Köln Phantasm


  • 31. March 2017 | 17:45 – 18:00

Lecture Performance, Rheim Alkadhi  (Iraq, USA)

Referencing ongoing research interests along the lines of transgender and queer sexualities, migration and displacement, otherwise obscured object narratives, and urgent bodily economies of belonging-in-transit, the project finally coalesced as a response to the infamous assaults and thefts last year at the Cologne Central Station on New Year’s Eve. The work engages perceived nationalist anxieties regarding physical proximity; the encroachment of the rest of the world upon the exclusive „family“ of nations (the West and all those who aspire to emulate it), and the function of borders as devices preserving the construction of a national, inevitably racial elite. The result probes the characterization of foreignness as monolithic, hypersexualized, dark, and masculine; abstraction of masses, seas, influxes, and populations; assault, rape, or theft on that night as an attack against the state (conflating rape with the petty thefts of wallets and cellphones); and finally the classical ideal of the female body as a symbolic appropriation of a fraternal order, the church, and the national economy. The phantasm enters our line of sight, counterposing as a blinding amalgamation, an onslaught of everything both desired and feared whereby exposure induces unprecedented economies of vision after having gone blind.

 

Photo: Akademie Schloss Solitude