radziszewski ein, ihre kuratorische Praktiken vorzustellen und untereinander und mit dem Publikum zu diskutieren. Die Diskussion wird moderiert von Robert Steinberger.

Das kuratorische Konzept der Veranstaltungsreihe von Dimitrina Sevova in Zusammenarbeit mit Alan Roth (auf Englisch): http://materials.corner-college.com/2016/201602/201502-the-artist-as-the-curator-new-series.html


[Deutsch siehe oben]

Corner College is continuing its series of events The Artist as The Curator as The Artist (The Art of Curating or How about a Paracuratorial Turn?).

In the fourth event, artists Livio Baumgartner, Pascal Häusermann and Karol Radziszewski are invited to present their curatorial practices and discuss them between themselves and with the audience. The discussion will be moderated by Robert Steinberger.

Curatorial concept of the series of events by Dimitrina Sevova in collaboration with Alan Roth: http://materials.corner-college.com/2016/201602/201502-the-artist-as-the-curator-new-series.html



Livio Baumgartner



Detailliertere Legende zum Bild // Extended caption for the picture:

Die Diele, Vitrine 03 mit «KÜNSTLERKERZEN» VON:
Martin Blum
Rene Fahrni
Franziska Baumgartner
Martin Charmosta
Costa Vece
Vanessa Billy
Nino Baumgartner
huber.huber
Sarina - Sandino Scheidegger
Cyril Plangg
Jan Hostettler
Ariane Koch
Andreas Heusser
Sebastian Mundwiler
Julia Hoentzsch
U.V.M.




Livio Baumgartner (1982 Bern) studierte Fotografie und Bildende Kunst in Zürich und Bern. Während in den Fotogramm-Arbeiten die klassischen Bildelemente von Linie und Raum zu einer neuen Interpretation gelangen, wird in den installativen und konzeptuellen Arbeiten der Frage nachgegangen, wann und wie ein Werk zur Kunst wird. Die subtile Ironie hinter diesen Kunstprojekten überführt den scheinbar banalen und alltäglichen Gegenstand in einen ästhetischen Kontext. Neben seiner künstlerischen Tätigkeit kuratiert der gebürtige Berner seit 2009 Ausstellungen verschiedenster Künstler_innen im Zürcher Off-Space «Die Diele». Zudem interessiert ihn immer wieder die kollektive Umsetzung künstlerischer Lösungen in Projektbezogenen Ausstellungen wie «No Territorial Pissing» (2010, Bern), «Shine on You Crazy Diamond» (2012, Zürich, mit Nele Dechmann und Nicola Ruffo) oder «Oh wie schön ist Panama – im Spannungsfeld zwischen Mola und Moral» (2016, Zürich, mit Andreas Heusser).
http://www.liviobaumgartner.ch/
http://www.diediele.ch/


Pascal Häusermann



"Das Thema der Männlichkeit ist eine Konstante sowohl in meiner künstlerischen Praxis wie auch in den kuratorischen Arbeiten.

"Trouble Boy", 2014 im Corner College gezeigt, untersuchte Aggressivität und Selbstinszenierung im Kult des Heavy Metal und bezeichnete eine Stagnation des Rollenmodells Mann. In Gegenüberstellung dazu steht meine derzeitige Arbeit des Erkundens von urbanem Lebensraum. "Walking in Paris along a Mosaik", "Walking an Oriental Line" und "Ascending and Descending in São Paulo" sind filmische Arbeiten, in welchen Kontrollschemen der Orientierung aufgegeben und neu erfunden werden. Eventuell handelt es sich dabei um ein Gegenmodell zur hegemonialen Männlichkeit oder aber auch um die Neuerfindung des Flaneurs."
http://pascalhaeusermann.ch/


Karol Radziszewski



Taking his latest project "Queer Archives Institute" (QAI) as an example, Karol Radziszewski will talk how he is switching between the roles of an artist, an archivist, a collector and a curator. He will present the different forms the QAI takes - from an exhibition to a temporary office, a publication, a performance, a lecture. He will discuss also how he is considering running a para-institution as a political statement.

The "Queer Archives Institute" is a non-profit artist-run organisation dedicated to research, collection, digitalisation, presentation, exhibition, analysis and artistic interpretation of queer archives, with special focus on Central and Eastern Europe. Founded in November 2015 by Karol Radziszewski, the QAI is a long term project open to transnational collaboration with artists, activists and academic researchers.
http://queerarchivesinstitute.org/

[Deutsch siehe unten]
The coastal city of Alexandria appears to be frozen in time while simultaneously drowning in sewage, the military is seizing coastal real estate and building shopping malls, the former farmers from the surrounding villages are marching in and dead bodies of African refugees are washing up the shore with missing organs. All these players are operating without remorse. We will take a look at the images and representations of Alexandria in film and popular culture in contrast with what the city now is, following its rapid demographic and cultural change that has been taking place for decades, slowly approaching the true owners of the city.

Layers upon layers of ruins, burned to the ground, catacombs, not so secret gardens, elite cosmopolitans in beach cabins panicking over marching armies. Middle class tastes and values prevail.

In this talk, Hanaa Safwat will introduce the many images and representations of the city of Alexandria, pairing it with her work in progress, “A Monument to Contracting”, a video that tells the story of a fictional resistance group operating in Alexandria.


[English see above]
Die Küstenstadt von Alexandria erscheint in der Zeit gefroren, während sie gleichzeitig in Müll versinkt, das Militär Gebäude entlang der Küste konfiziert und Einkaufszentren baut, ehemalige Bauern aus den umgebenden Dörfern einmarschieren und die Leichen afrikanischer Flüchtlinge mit fehlenden Organen an der Küste angeschwemmt werden. All die Spieler operieren darin ohne Gewissensbisse. Wir schauen uns die Bilder und Darstellungen von Alexandria in Film und Populärkultur in Gegenüberstellung zu dem, was die Stadt heute ist, und verfolgen ihre schnelle demographische und kulturelle Veränderung, die über Jahrzehnte stattgefunden hat und langsam auf die eigentlichen Eigentümer der Stadt zukommt.

Schichten über Schichten von Ruinen, bis auf den Grund abgebrannt, Katakomben, nicht so geheime Gärten, Elite-Kosmopoliten in Strandkabinen, die wegen marschierenden Armeen in Panik geraten. Mittelklasse-Geschmack und Werte herrschen vor.

In dieser Vorlesung wird Hanaa Safwat die vielen Bilder und Darstellungen der Stadt Alexandria einführen, und mit ihrem work in progress “A Monument to Contracting” verbinden, einem Video, das die Geschichte einer fiktionalen Widerstandsgruppe in Alexandria erzählt.

An exhibition project by Adrien Guillet and Quentin Lannes

curated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.

Sat 09.07.2016 - Fri 05.08.2016

Opening on Saturday, 9 July 2016 at 18:00h.

Sunday, 10 July 2016 at 16:00h: Artist Talks, presentations and discussion.

Finissage on Friday, 5 August 2016 at 18:00h in the presence of the artists.


Opening Hours / Öffnungszeiten:

Wed 15:00h - 18:00h
Thu 16:00h - 19:00h
Fri 15:00h - 18:00h


Emporium of Benevolent Data is an exhibition project by Adrien Guillet and Quentin Lannes, in collaboration with Corner College, based on the two artists’ long-term friendship and discussions. It puts on display their recent works Citracit, a site-specific research-based installation by Adrien Guillet, and the two video installations #IamRebekah and The Next Round by Quentin Lannes.

The title of the exhibition project is inspired by the story “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” The latter is a scientist from 17th century enlightenment whose “ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled ‘Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge’” with its taxonomy of animals. The exhibition especially considers the distinctive character, listed in this encyclopaedia under the letter “(f)”, of being “fabulous,” as a method of fabulation on historical materials, modern ruins, commodities, and the recent rapid move of virtual-reality technologies into the medium mainstream, revealing a new geopolitics of the virtual and a crisis of representation of the body that inevitably follows from it. The dialogical format of the exhibition invokes a benevolent methodology that breaks with genealogy and linear narrative, détourning ‘cognitive technologies’ to actively speculate and generate deviated narratives that remain open in their “inherent formlessness,” providing the viewer with a “groundless basis of the aesthetic experience.” This methodology is both anachronistic and futurist, which inevitably come together in a live structure, in what Shklovsky describes as a “ludic ruin/construction site that lays a foundation for the subversive practice of estrangement.” The connecting principle of the works on display is the interplay of de-coding and encoding of the technological dispositifs, colonial history, and material knowledge. As their collective motto, the artists refer to what the Red Queen says to Alice about remembering events before they happen as well as events that have happened: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”

The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, to which Emporium of Benevolent Data refers, was an important inspiration for Michel Foucault when writing The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, for his fabulation on epistemological models out of “the laughter that shattered” and its echo “continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.” This echo shall be heard from the depth of the exhibition, rather than forms of mediation of the ambivalent.

Excerpt from the curatorial text by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.


Adrien Guillet

Citracit

[English and German below]

Citracit est une uchronie, une fiction dystopique et anachronique qui explore les relations problématiques qu’a noué le constructeur automobile Citroën avec le continent africain. Ce projet prend corps par la création d’un ensemble de produits promotionnels modifiés, de sculptures et d’accessoires de facture artisanale africaine. Ces deux types de productions répondent à l’énoncé suivant : « On a retrouvé des cadeaux souvenirs Citracit qui devaient être vendus dans les boutiques des bordjs-hôtels Citroën. Ils ont échappé à l’ordre de destruction d’André Citroën ! ».


[ French above; German below ]

Citracit is a uchronia, a dystopian and anachronistic fiction that explores the problematic relations weaved by the automobile constructor Citroën with the African continent. The project takes shape through the creation of a number of modified advertising products, sculptures and accessories of African artisanship. These two types of productions respond to the following statement: “Citracit souvenir gifts have been found that were to be sold in the boutiques of the Citroën bordjs hotels. They escaped André Citroën’s order that they be destroyed!”

What does Citracit consist of?

As Alison Murray explains in her essay “Citroën Tourism” (see at the end of this document), the failure of the Trans-African Company was skillfully hushed up, so that Citracit was completely forgotten. The main objective of my project is to dig up the Trans-African Company following a strategy reverse to that of André Citroën. Since the communication material of the Trans-African Company was destroyed, I take care of producing them from scratch.

In my project, Citroën no longer exists, and is replaced by Citracit. In this uchronia, the founding of the Trans-African Company went well, and Citroën has not defaulted. In this parallel reality opened up by the Citracit project, Citroën is no longer a constructor of cars but embodies the very notion of exoticism, adventure and travel in the way of popular travel agencies.

I chose to call my project Citracit in order to bring back to the present the history of the Trans-African Company. This tourism project for a chain of camping sites and hotels in Africa was also called Centracit or CEGETAF. From Citroën to Citracit it is enough to delete a “oën” and replace it by “acit.” Three of the letters to append are already present in Citroën. As for the suffix “a,” it is easily created from the “r” of Citroën. In this play of typographical détournement lies the essence of the Citracit collection. Observing more precisely the Citracit logo that can be found ahead of this article on the first page, one can observe that the “acit” of Citracit is pixelized. What looks accidental is done on purpose and bears witness to the détournement style of the Citroën brand, a raw and DIY kind of détournement. The two chevrons of the logo become sacred clan symbols. We discover them once more on the sculptures, as motifs and texture.

Rather than attempting to find out what might have actually been sold in the souvenir gift boutiques of Citroën’s bordjs hotels in Africa, Citracit is taken as a starting point for a sculptural and conceptual reflection. Far from a historical reconstruction, the elements of the Citracit collection of souvenir gifts are a marriage between the African artisan codes and techniques, and a selection of second-hand promotional Citroën products. Online market places (Le Bon Coin, Ebay, Price Minister and Delcampe) allow me to collect at moderate cost advertising objects and tourist souvenirs from Africa I am interested in. The collection process in itself says something about our times, in the sense that it is mainly about online buying and postal shipping. This dematerialization of the act of buying breaks any possibility of a personal narration, and raises questions about the problem of recycling of symbols. Indeed the value of the souvenir gifts brought back from Africa by travelers is almost nil, since they consist of an ersatz of traditional African art, produced for tourists (airport art). While the great majority of Citroën advertising products are initially free, and intended to be given away (notion of reward and of communication) to clients, future clients, employees and institutions. These are thus indeed symbols, intrinsically poor fetish objects to which a strong history is attached.

The artefacts mixing the visual identity of Citroën and African aesthetics take the form of statuettes, clothes, bags, belts, gadgets, etc., where references cross and symbols enter into confrontation. Each element is the stage of a merciless struggle between the visual identity of Citroën and that of Citracit, between Europe and Africa, between cars and tourism, success and failure, serial production and manually produced work. The status of these creations is ambiguous, both travel memories via a tour operator that has never worked, and counter-advertising products, problematic in that they evoke a chapter of French colonial history that has been completely blanked out.













[French and English above]

Citracit ist eine Uchronie, eine dystopische und anachronistische Fiktion, welche die problematischen Beziehungen auskundschaftet, die der Autohersteller Citroën mit dem afrikanischen Kontinent gewoben hat. Das Projekt nimmt Gestalt an über die Schaffung einer Anzahl von abgeänderten Werbeprodukten, Skulpturen und Zubehör afrikanischen Handwerks. Die beiden Arten der Produktion entsprechen der folgenden Aussage: „Es wurden Citracit-Souvenirs gefunden, die in den Boutiquen von Citroëns Bordjs-Hotels hätten verkauft werden sollen. Sie entgingen André Citroëns Anweisung, sie sollten alle zerstört werden!“

Worin besteht Citracit?

Wie Alison Murray in ihrem Aufsatz „Citroën-Tourismus“ erklärt (siehe Anhang zu diesem Dokument), wurde das Versagen der Trans-Afrikanischen Gesellschaft so geschickt vertuscht, dass Citracit gänzlich in Vergessenheit geriet. Das Hauptziel meines Projekts liegt darin, die Trans-Afrikanische Gesellschaft auszugraben, einer Strategie folgend, die jener von André Citroën gegenläufig ist. Da das Kommunikationsmaterial der Trans-African Company zerstört wurde, mache ich mich daran, diese von Grund auf herzustellen.

In meinem Projekt existiert Citroën nicht mehr und wurde durch Citracit ersetzt. In dieser Uchronie ist die Einweihung der Trans-Afrikanischen Gesellschaft gut gegangen, und Citroën ist nicht Pleite gegangen. In der Parallelwirklichkeit, die das Citracit-Projekt aufmacht, ist Citroën nicht mehr ein Autohersteller, sondern verkörpert geradezu den Begriff des Exotismus, Abenteuer und Reisen in der Art begehrter Reisebüros.

Ich habe für mein Projekt den Titel Citracit gewählt, um die Geschichte der Trans-Afrikanischen Gesellschaft in die Gegenwart zurückzubringen. Dieses touristische Projekt für eine Reihe von Campingplätzen und Hotels in Afrika lief auch unter dem Namen Centracit oder CEGETAF. Um von Citroën zu Citracit zu gelangen, genügt es, ein „oën“ mit „acit“ zu ersetzen. Drei der Buchstaben, die es zu ersetzen gibt, sind bereits in Citroën zu finden. Das Suffix „a“ hingegen lässt sich einfach aus dem „r“ von Citroën herleiten. In diesem Spiel des typographischen détournement liegt das Wesen der Citracit-Sammlung. Eine genaue Betrachtung des Citracit-Logos, das diesem Artikel auf der ersten Seite voransteht, zeigt, dass das „acit“ von Citracit pixelisiert ist. Was zunächst als Zufall erscheinen mag, ist durchaus Absicht und verweist stilistisch auf das détournement der Marke Citroën, eine rohe und DIY Art des détournement. Die beiden Sparren des Logos werden zu heiligen Clan-Symbolen. Wir entdecken sie erneut in den Skulpturen, als Motiv und Textur.


Quentin Lannes

#IamRebekah

2015. HD video, color, silent, 3’20 looped and sound, 7’40 looped.

Dans l’installation vidéo / son #IamRebekah (2015), l'artiste a développé une fiction d’anticipation à partir de deux véritables personnalités publiques – Zoltan Istvan, candidat transhumaniste à la présidence des États-Unis en 2016 et Rebekah Marine, mannequin en situation de handicap et ambassadrice de la compagnie de prothèse Touch Bionics – dont il a imaginé les trajectoires politiques pour les années à venir sur fond de campagne électorale et de cyber-activisme.


In the video / sound installation #IamRebekah (2015), the artist developed an anticipatory fiction on the basis of two true public characters – Zoltan Istvan, transhumanist candidate to the US presidency in 2016, and Rebekah Marine, differently able fashion model and ambassador to the prosthetics company Touch Bionics – of which he imagined the political trajectories for the years to come, on the backdrop of an electoral campaign and cyber-activism.


The Next Round



2016. HD video.

L'installation vidéo et sonore VR Boxing (The Next Round) que l'artiste a développé pour le Corner College se situe dans le prolongement de l'installation #IamRebekah présentée aux Bourses de la Ville en décembre 2015 - janvier 2016 au Centre d'Art Contemporain, Genève. Il y poursuit ses recherches sur les relations entre corps humain et nouvelles technologies. Ici encore, il propose une fiction d'anticipation ancrée dans un futur proche, proposant
un regard sur l'évolution de nos pratiques actuelles.

Il s'est penché sur le récent développement des dispositifs permettant l'immersion dans une réalité virtuelle : par la vue (casques Oculus Rift et HTC Vive), le déplacement (plate-forme de mouvement Omni) et le
toucher (combinaison vibrante Teslasuit). Étonnamment, la plupart de ces dispositifs dits innovants existent
depuis le début des années 90 mais n'avaient pas trouvé un assez large public à l'époque, pourtant tourné vers
les années 2000. Je m'interroge sur les raisons qui amènent le grand public à enfin s'y intéresser aujourd'hui,
presque 30 ans plus tard.

La fiction VR Boxing questionne donc les pratiques du corps – ici le sport et plus précisément la boxe – à l'ère de ces dispositifs de réalité virtuelle.

Un boxeur, dont les mouvements sont enregistrés par des capteurs n'est pas confronté physiquement à son adversaire sur un ring mais combat une simulation numérique d'un autre boxeur, présent dans un autre espace physique, à des centaines de kilomètres de lui. Lorsqu'un coup atteint sa cible, une décharge électrique est envoyée à l'adversaire via sa combinaison. Une journaliste interroge le boxeur sur l'évolution de son sport, son appréhension de la douleur, son rapport au dispositif numérique remplaçant des interactions physiques, etc.

Le tournage s'effectue en deux temps :
captation vidéo traditionnelle à l'École de Boxe Erdal Kiran 1887, Genève.
captation de mouvement réalisée à Artanim, Meyrin.












The Next Round

The video and sound installation VR Boxing (The Next Round) that the artist developed for Corner College is situated in the prolongation of the installation #IamRebekah presented at the City Grants in December 2015 to January 2016 at the Contemporary Art Center in Geneva. In it, he continues his research on the relations between human body and new technologies. Once again, he proposes an anticipative fiction anchored in a near future, proposing a view on the evolution of our current practices.

He investigated the recent developments of dispositifs that allow immersion into a virtual reality: through sight (Oculus Rift helmets and HTC Vive), movement (Omni movement platform) and touch (vibrating Teslasuit). Surprisingly, most of these so-called innovative dispositifs have existed since the beginning of the 1990s but had not found a sufficiently large public at the time, which was turned towards the years 2000. He raises questions about the reasons that are finally stoking an interest with a larger public today, almost 30 years later.

The fiction VR Boxing thus raises questions about the practices of the body – here, sports, or more precisely, boxing – in the era of these virtual reality dispositifs.

A boxer whose movements are registered by captors is not physically confronted with his adversary in a ring but fights a numerical simulation of another boxer, present in another physical space hundreds of kilometers away. When a punch hits its target, an electrical discharge is sent to the adversary through his suit. A journalist interviews the boxer on the evolution of his sport, his perception of violence, his relation to the numerical dispositif that replaces physical interaction, etc.

The shooting takes place in two phases:
Capturing of traditional video at the École de Boxe Erdal Kiran 1887, Geneva.
Capturing of movements operated at Artanim, Meyrin.





This exhibition was made possible by the kind support of the French Embassy in Switzerland.

A group exhibition project with
Jonathas de Andrade, Anne Brand Galvez & Company, Mariano Gaich, Óscar Gardea Duarte, Pascal Häusermann, Silvan Kälin, Cristiano Lenhardt, Jso Maeder, Ana Roldán, Lena Maria Thüring, WORMS Künstler_innengruppe.

Curated by Damian Christinger and Dimitrina Sevova, co-curated by Silvan Kälin.

Friday, 27 May 2016 - Sunday, 26 June 2016


Program of the Finissage


16:00h
Discussion on the exhibition concept of New Buenos Aires between the curators, Damian Christinger and Dimitrina Sevova, and the artists Mariano Gaich, Jso Maeder, Ana Roldán.


17:00h
Talk 7 Reasons for the Re-Colonization of Latin America by Thomas Haemmerli.

17:30h
Presentation (Chr.K.) by Jso Maeder (auf Deutsch).



1. Keine exegese.
Denn mir erschiene es hinsichtlich des NBA-projekts gleich einer versäumten gelegenheit, versetzten wir uns nicht in die lage deines briefautors, und liessen die frage zu: was ist das?
/> JM. ‘the grey sphere problem/ cologne version:
«you want to see art and find stuff», 2013
//> wie schon erwähnt: analog zu Canguilhems wissenschaftshistorischer/-theoretischer ausgangsfrage: wovon reden wir überhaupt bei der interpretation/kritik/theorie/geschichte von kunst?

2. (Chr.K.) als rauschen. störung, oder information, die nicht entschlüsselt werden kann? - Irritation ist hier immanenz eines konflikts, da sich assoziativ, d.h. im rekurs auf die bekannten instrumente nicht unbedingt eine botschaft bzw. deren deutung ergibt. Darin liegt eine ähnlichkeit mit der albernheit.

3. Hebt ein sinn mit dem/durch das wort ‘kunst’ das rauschen oder die störung auf - ist dies dann gleich einer information?

4. Was aber ist dann mit der wirklichkeit des rauschens? - Löst es sich als solche auch als konflikt auf, wenn es ‘kunst’ ist - oder hat man sich - dissoziativ - in den konflikt zu begeben/auf das fremde einzulassen/einzufinden, um vielleicht ein drittes, eine vorfällige eventualität eines sinns in betracht zu nehmen. Ein übergang in den möglichkeiten der surprise.

JM/06-016


1. No exegesis.
For it would seem to me, with respect to the NBA project, to be an opportunity forgone if we did not put ourselves in the shoes of the author of your letter, and allow the question to arise: what is this?
/> JM. ‘the grey sphere problem/ cologne version:
«you want to see art and find stuff», 2013
//> as mentioned: in analogy to Canguilhem’s initial question of science history/theory: what are we talking about at all in the interpretation/critique/theory/history of art?


2. (Chr.K.) as noise. Disturbance, or information that cannot be deciphered? – Irritation is here the immanence of a conflict, since a message or its interpretation does not necessarily come associatively, i.e., making use of the familiar instruments. There lies a similarity to silliness.

3. Does a meaning with or through the word ‘art’ extinguish the noise or the disturbance – is this then equal to information?

4. But what about the reality of the noise? – Does it, as such, dissolve as a conflict if it is ‘art’ – or does one have to – dissociatively – enter into the conflict/engage with the other in order perhaps to take into account a third, an early eventuality. A transition in the possibilities of surprise.

JM/06-016



18:00h
Performance Banana as Tourist by Ana Roldán, with the voice of Jen Prosperi.



Inspired by “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nature is not fixed but fluid; to a pure spirit, nature is everything”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the tropics reigns perpetual youth. Within the domesticated plantations of goods, the work and value empires, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest can not imagine how he or she should get tired of it in a thousand years. In the tropics we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part, I am a particle of Nature. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

In the boiling wilderness and especially in the curved lines of odours bananas, one beholds somewhat as beautiful as one’s own nature. As bones, as bananas. The greatest delight which the tropics minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between people and the vegetable. Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in human, or in a harmony of both. The heat of man or woman labouring under calamity, illuminate the Nature wearing all the colours.


18:30h
Performance Misti haca masuru* = (Hombre vida ayer) by Roland Wagner.


Dreizehn 'interaktive' Erzählungen.

* Lexikon der Aymara-Sprache:
http://www.perou.org/dico/index.php?lg=es
http://www.ilcanet.org/clasesyservicios/clases.html



We would like to thank Hauser & Wirth for their support in loaning Corner College the art transport crates used in building the architecture of the exhibition.



Many thanks also to the Präsidialdepartement Basel-Stadt, Kulturabteilung for their supporting the participation of WORMS / Saman Anabel Sarabi / Stefan Wegmüller in this exhibition.

Mit San Keller (voc), Michael Jaeger (ts, cl) and Fabian Gisler (b)


Wir spielen unsere Instrumente mit vier Fingern so gut wie andere mit fünf. Neben der Bühne arbeiteten wir als Handwerker - dabei hat unser Bassist seinen Mittelfinger verloren. Aus Solidarität spielen wir seither alle nur noch mit vier Fingern. Kürzlich ist unser Flötist tragisch verstorben, doch wir spielen zu dritt so gut wie zu viert als die FOUR FREDDIES. Unsere Konzerte sind Performances mit, vor, im und/oder ohne Publikum. Wer bis zum Ende ausharrt, hat es verdient, nichts dafür zu bezahlen.

Hier noch unser Witz der Woche: "Was sagt der Reggae-Fan zu seinem Kumpel, wenn er nichts mehr zu rauchen hat?

Schalt endlich diese Scheissmusik aus!"

Zwei Minuten FOUR FREDDIES / A CONCERT WITH OR WITHOUT YOU auf Youtube



With San Keller (voc), Michael Jaeger (ts, cl) and Fabian Gisler (b)

We play our instruments with four fingers just as well as others do with five. While we were working as manual labourers alongside our work on stage, our bassist lost his middle finger. Ever since then, we have all played with just four fingers, out of solidarity. Not long ago, our flautist tragically died, but we play in a group of three just as well as in a group of four, as the FOUR FREDDIES. Our concerts are performances with, before, in and/or without an audience. Anyone who perseveres to the end has earned the right to pay nothing for it.

And now our joke of the week: "What does a reggae fan say to his companion when he has nothing left to smoke?

Do switch off that crap music!"

Two minutes FOUR FREDDIES / A CONCERT WITH OR WITHOUT YOU on Youtube

In the context of the group exhibition New Buenos Aires at Corner College.


Screening of Legalillanalyzis by Andrea Éva Győri, video of a performance, 16:9, 2014.
Andrea Éva Győri and Mateo Chacon-Pino discuss with the audience.

The Art World somehow resembles the infamous Rabbit Hole through which Alice falls into Wonderland. The deeper you get, the more you find yourself in a strangely working world with its own logic and language, in which you have to adapt yourself and learn the proper vocabulary. Contrary to the Wonderland, the Art World is visible to the outside of it and some objects even become general knowledge. The Screening of Andrea Éva Győri's Video “Legalillanalyzis” (2014) shows how a political scientist presents Andrea's drawings without prior knowledge. Following up a group of experts will discuss how their supposedly naïve view on Art is perceived from the Art World and which conflicts arise in the discussion on Art through the fact of not being actively involved in the Art World.

In the context of the group exhibition New Buenos Aires at Corner College.


Lateinamerikazentrum Zürich (Universität Zürich) and Corner College present

Tropical Babel: on a ruined mall stranded in Caracas
Celeste Olalquiaga (Proyecto Helicoide)

at Corner College
on 16 June 2016
at 19:00h, followed by a reception

Built in the 1960s as a futuristic shopping mall, El Helicoide de la Roca Tarpeya, in Caracas, Venezuela, would have been the most state-of-the-art shopping mall of the Americas, with a double helix of vehicular ramps aligned with high-end boutiques, exhibition centers and even a heliport. But El Helicoide was never finished and has been the site of multiple failed projects (including a bus terminal and a cemetery), massive informal occupations and, for the last thirty years, a police headquarters with political prisoners. How the building that was supposed to be the symbol of Venezuela modernity turned instead into one of this country's (and modernity's!) most emblematic failures make of El Helicoide an incredible story of soured ambitions, democratic betrayals, bankruptcy, evil spirits and more...

PROYECTO HELICOIDE is a non-profit organization dedicated to rescuing the architectural, cultural and social value of El Helicoide de la Roca Tarpeya in Caracas, Venezuela. Built as a spiraling drive-in mall between 1958 and 1961, El Helicoide was never finished. Its unique shape and peculiar history of abandonment, failed projects and police occupation make it a global icon of the contradictions of modernity.

In the context of the group exhibition New Buenos Aires at Corner College.

Address: Kochstrasse 18, 8004 Zürich (30 m from Corner College).
Meeting point at Corner College at 20:00h. If you come later, come directly to Kochstrasse 18 (entrance from the alleyway between the buildings). If you cannot find it, try calling +41-79-248 43 15.

20:00h Door opens. Meet at Corner College to walk over to Kochstrasse 18
21:00h Performance / screening Éternau Alterstereo by Distruktur (Melissa Dullius & Gustavo Jahn)

Photo documentation of the event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cornercollege/photos/?tab=album&album_id=566347266879116

In the context of the group exhibition New Buenos Aires at Corner College.


17:00h Door opening
17:30h Artist talk and screening of a selection of his works by Cristiano Lenhardt.
19:00h Skype performance Teta Lírica [Lyric tits] by Marie Carangi.
20:00h Screening program The Uprising of the Body curated by Silvan Kälin.

[English see below]

Corner College führt seine Veranstaltungsreihe The Artist as The Curator as The Artist (The Art of Curating or How about a Paracuratorial Turn?) fort.

In der dritten Veranstaltung lädt Corner College die Künstler_innen Saman Anabel Sarabi und Alex Wissel ein, ihre kuratorische Praktiken vorzustellen und untereinander und mit dem Publikum zu diskutieren.

Das kuratorische Konzept der Veranstaltungsreihe von Dimitrina Sevova in Zusammenarbeit mit Alan Roth (auf Englisch): http://materials.corner-college.com/2016/201602/201502-the-artist-as-the-curator-new-series.html




[Deutscher Text siehe oben]

Corner College is continuing its series of events The Artist as The Curator as The Artist (The Art of Curating or How about a Paracuratorial Turn?).

In the third event, artists Saman Anabel Sarabi and Alex Wissel are invited to present their curatorial practices and discuss them between themselves and with the audience.



15:00h Picnic and discourse: Saman Anabel Sarabi, in collaboration with Stefan Wegmüller, and Alex Wissel will present their work through presentations, card games and an informal reading of their shared letters
18:00h Discussion between the artist-curators and the audience, moderated by Dimitrina Sevova
20:00h Screening of Alex Wissel's movie Single (Regie: Jan Bonny und Alex Wissel)

Copies of the artist-curators' collected material with and around their 'letters' will be available in the space.



Saman Anabel Sarabi

Mein Name ist Josephine. Ich bin Sängerin und komme aus einer Kurzgeschichte, in der ich mich nicht mehr wohlgefühlt habe und deswegen aus dem Buch heraus in andere Bücher, Situationen, Gespräche, Zustände, Wälder, Städte, Parks und Konstellationen reise. Dort, wo ich jetzt bin ragen hohe lauschige Bäume in die Höhe, zwei grosse Wiesenabschnitte werden abwechselnd durch labyrinthische Pflastersteinwege und dichte Böschungen miteinander verknüpft - hinter den Bäumen eine vierspurige Strasse und eine grosse Kreuzung, auf der gegenüberliegenden Seite riesige Villen.
Ich halte mich seit einiger Zeit hier auf und habe bemerkt, die Menschen hier teilen ihre Zeit extrem akkurat ein und leben darin als wäre es anders nicht möglich: es gibt Sekunden, Minuten, Stunden, Monate, Jahre, Holozäne und Antropozäne. (...) An den Wegrändern und Wiesenabschnitten entlang laufend, habe ich die Douglasie getroffen. Hier treffen wir uns nun regelmässig zum Schreiben, Sprechen und Lesen mit dem Nashorn aus dem Naturhistorischen Museum Bern, einem Fragebogen von Almut Rembges, der verirrten Seele von Vivienne von Wattenwyl, Marthe Gosteli’s Burgermedaille und durchforsten die unzähligen Dokumente des Stadtplanungsamts Berns, ein paar Ausgaben der Lehrerinnenzeitschrift aus der Gostellistiftung sowie das Buch von Katrin Rieder 'Netzwerke des Konservatismus, Berner Burgergemeinde und Patriziat im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert' ... Lucie Kolb schreibt mit...

(aus: Worms 3008: timetravel to an un-named park with Josephine-Joseph the singer-mouse, a carrier bag full of resurrected l's and nd's, powerfull plants, turning subjects, historical papers and future ghosts, individuals and collectives - all needy for connection, they seem to have an urgent feeling for front politics but without the vanguard party and the free market feminists)

Eine Zeitreise am 19. Juni 2016 führt uns in Corner College in Zürich...



Alex Wissel

Kunst ist keine Pfeiffe

Wer bin ich? Wer sind wir? Wer spielt uns und wen spielen wir?

The moment where representation turns into participation is my main interest and I´m trying to reach it by thinking and working about marketing, appropriation and display decisions. My work has a lot to do with theater in everyday life and how architecture, social roles and a specific atmosphere can be used to influence people habits.


Single
Regie: Jan Bonny und Alex Wissel. Mit Alex Wissel, 70 min, D 2015

„Single“ spielt sowohl auf den Beziehungs-Status des jungen Künstlers Alex Wissels, der sich im gleichnamigen Film selbst spielt, als auch auf den von ihm gegründeten Single Club an. Nachdem seine Freundin ihn verlässt, sucht Wissel in der Rolle des Nachtclubbetreibers neue Bestätigung. In den Kellerräumen des albanischen Lokals “Bistro Agi” unweit des Düsseldorfer Hauptbahnhofs findet er den geeigneten Ort. Von Juni 2011 bis Juni 2012 inszenierten Künstlerinnen hier experimentelle Parties und Performances, die sich unter Mitwirkung des Publikums entfalteten. Dank der völligen Verausgabung aller Beteiligten wurde der Raum dafür ein jedes Mal neu gestaltet. Viele nutzten die Veranstaltungen für die Gründung von Kunst- und Musikprojekten. So gesehen war der Club eine einzigartige Bühne für das Erproben unterschiedlicher Formate und Katalysator für neue Bands und Kollektive.

Der Film Single, von Alex Wissel und Jan Bonny, handelt einerseits von der kurzen Ära des Clubs, der als alternatives Modell von öffentlichem Raum und partizipativer „Sozialskulptur” konzipiert war. Andererseits erzählt er die fiktive Geschichte eines jungen Mannes, der die permanente Selbst-Inszenierung irgendwann nicht mehr von der Realität unterscheiden kann. Der Film kann auch als Fortführung des Ortes mit anderen Mitteln gesehen werden.

Mit u.a. Lars Eidinger, Rita McBride, Peter Doig, Agipet Iljazi, Hans-Jürgen Hafner, Magdalena Kita und Sibel Kekilli.


“Single” refers both to the relationship status of the young artist Alex Wissel, who plays himself in the eponymous movie, as well to the “Single Club” founded by him. After his girlfriend left him, Wissel seeks new recognition in the role of a nightlife impresario. In the basement of the Albanian gambling bar “Bistro Agi” near Dusseldorf’s main train station he finds a suitable place. From June 2011 to June 2012, artists, with the participation of the audience, throw experimental parties and performances. Thanks to the commitment of everybody involved, to the point of exhaustion, on every club night the basement had a completely new look. The events were used by many to form new art collaborations and music projects. From this perspective, the club was a unique stage for experiments in new formats and a catalyst for new bands and collectives.

The movie Single by Alex Wissel and Jan Bonny is partly about the short era of the club, which was conceived as an alternative model of public space and a participative social sculpture. Partly it is the fictive story of a young man who loses contact with reality due to permanent self-staging. One could also see the movie as the continuation of the place by other means.

With, among others, Lars Eidinger, Rita McBride, Peter Doig, Agipet Iljazi, Hans-Jürgen Hafner, Magdalena Kita and Sibel Kekilli.




Curatorial concept of the series of events by Dimitrina Sevova in collaboration with Alan Roth: http://materials.corner-college.com/2016/201602/201502-the-artist-as-the-curator-new-series.html

The Artist as The Curator as The Artist (The Art of Curating or How about a Paracuratorial Turn?) is a series of presentation and conversation-driven irregular events critically interrogating the curatorial turn, exhibition-making practices that sometimes go beyond the notion of the exhibition, the practices of curating performed by the artist, and the performative potentialities of the curatorial without a clear programming policy and museological framing. It questions how the political and aesthetic potentiality of the discourse can be made practical, searching for a new vocabulary reflecting on the idea of what an exhibition could be from the point of view of the artists and their current exhibition practices and curatorial endeavors.


We would like to thank the Präsidialdepartement Basel-Stadt, Kulturabteilung for their supporting the participation of Künstler_innengruppe WORMS / Saman Anabel Sarabi and Stefan Wegmüller in this event, and in the ongoing exhibition, New Buenos Aires.

A group exhibition project with
Jonathas de Andrade, Anne Brand Galvez & Company, Mariano Gaich, Óscar Gardea Duarte, Pascal Häusermann, Silvan Kälin, Cristiano Lenhardt, Jso Maeder, Ana Roldán, Lena Maria Thüring, WORMS Künstler_innengruppe,

and performances by Anne Brand Galvez & Company, Marie Carangi, Distruktur (Melissa Dullius & Gustavo Jahn), Luciana Freire D'Anunciação, Ana Roldán.

Curated by Damian Christinger and Dimitrina Sevova, co-curated by Silvan Kälin.

Friday, 27 May 2016 - Sunday, 26 June 2016

Öffnungszeiten / Opening Hours

Mi 15:00h - 18:00h / Wed 3 pm - 6 pm
Do 16:00h - 20:00h / Thu 4 pm - 8 pm
Fr 15:00h - 18:00h / Fri 3 pm - 6 pm
Sa 14:00h - 17:00h / Sat 2 pm - 6 pm
(Am Samstag, 28. Mai, am Tag nach der Ausstellungseröffnung, bleibt Corner College zu. / On Saturday, 28 May, on the day after the opening, Corner College will remain closed.)


Vernissage: Friday, 27 May 2016 at 18:00h
Skype performance at the opening, Porosidades do espaço temporalizado [Porosities of a temporalized space] by Luciana Freire D'Anunciação;
20:00h Performance Cerati a la Cumbia by Anne Brand Galvez & Company, with Philip Frowein (DE), Fernando Noriega (MX), Alex Martinez (MX), Pablo Miguez (ARG), Moritz Mayer (CH).

Sunday, 29 May 2016:
17:00h Door opening
17:30h Artist talk and screening of a selection of his works by Cristiano Lenhardt.
19:00h Skype performance Teta Lírica [Lyric tits] by Marie Carangi.
20:00h Screening program The Uprising of the Body curated by Silvan Kälin.

Sunday, 5 June 2016: Performance / screening Éternau Alterstereo by Distruktur (Melissa Dullius & Gustavo Jahn).

Sunday, 26 June:
16:00h Discussion on the curatorial concept between the curators, Damian Christinger and Dimitrina Sevova, and the artists present, Mariano Gaich, Pascal Häusermann, Jso Maeder, Ana Roldán.
17:00h Talk 7 Reasons for the Re-Colonization of Latin America by Thomas Haemmerli.
17:30h Presentation (Chr.K.) by Jso Maeder (auf Deutsch).
18:00h Performance Banana as Tourist by Ana Roldán.
18:30h Performance Misti haca masuru* = (Hombre vida ayer) by Roland Wagner.


New Buenos Aires NoW and Therefore!

New Buenos Aires has a peculiar mobile and turbulent geography that designates neither a particular place nor a particular time. It is an event, i.e., an atmospheric function of the exhibition. It can exhibit itself. Events are exhibitions, wrote the old philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their late work What Is Philosophy? They see the potentiality of the event becoming an exhibition, making the concept visible, setting up various displays and the “exchange of ideas,” a zone de voisinage that can be offered to the viewer.

New Buenos Aires is not a thematic exhibition. It embodies an extra-subjective assemblage by the participating artists with their heterogeneous practices in the drift of a new conceptual wind that blows with necessary slowness and immediate urgency to express the practical dimensions of de-colonizing thought at a time of environmentalist discontent, of changes in the intellectual climate of global transformation in a new, ecologically oriented history of capitalism in the ‘age of capital’ – with the dilemma of global art, or the art of the Capitalocene, as the work of art is a work of opinion. The exhibition display confronts the epistemic violence of ‘big history’ to create a counter-space of ecological justice, in a labyrinth of ‘wonderful and messy tales’ and other, equally enigmatic multiplicities – a labyrinth alive with the movements of crowded people, and other creatures.

Excerpt from the curatorial text by Dimitrina Sevova.



New Buenos Aires, 20th of September 2048

Dear Osmond

This letter reaches you three days ahead of the official investigation as a personal favour, a gesture of treachery (you so much admire in the classics), and as proof of a friendship that has connected us for more than thirty years.

The official document will state, as always, nothing, and I thought that you might be interested in my personal thoughts and insights, as this case contains everything that you and I find interesting.

When a cult of this extreme persuasions scrambles to protect a ship at all costs, that is for all purposes of the sane mind completely useless (it is not fit to be put on water for example) then the authorities will want answers, as you know, and when the case is as it is, they will even call upon an arcane archaeologist as myself.

Excerpt from the curatorial text by Damian Christinger.


Jonathas de Andrade

Pacifico [Pacific]
2010
Super8 transferred to DVD, 12 minutes





A massive earthquake erupts over the Andes, detaching Chile from the South American continent. As a consequence, the sea returns to Bolivia restoring its lost coastline, Argentina gains coasts with both the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, and Chile becomes a floating island adrift in the seas.



Anne Brand Galvez & Company

Cerati a la Cumbia
Performance








Mariano Gaich

Prosthesis & Fetish – The Journey of Exoticized Reason



During centuries of hegemonic reason and global trade’s domain, a utopian world shaped by travelling in the quest for unknown paradises – the “exotic,” “alien” or “outlandish” – depicts a transparent, crystalline display through which (un)material human production can be watched and therefore classified.

These “exotic” objects of adoration get appropriated by an entire fetishistic web that – after creating divisions in nationalities – reproduces cultural and national identities as merchandises, from raw material to goods such as art. Exoticism becomes marketing and promotion.

These same objects, wherever you might find them, in a ship, a storage, in a museum or even a library with travel novels in a XIX century fashion or contemporary science fiction ones, are placed in a way that a whole juxtaposition of different times and spaces suggests a heterotopic entity with its dystopic side of uses and abuses by a large (post)colonial history.

The installation inverts the logic of capitalistic reason, understood as a vessel of accumulation: crystalline displays become un- and over-exoticized at the same time, showing a narrative of decolonization, rests and remains, traces of past, present and future ongoing greediness.


Flaming Prostheses for Autonomy and Mutation (Ritual Manifesto)



Action, ritual of manifestation, an installative Manifesto, incorporating prostheses with body, escaping from genderification, categorization and slavery, racism, (post)colonial abuses.
Breaking chains and mutating DNA chains, to a diversity of “in-betweens” becoming fluidity, autonomy.



Óscar Gardea Duarte

La Fosa [The Pit]
Video documentary, installation, 2016



A white building stands in the middle of the desert, it is run by a former so called gang member turned Christian, his acolytes serve as translators of both realms which collide at this precinct. “You will learn darkness”. A sinister pit that holds a deep entrenched problem of: What veils them unknown and unwanted, and where is their place? Slums of the future, residents that are classified by the leader or his subordinates as aggressive, non-amicable or a threat to the veil of reason will be then confined to a one meter by one eighty cell that remains locked until the keepers think it is plausible to end seclusion. There is no official census to the facilities population and non-provided for, to the pertinent institutions that have solicited it. It is an asepsis solution for social cleansing of both border cities by method of segregating from practical functional society, abused, policed and no knowledge based exclusion of diverse individuals whom are intentionally shunned and forsaken to a discourse that supposes greater than their existence, one of so called altruism, political correctness and modernity´s progress rhetoric. Concentration camp for rational diversity where the master is veiled as a beloved figure of masculine yet benevolent mythological stature who claims “Nobody wants them, except for myself”. The edifices´ boundaries are reduced to the sensibility for the interpretation of the real, limits defined by the smell of blood and urine.

Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, May 2016

The work consists of the documentation of a 5 × 5 × 5 meter pit which comes covered by a cement surface with an aperture of 20 cm × 2.5 meters, in situ at the facility at Kilometer 35 of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. It includes documentation of the seclusion wing called “ocho” and its inmates.



Pascal Häusermann

Sketches of a Gringo
24 papers, watercolour on Xerox, A3, 2015



In 1831 the German engraver and drawer Moritz Rugendas travelled to Brazil in the frame of the expedition of Freiherr von Langsdorff, where he documented landscape, culture and habits of the people in hundreds of drawings. Back in Europe, he could publish the work, which became very famous under the name “Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil”, with the help of Alexander von Humboldt. The photocopies of a copy of a original print of that book from the public library Zentralbibliothek Zurich became a sort of a diary during my residency in São Paulo in spring 2015.

It is a documentation about the daily confrontation and identification with Brazilian culture, the ambivalence between the European heritage coming from the colonial past, and the strangeness of this “new” culture, a mix with indigenous and African roots.

The gesture to overdraw the erstwhile documentation contains an assumption that the guilt coming out of the colonial conquest can be assimilated by superimposing one's experiences on the historical events. Meanwhile, history keeps on being present. It has been put on the backburner through a new personal perception.

(Pascal Häusermann)


The drawings by Pascal Häusermann are on loan from Kantonale Kunstsammlung Appenzell Ausserrhoden. // Die Zeichnungen von Pascal Häusermann sind eine Leihgabe der Kantonalen Kunstsammlung Appenzell Ausserrhoden.



Silvan Kälin

Mormaço
2016
Animated video





A climatic situation of heat and humidity, the everyday life of a tropical city in which the machines and the sweat of its inhabitants mingle, forming unexpected gardens.


The Uprising of the Body

Screening program curated by Silvan Kälin, 29 May 2016

Performance expresses itself as a need of bodily manifestation against an inescapable, given reality.



Cristiano Lenhardt

Polvorosa
Video.



Electronic supernatural phenomenon magnetizes two bodies and brings them close.



Jso Maeder

Werkgruppe Fig. - Speicher
seit 2012 - in progress



Das modell der „zivilgesellschaft“ erscheint im zeichen der heutigen kapitalistischen plankultur in hinblick auf eine gedankliche oder künstlerische autonomie in konfigurationen institutionaler leitsysteme blockiert; *) das moderne programm, im grunde die gesellschaftliche eigenprojektion als ein kanonischer bezugs- bzw. bewusstseinshorizont, im leerlauf in systemischer einrichtung. – Zyklomoderne (Demuth), bestenfalls noch ideologische reproduktion als soziales monument und als moment abstrakter dominanz.

Die letzte historische möglichkeit der moderne entspräche daher der art nach einer matrix abstrakter dominanz, 'modern' rein noch aufgrund der in ihrer sprache sowie deren textuellen zirkularen mittelbaren progammatik, - selbstverständigung, interpretament in der konstanten umwälzung und modifikation eines zwanghaften korrelats der chiffren und zeichen.

• Daher frage nach dem capital fixe, einem 'wissen' im motiv des auf|bewahrens/be-haltens: archiv/speicher unter den voraussetzungen abstrakter dominanz.
Wenn die moderne sich ideologisch eine kontinuität in der kanonischen setzung eines gesellschaftlichen erwartungshorizonts gibt, während die 'gesellschaftlichen lebens-prozesse' und praxen sich hingegen provisorisch, unter produzierten bedingungen als jeweilige modalitäten der produktion realisieren - wie, anhand welcher kriterien und welcher 'formen', lokalisiert, reflektiert 'gesellschaft' sich dann im verhältnis zu ihrem historischen entwurf? - Und insbesondere: wie bezeugt, quasi belegt oder dokumentiert sie sich hinsichtlich des ihrer eigenbehauptung immanenten kulturellen leistungsan-spruchs, wenn der prozess unablässiger verfremdung (titel 'wachstum/fortschritt') eines
je gültigen oder bestehenden die 'lebenswelt' kennzeichnet?
Und noch konkreter: Wie funktioniert (sofern überhaupt) hierbei kunst im rahmen der abstrakten programmatik einer vergesellschaftung, gerade unter gesichtspunkten ihrer impliziten logik des (sozialen aus-)tauschs?


*)>>> Indem 'produktion' nicht allein eine erzeugung von waren meint, sondern sie durch ihre bedingungen zugleich muster und mittel eines herrschenden wissens ('general intellect') fabriziert, festschreibt, ist sie strukturelle kraft in gesellschaftlicher formation. Auch i.s. der legitimation deren herrschaftlicher dispositve oder der politischen massgabe, da im rahmen systematischen wissens ('knowledge'), d.h. mitunter, einer universitär-disziplinären, institutionellen wissenschaft, die 'produzierte Produktivkraft eines wissens in gesellschaftlicher funktion' abstrakt, als formular einer sprachlich-textuellen oder zeichenhaften ebene reproduziert ist. I.s. eines hintergründigen reglements des 'capital fixe', als momentum abstrakter dominanz, fungiert die produktion im beziehungsraster (cf. (aus-)tauschabstraktion) des vergesellschafteten lebens gleich einer äusserlichen, objektiven gegebenheit.
cf. hierzu, im rekurs auf Marx' 'Grundrisse' (wie hier zitiert, insbesondere das Maschinenfragment (MEW, Bd. 42)), nebst dem späteren werk Althussers:
– die analysen Antonio Negris und Maurizio Lazzaratos, sowie weitere schriften zur theorie des postoperaismus.
– ausserdem konzept der 'wissensgesellschaft' (Lane, Bell), als ablösung industrieller waren- durch spezifische wissensproduktion i.s. einer ressource der wertschöpfung.


Under the sign of today’s capitalist plan culture in view of an intellectual and artistic autonomy the model of “civil society” appears blocked in configurations of institutional control systems; *) the modern program, which consists at bottom of the social self-projection as a canonic horizon of reference and consciousness, running idle in a systemic facility. Cyclomodernity (Demuth), at best ideological reproduction as a social monument and a moment of abstract domination.

The last historical opportunity of modernity would thus correspond in kind to a matrix of abstract domination, remaining modern only on the basis of the program mediated by its language and its textual circulars – self-understanding, a key to interpretation in the constant upheaval and modification in the forced correlation of codes and signs.

• Hence the question of fixed capital, a knowledge in the motif of retaining/holding on to: archive/store under the conditions of abstract domination.
If modernity claims for itself a continuity in making canonical a social horizon of expectations while the social life processes and practices on the other hand are realized provisionally, under produced conditions, as the respective modalities of production – how, according to what criteria and what forms, localized, is society reflected in relation to its historical blueprint? – And, especially: how is it testified, quasi proven or documented in view of the cultural claim to performance inherent to its self-affirmation, when the process of unrelenting alienation (title growth/progress) of the respectively valid or established, characterizes the living environment?
Even more concretely: How does art function (if at all) in the framework of the abstract program of a socialization, especially from the point of view of its implied logic of (social ex-) change?

Translated from German by Alan Roth

*)>>> As ‘production’ intends not only the production of goods but through its conditions at the same time the fabrication and perpetuation of the patterns and the means of predominant knowledge (‘general intellect’), it is the structural force of societal formation. Also in the sense of legitimizing its social dispositifs or political conditions, since in the framework of systematic knowledge, i.e., a sometimes universitarian-disciplinary, institutional science, “the powers of social production [that] have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process” are reproduced abstractly, in the formula of a linguistic-textual or semiotic plane. In the sense of the hidden rule of fixed capital, as a moment of abstract domination, production acts as a quasi-external, objective factor in the pattern of relations (cf. abstraction of exchange) of socialized life.
cf. with reference to Marx’s Grundrisse (as quoted here, especially the Fragement on the Machines, as well as the later work of Althusser:
– the analyses by Antonio Negris und Maurizio Lazzarato, as well as other writing on the theory of post-operaism.
– also the concept of society of knowledge (Lane, Bell), as the displacement of industrial production of goods by specific knowledge production in the sense of a resource adding value.



Ana Roldán

Negative Bodies (The Utopic Body)
2016
Neon
30 x 32 cm


Withering Paradisiaca
2014
Table, glass table top, banana flower
65 x 70 x 100 cm (table), flower size variable




This is boring. No, it's not.
2016, 25 x 15 x 5 cm




Vanilla Overseas
2016
Installation
Variable


Banana as Tourists
2016
Performance Sunday, 26 June 2016, 18:00h
Inspired on “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nature is not fixed but fluid; to a pure spirit, nature is everything”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the tropics reigns perpetual youth. Within the domesticated plantations of goods, the work and value empires, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest can not imagine how he or she should get tired of it in a thousand years. In the tropics we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part, I am a particle of Nature. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

In the boiling wilderness and especially in the curved lines of odours bananas, one beholds somewhat as beautiful as one’s own nature. As bones, as bananas. The greatest delight which the tropics minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between people and the vegetable. Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in human, or in a harmony of both. The heat of man or woman labouring under calamity, illuminate the Nature wearing all the colours.



Lena Maria Thüring

Future Me

HD Video, single channel, 16:9, colour, sound, 11 min 45 sec, German subtitles





Die künstlerische Arbeit Lena Maria Thürings beginnt häufig mit Gesprächen, die sie mit anderen führt und zu Texten und Videofilmen weiterverarbeitet. Dabei interessiert Thüring die Frage, wie man anhand individueller Geschichten über gesellschaftliche Systeme und die ihnen zugrunde liegenden Konstruktionen nachdenken kann. Im Rahmen der Education Projekte lud das Museum für Gegenwartskunst die Künstlerin ein, um gemeinsam mit Schülerinnen und Schülern ein neues Werk zu produzieren. In Zusammenarbeit mit der Künstlerin verfassten die Schülerinnen und Schüler ihre Memoiren - von der Geburt bis zum Tod. So entstand eine Reihe semi-fiktiver, teils erfundener, teils autobiografischer Texte, in denen die Grenze zwischen Dokumentation und Fiktion berührt wird – zwischen Erinnerung und Inszenierung. Die Texte wurden anschliessend bearbeitet, verdichtet und verfremdet. Das Resultat dieses Prozesses ist ein Skript, das den Ausgangspunkt für einen Videodreh bildet. So entsteht ein Film, der Züge eines Musikvideoclips hat. Die teils tänzerischen, teils kämpferischen Choreografien und Inszenierungen vor der Kamera füllen die Bildebene. Die von den Schülerinnen und Schülern gesprochenen Memoiren erscheinen als Offstimmen auf der Tonebene – ein polyphoner Sprachteppich im Rhythmus der Bilder.

Søren Grammel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel, Switzerland


Lena Maria Thüring’s art often grows out of conversations with others she translates into texts and videos. Thüring’s guiding question is how individual stories can help us think about social systems and the constructions that underlie them. As part of its Education Projects series, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst invited the artist to collaborate with high school students on a new work. She led the students in a workshop in which they wrote their memoirs, from birth to death, producing a series of semi-fictions: partly invented and partly autobiographical texts probing the boundary between the documentary and fictional registers—between recollection and dramatic imagination. Edited for greater density and added effect, the texts served as the basis for a script used in a subsequent video shoot. The result is a film that bears the hallmarks of a music video. The choreographies and dramatic scenes staged for the camera burst onto the screen with a mix of dancelike grace and combativeness, while the soundtrack features the students’ own offscreen voices reading their memoirs—a polyphonic verbal fabric in the rhythm of the images.

Søren Grammel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel, Switzerland



WORMS Künstler_innengruppe

timewheel-oracle for feminist politics of complexity

on selected dates a one-minute oracle will be transmitted to corner college on midday and midnight. concrete dates will be announced soon.




The one-minute-oracles act as a call to feminist politics of complexity, in search for a joint memory - binding and linking the past, present and future. The oracles have been a fluid practice within Worms since summer 2013 in the context of an intense exchange with the artist duo coexistent. They will be expanded and exchanged throughout the exhibition at Corner College between different artists/groups and collectives.

The rotating future­past­present-wheel will help to bring memories, dreams and predictions together, conjuring a transtemporal place towards a collective déja vu.

The recorded one-minute oracles will be available as documentation in the exhibition, as materials on the Corner College website and on vimeo.

Transmission dates:

26 May midnight https://vimeo.com/168362750
27 May ­midnight https://vimeo.com/168407213
8 June midnight https://vimeo.com/169940078
11 June ­midday https://vimeo.com/170333472
14 June ­midnight https://vimeo.com/170683628
25 June midday https://vimeo.com/172203856



Luciana Freire D'Anunciação

Porosidades do espaço temporalizado [Porosities of a temporalized space]

Skype performance at the opening



The project Porosities of a Temporalized Space is a durational performance that plays with time-space possibilities in order to question the way we perceive the chronological time. How can one use the body to temporalize the space or spacialize the time? Possible answers will come with my proposed action: the repetition of gestures. In a defiant way towards the success of such failure driven action, I will subject my body into the gesture repetition exhaustion, and with it I will be open to accidents and its continuous potencial to change the gesture. I will consider everything around me as stimuli, be it the the city sounds, the architecture and objects within the space. Hence I will consider my body a porous entity, which both accumulates and let go experiences and time-space stimuli. In a subtle way the perfomance will go through changes that will be perceived accordingly to the relation which audience member will create within the time spent with the performance.



Distruktur (Melissa Dullius & Gustavo Jahn)

Éternau Alterstereo

Performance / screening on Sunday, 5 June 2016
2 X 16mm, digital sound | Brazil, Germany | 25min | 2011





Éternau Alterstereo is a performance by Distruktur in the finest tradition of expanded cinema: a dual 16-mm projection accompanied by a collage soundtrack.

The juxtaposition of the 2 screens affects the viewer experience and the images in different ways such as echoing, mirroring, or complementing. Visual stereo hi-fi. The use of distortion lenses during the projection can be applied to invade the projection space beyond the screen's surface.

The soundtrack comments and adds new layers to the images involving the audience in a warm tempest of sound.

The "filmperformance" revisits and multiplies the short film Éternau, a colorful tropical fantasy that pays tribute -not without irony- to genres and clichés of the XX century cinema, eccentric film stars, exoticism and orientalism, by reproducing and reinventing this imagery from a timely and spatial distance.

All the 16mm footage used in the performance was shot in studio and locations in south Brazil between 2004 and 2006. Éternau screens regularly all over the world in film festivals, museums, art spaces and cine-clubs since 2006.

Exhibitions

2015
(S8) MOSTRA DE CINEMA PERIFÉRICO | A CORUÑA
FILMESPERFORMANCE | Academie Minerva Beeldende Kunst & Vormgeving| GRONINGEN

2014
WE ARE ANIMALS | Austellungsraum, Bilingua e.V. | BERLIN

2012
LEERSTAND . 012 / 13 | Kitev | OBERHAUSEN
TRUE TRUE NAME - MAD KATE'S PERFORMANCE SALON | Exit | BERLIN
FILMESPERFORMANCE | PERFORMA PAÇO, Paço das Artes | SÃO PAULO

2011
INTRICATE MACHINES | Mica Moca Project Space | BERLIN
TUDO È Guest Nation Brazil | Ex-Esattoria | FLORENCE




Marie Carangi

Teta Lírica [Lyric tits]

Skype performance on Sunday, 29 May 2016





Teta Lírica é uma performance que envolve a relação de atrito entre o movimento do corpo e o instrumento musical theremin. Esse instrumento possui uma antena que emite um campo vibracional no ar, onde as notas musicais se distribuem reagindo à proximidade do corpo. Enquanto o corpo se sacode, as tetas balançam tocando aleatoriamente as notas nesse campo gerando sons. O grau de aproximação entre tetas e antena, associado à velocidade de movimento, gera picos de agudo variáveis, resultando num canto lírico estridente.


Lyric Tits is a performance that involves the frictional relationship between the movement of the body and the musical instrument theremin. This instrument has an antenna that emits a vibrational field in the air, where the notes are distributed reacting to the proximity of the body. As the body is shaking, the tits swing randomly, playing the notes in this sound-generating field. The degree of proximity between tits and antenna, combined with the velocity of the movement, generates peaks of variable pitch which result in a strident lyrical song.


We would like to thank Hauser & Wirth for their support in loaning Corner College the art transport crates used in building the architecture of the exhibition.



Many thanks also to the Präsidialdepartement Basel-Stadt, Kulturabteilung for their supporting the participation of WORMS / Saman Anabel Sarabi / Stefan Wegmüller in this exhibition.





A kind of palimpsest
by Petra Elena Köhle & Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin
consisting of two flags on display on the façade of Corner College, makes a passage from Chapter I to Chapter II of the exhibition/publishing project No-where? Now-here! The Molecular Books of Life – Colleges of Unreason. It will remain on display throughout the time between the two chapters.



Chapter I took place from 17.03.2016 to 17.04.2016.
Chapter II is due to take place in November/December 2016.
A text about the work is available in the space, as well as on the website of Corner College.

Public presentation of the outcome of the project Occasionally Human by the researcher and the participating artists and curators. With apéro.


A project by Francesca Brusa


Curators:
Nadja Baldini, Mateo Chacon-Pino, Daniel Morgenthaler, Julia Moritz, Dimitrina Sevova, Agustina Strüngmann

Artists:
Johanna Bruckner, Luc Mattenberger, Mediengruppe Bitnik!, Philemon Otth, Martin Schick, Paulo Wirz


Program on Saturday, 14 May 2016
18:00h public interview with Julia Mortiz
18:30h public interview with Paulo Wirz
19:00h public presentation of the research by Francesca Brusa


The project is realized in collaboration with the post-graduate program in Curating at ZHdK. http://oncurating.org




Photo documentation of the event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cornercollege/photos/?tab=album&album_id=566327370214439

“Relationships to the other does not proceed through identification with a preexisting icon, inherent to each individual. The image is carried by a becoming other, ramified in becoming animal, becoming plant, becoming machine and, on occasion, becoming human.” Felix Guattari


How is contemporary aesthetic production affected by interactions and relations among its productive agencies?
In post-Fordist and post-human conditions of creative and artistic labour, what is the impact of collaborative realms on the production of aesthetic and cultural discourses?
To what extent can we link the value of cultural and artistic production to the specificities of the relations underneath it? To which field of relations (collaborators, friends, akin humans?) can we ascribe the specific relation between artists and curators?

The project seeks to write a chapter in the definition of the ontological nature of the relation between two specific productive agencies, curator and artist, and the impact of this relation on aesthetic production.
The conditions underneath creative production will be examined by the analysis of the relations among its productive bodies, considering the consequences of the contemporary modes of production of subjectivity.
The research aims to explore the extent of a relational and collaborative method to be embedded in the processes of definition of new cultural, aesthetic, affective and existential territories.

The research investigates different artistic and curatorial approaches to sociality as a productive skill, and it will be conducted through a series of conversations where communication, based on language and affinities, will be recorded and analysed in a television-like set.


A project by Francesca Brusa


Curators:
Nadja Baldini, Mateo Chacon-Pino, Daniel Morgenthaler, Julia Moritz, Dimitrina Sevova, Agustina Strüngmann

Artists:
Johanna Bruckner, Luc Mattenberger, Mediengruppe Bitnik!, Philemon Otth, Martin Schick, Paulo Wirz

Saturday, 14 May at 18:00h: Public presentation of the outcome of the project “Occasionally Human” by the researcher and the participating artists and curators. With apéro.

Program on Saturday, 14 May 2016
18:00h public interview with Julia Mortiz
18:30h public interview with Paulo Wirz
19:00h public presentation of the research by Francesca Brusa


The project is realized in collaboration with the post-graduate program in Curating at ZHdK. http://oncurating.org



Photo documentation of the event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cornercollege/photos/?tab=album&album_id=566327370214439

Performance {reclaim the twelfth camel} < code of practice by Alexander Tuchaček at the opening of the exhibition "No-where? Now-here! The Molecular Books of Life – Colleges of Unreason" on 17 March at 21:00h.

The work {reclaim the twelfth camel} < code of practice is about an attempt to generate language to reappropriate algorithmic space, a space that has gone amiss, got lost or was just plain stolen from us.

To this end, a special animal is led into the room, a camel that is simultaneously text, image, program, narrative and enactment. The work is about a conflict over distribution that ostensibly is resolved well, balancing everything out again. This apparently good solution however throws the relation between text and enactment out of joint. A third figure, the self-executing shell program that decodes itself from the image of the camel, demands to have its say, all the while writing, or prescribing, the story of the twelfth camel. But who is it that speaks the text of the story, and from what position? Might it not be about an utterly different conflict over distribution, about time and space of the narrative, and about the question of who and how can reclaim the redistribution of this space?

A multiplicity of performers in the form of bots, scripts and figures make their appearance. The project starts out on the opening date on 17 March at 21:00h and will be followed during the exhibition by further protagonists and enactments.

Throughout the event, performance Too expensive and not enough to eat by Sophie Yerly.

Modern science makes us understand the true character of the machine, of rationalization and of standardisation. All of that leads to one thing only: the economy. Economy attempts (is) the symmetricalisation of forces.
Art is to create inequalities.
from Yiannis Isidorou: What Asger Jorn (un)/taught me - a text of 11 positions regarding the movements and tropes of the artist in the symmetrical(ized) world of economy


17:00h Performance The Real On Kawara by San Keller in conversation with his father about his 43 years at the Cantonal Office of Personnel Bern.

San Keller schenkte seinem Vater zur Pensionierung in Anlehnung an On Kawaras «Today Series» den gemalten Bindestrich zwischen seinem ersten (20. April 1965) und letzten (31. Oktober 2008) Arbeitstag beim Kantonalen Personalamt Bern.

San Keller gave as a gift to his father the painted hyphen between his first (20 April 1965) and last (31 October 2008) working day at the Cantonal Office of Personnel Bern, in reference to On Kawara’s “Today Series.”


18:00h Performance A kind of palimpsest by Petra Elena Köhle & Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin, „Pierre Ménard – Autor des Don Quixote“ by Jorge Luis Borges, read by Andreas Storm.


18:45h Performance Dreams come true by Martina-Sofia Wildberger.


19:15h Artist talks by Riikka Tauriainen, Alexander Tuchaček.


Discussion with the artists and the curators. Bar, party.

Anne Käthi Wehrli

Lesung aus Die Frau als Einstiegsloch

Ist es ein Krimi? Forschung? Expedition?
Ein Abenteuer mit Fragen.

Sie ist am ermitteln. Zurzeit beschäftigt sie sich mit dem Raum der Vagina und der Gebärmutter, diesem Leerraum den Frauen hätten.
Phantasien sind hier das Thema. Ich habe bemerkt dass mich insbesondere auch Phantasien und Konzepte über Weiblichkeit von Männern interessieren.
Ich rede hier natürlich vom Penisneid.
Nun will sie das einmal unter die Lupe nehmen.
Was dabei herauskommt ist noch unbekannt.

Die neusten Fassungen des Texts Die Frau als Einstiegsloch, der während der Dauer der Ausstellung geschrieben wird, liegen jeweils zum mitnehmen und lesen auf.
An der Lesung werden zudem weitere Materialien verwendet, und ich stehe natürlich auch für Fragen zur Verfügung.

Jonas Etter

Untitled (Fountain II)

Artist talk. Discussion.