CONTRIBUTIONS BY
Nabil Ahmed
Nabil Ahmed is an artist and researcher working on environmental violence and forensic architecture. His writings have appeared in academic journals, magazines, and various art and architecture publications such as Third Text, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Volume and South Magazine – documenta 14. More recently he has been part of the Anthropocene Project at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennial. He lives and works in London.
Lecture: Inter-Pacific Ring Tribunal
(Friday, March 31, 10 – 10:45 a.m.)
Rheim Alkadhi
Rheim Alkadhi is a visual artist who operates under growing conditions of impermanence, maintaining a practice that is transient, portable, and formulated site-specifically, with regard to socio- and bio-political geographies. Exhibitions include the current Shanghai Biennale, Qalandiya International (2016), the Asia Pacific Triennial (2015), and the Sharjah Biennial (2015). She was recently a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, and then at the Autonomes Culture Centrum (ACC) in Weimar, where a diverse selection of her projects is now on view until May, 7, 2017. She is currently based in Berlin.
Lecture Performance: Köln Phantasm
(Friday, March 31, 5:45 – 6:05 p.m.)
Credit: Eleonore de Bonneval
John Barker
John Barker has written extensively on political economy for over forty years, as well as writing fiction and a memoir. A partial archive of this work can be found at www.theharrier.net.
Lecture Performance: Monarchs of Time and Space
(Friday, March 31, 3:15 – 4 p.m.)
Keti Chukhrov
The philosopher Keti Chukhrov (National Research University, Higher School of Economics [HSE], Moscow) is an associate professor in the Department of Cultural Theory at the HSE, head of the theory department at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) in Moscow. Her research interests are the ontology of performing, comparative epistemologies of socialism and capitalism, art systems, and post-human studies. She has authored numerous texts on art theory, cultural politics, and philosophy. Book-length publications include: To Be – To Perform: “Theatre” in Philosophical Criticism of Art (2011); Pound &£ (1999); and a volume of dramatic writing, Just Humans (2010). She is currently finishing the book on the interpretation of the notion of “the ideal” in the Soviet Marxist philosophy of 1960s and 1970s.
Lecture: How to Evade the Envy of the Servant and the Benevolence of the Master
(Saturday, April 1, 10:45 – 11:30 a.m.)
Katja Diefenbach
Katja Diefenbach is Professor of Aesthetic Theory at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart. Her research interests are French philosophy and the epistemology of the twentieth century, with a special focus on the relations between Marxism and Poststructuralism. She is co-editor of the volume Encountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought (Bloomsbury, 2013). In 2017, her book Politik der Potentialität: Spinoza im Postmarxismus will be published by Turia & Kant. She has taught at various universities, such as the Berlin University of the Arts, Humboldt University, and the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. She is a member of the circle of editors involved in the Berlin publishing association b_books.
Lecture: Politics in the Fourth Person Singular
(Sunday, April 2, 11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.)
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Denise Ferreira da Silva’s academic writings and artistic practice address the ethical questions of the global present and target the metaphysical and onto-epistemological dimensions of modern thought. Currently, she is an Associate Professor and Director of The Social Justice Institute (the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice) at the University of British Columbia.
Her recent academic publications include the edited volume Race, Empire, and The Crisis of the Subprime (with Paula Chakravartty, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), as well as the articles “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Towards the End of the World” (The Black Scholar, 2014) and “The Racial Limits of Social Justice: The Ruse of Equality of Opportunity and the Global Affirmative Action Mandate” (Critical Ethnic Studies, 2016). Her art-related work includes texts for publications linked to the 2016 Liverpool and São Paulo biennales, advising Natasha Ginwala, the curator for the Contour 8 Biennale (Mechelen, 2017), as well as events (performances, talks, and private sessions) and texts that are part of her own practice, Poethical Readings (in collaboration with Valentina Desideri).
Lecture: Speculations on a Transformative Theory of Justice
(Friday, March 31, 4:15 – 5 p.m.)
Credit: Enrico Incerti
Mohammad Abu Hajar
Mohammad Abu Hajar is a Syrian rap artist. The political content of his songs got him arrested and incarcerated in his country. He started his career as a rapper in 2004, as one of Syria’s first rappers. His first song was motivated by the coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then, in 2007, he formed Mazzaj, together with two other musicians, to be the first Syrian band in Tartous, his hometown on the coastal side of the country. By 2012, after being sought by the secret service, he fled to Rome, where he finished his master’s degree in political economics (focusing on the economic effects of immigration). In summer 2014, the artist moved to Berlin and asked for political asylum.
Lecture Performance: Art, Revolution Asylum: How to Decolonize
(Thursday, March 30, 7:00 – 7:45 p.m.)
Peter Haury
Peter Haury (born 1966) is an artist, activist and engages in the non-profit art education sector, with a focus on participative art. He is a part-time art teacher at a secondary school.
Moderation: Workshop 3
(Friday, March 31, 10:45 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.)
Moderation: Workshop 3
(Saturday, April 1, 10:45 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.)
Credit: Elke Hammelstein
Srećko Horvat
Srećko Horvat (born 1983 in Osijek) is a philosopher and political activist. He has published ten books translated into more than fifteen languages, most recently What Does Europe Want? with Slavoj Žižek (Columbia University Press, 2014) and The Radicality of Love (Polity, 2015). His articles are regularly published in The Guardian, The New York Times, and Newsweek. He is one of the founders of the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM 2025) with Greece’s ex-finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.
Lecture: Europe: The Coming War or the Coming Insurrection?
(Friday, March 31, 6:15 – 7 p.m.)
Credit: Miquel Taverna
Credit: Sandra Then-Friedrich
Schorsch Kamerun
Schorsch Kamerun (born in 1963 in Timmendorfer Strand) is a founding member and singer of the Hamburg-based band Die Goldenen Zitronen (The Golden Lemons). Together with Rocko Schamoni and “Wiener-Norbert,” he founded the Golden Pudel Club in Hamburg. Since 2000 he has been working as a theater director and author. He has staged productions at many venues, including the Deutscher SchauSpielHaus Hamburg, Schauspielhaus Zürich, Münchner Kammerspiele, Volksbühne in Berlin, Staatsschauspiel Stuttgart, Wiener Festwochen in Vienna, the Ruhrtriennale, and the Bayrische Staatsoper in Munich. For his WDR radio play Ein Menschenbild, das in seiner Summe Null ergibt, Kamerun received the “Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden“ in 2007. He was a guest professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and has traveled for various projects in Europa, America, Namibia, Japan, Belarus, and Lebanon. In 2016, his first novel, Die Jugend ist die schönste Zeit des Lebens, was published.
Lecture Performance: No Color Colorful
(Sunday, April 2, 3 – 3:45 p.m.)
Hilary Koob-Sassen
Hilary Koob-Sassen is a filmmaker and sculptor. Working with and across text, song, sculpture, film, animation and performance, he creates systems in which deeply researched inventions in finance, biology, politics and philosophy work together to strategize and enact the future structure.
Lecture Performance: How to Conquer Infrastructure Space and Colonize the Scalar Niche
(Thursday, March 30, 9 – 9:45 p.m.)
PeterLicht
With his work, Peter navigates the poles of text, music, pop, art, social sculpture, capitalism, and bargin markets. In addition to music albums and books, he performs theater texts and productions in cities like Munich, Basel, and Berlin. Since early 2016 he has been writing a weekly column for the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. His music albums include: 14 Lieder (2001); Stratosphärenlieder (2003); Lieder vom Ende des Kapitalismus (2006); Melancholie und Gesellschaft (2008); Das Ende der Beschwerde (2011); and Lob der Realität (2014).
Book publications: Wir werden siegen! Buch vom Ende des Kapitalismus (Munich, 2006); Die Geschichte meiner Einschätzung am Anfang des Dritten Jahrtausends: Erzählung, (Munich, 2008); Lob der Realität (Berlin, 2014). Also, at Theater Basel he performed in Der Menschenfeind, which premiered in 2016. In 2007, he was awarded the 3sat Prize and the Audience Award of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.
Lecture Performance: Emotionals Come Rally
(Friday, March 31, 7:30 – 8:15 p.m.)
Florian Malzacher
Florian Malzacher has been the Artistic Director of Impulse Theater Festival (Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Mulheim/Ruhr) since 2012, as well as an independent performing arts curator, dramaturge, and writer. Among his latest publications are: Curating Performing Arts (2010, co-edited with Tea Tupajić and Petra Zanki), Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics (2014, co-edited with steirischer herbst), and Not Just a Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre of Today (2015).
Moderation: Workshop 1
(Friday, March 31, 11:45 a.m. – 1.30 p.m.)
Moderation: Workshop 1
(Saturday, April 1, 11:45 a.m. – 1.30 p.m.)
Credit: Robin Junicke
Katrin Mundt
Katrin Mundt is an independent curator and author who has worked on many film screenings and exhibitions for, among others, WKV Stuttgart, HMKV Dortmund, PACT Zollverein, Essen and numerous festivals; as jury member/programmer for EMAF Osnabrück, Videonale, Bonn and Duisburger Filmwoche. Besides regular book contributions, she recently published a volume on documentary in film and art called Ortsbestimmungen: Das Dokumentarische zwischen Kino und Kunst (2015, co-edited with Eva Hohenberger).
Moderation: Workshop 2
(Friday, March 31, 11:45 a.m. – 1.30 p.m.)
Moderation: Workshop 2
(Saturday, April 1, 11:45 a.m. – 1.30 p.m.)
Moderation: Final Debate
(Sunday, April 2, 1:00 p.m. – 2.00 p.m.)
MTL Collective
Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain are MTL Collective, a collaboration that joins research, aesthetics and action in its practice. Nitasha is a visual artist based in New York and New Delhi. She has a BA in Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and has attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and the School of the International Center of Photography. Nitasha is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Media Study, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Amin is a Palestinian-American lawyer, artist, and organizer based in New York. He has a BA in Philosophy, a JD from Indiana University Law School, and an LLM in Law from Columbia University. He practiced law for five years before transitioning to art, studying at the School of the International Center of Photography and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Amin currently teaches at the Gallatin and Steinhardt Schools at New York University and PRATT’s Graduate Writing Program.
Lecture Performance (Gulf Labor Coalition / MTL Collective): Art and the Practice of Freedom
(Saturday, April 1, 3:15 – 4:30 p.m.)
Credit: Ivan Hrkaš
Neue Dringlichkeit
Bojan Djordjev is a performance-maker from Belgrade, educated in theater and art theory at the Unversity of Arts in Belgrade and DasArts in Amsterdam. As an artist, he is interested in interdisciplinary text/language-based performance and performative potentials of theory. Apart from Belgrade, his works have been shown in Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam, New York, Vienna, Zurich, Zagreb, Rijeka, Ljubljana. He is one of the co-founders of TkH – Walking Theory theoretical and artistic platform and journal for performing arts theory, Belgrade. His recent works revolve around finding artistic and theatrical public formats for Marxist thought, as well as research into the artistic heritage of the Left in Yugoslavia and elsewhere.
Maja Leo is a curator and theater-maker based in Zurich, Switzerland and Hamburg, Germany. She works in the field of artistic research with a focus on collective production of knowledge in the performing arts.
Maja is co-founder of the Zurich-based art and performance collective Neue Dringlichkeit. Their works have been shown at Venice Biennale of Architecture (2014); ifa-Gallery, Stuttgart (2016); Shedhalle, Zurich (2017); Gessnerallee Zürich (2017); Favoriten Theater Festival, Dortmund (2014); and more. Since 2015 Maja has also worked as a project manager and curator for artasfoundation, a Swiss foundation for art in regions of conflict.
Lecture Performance: SAID TO CONTAIN:
(Sunday, April 2, 11 – 11:45 a.m.)
Workshop 4: SAID TO CONTAIN:
(Friday, March 31, 10:45 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.)
Credit: Ivan Hrkaš
Annette Ohme-Reinicke
Annette Ohme-Reinicke has a PhD in philosophy, is lecturer at the Institute for Philosophy at the University of Stuttgart. She is co-founder of the Hannah-Arendt-Institute, Stuttgart and chair of Die AnStifter, Stuttgart.
Publications: Bürgerbeteiligung – Entpolitisierung durch Politik? In: Jörg Radtke, Lars Holstenkamp (Editors): Handbuch Energiewende und Partizipation. Springer VS: Wiesbaden (to be published shortly); Vom Maschinensturm zur Schlichtung? Zur Bedeutung von Technikparadigmen in der Konstitution sozialer Bewegungen. In: Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, 27.Jg., 4/2014, S 30-39; Das große Unbehagen. Die Protestbewegung gegen Stuttgart 21" – Aufbruch zu neuem bürgerschaftlichen Selbstbewusstsein? Stuttgart: Schmetterling-Verlag, 2012.
Workshop 4: Trump as Class Warrior?
(Saturday, April 1, 11:45 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.)
Boris Ondreička
Boris Ondreička (born in 1969) is an artist and author; since 1987 a singer and lyrics-writer of the lo-fi band Kosa z nosa, since 2002–2011 director of the art initiative tranzit.sk, and since 2012 curator at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna. He has co-curated Rare Earth, Supper Club, Tomorrow Morning Line, Olafur Eliasson’s “Green light: An artistic workshop,” and five seasons of the frequence of spoken-word Ephemeropteræ, all for TBA21, Manifesta 8, Murcia, Cartagena, Being The Future, Palast der Republik, Berlin, Symposion / The Event, Birmingham, Auditorium, Stage, Backstage, Frankfurter Kunstverein, individual projects of Lois & Franziska Weinberger, Stano Filko, Andreas Neumeister, Július Koller, Denisa Lehocká, Zbyněk Baladrán, and more. He co-founded The Society of Július Koller. His artistic projects have been exhibited at many international biennials, museums, and exhibition spaces. His HI! lo. was published by tranzit / jrp|ringier, and One Second / Out of Time by Revolver. Most recently, he has curated The Question of Will, OSF, Bratislava, and is completing the retrospective of his writings (to date).
Lecture Performance: The Poem on Emptiness
(Saturday, April 1, 7:30 – 8:15 p.m.)
Dan Perjovschi
Dan Perjovschi has exhibited his work in the most important venues worldwide. His transient drawings on the walls of exhibition spaces are cultivated from the many notebooks that over the years have given rise to an archive of sorts to which the artist can take recourse. Moreover, new sketchbooks are created in conjunction with various projects. The fall of the Ceaușescu regime in Romania in 1989 presented a society, which up to that point had been totally monitored and controlled, with the immense challenge of relearning and democratically balancing freedom of speech and expression. The visual arts accompanied this period of upheaval, and the efforts made to erect a new society, with actions and performances. In addition to an older generation of artists, who had been isolated from public life in their private homes and worked only for a small group of friends, such as Ion Grigorescu, Constantin Flondor, and Teodor Graur, now a young avant-garde was taking root, which included the artist couple Lia Perjovschi and Dan Perjovschi.
In situ work
(ongoing)
Credit: Dan Perjovschi
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University and one of the founding members of the Karrabing Film Collective. She is the author of five books, including Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Duke, 2016), and the director of three Karrabing films. Her work focuses on the sources of the otherwise in Late Liberalism.
Lecture: After Antagonism and Solidarity: Tailings, Embankments, and Strainings
(Saturday, April 1, 6:15 – 7 p.m.)
David Quigley
Professor for Cultural Theory at the Merz Academy Stuttgart.
Party
(Saturday, April 1, after 11 p.m.)
Simon Sheikh
Simon Sheikh is a curator and writer who researches practices of exhibition-making and political imaginaries. He is Reader in Art and Programme Director of MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Sheikh was coordinator of the Critical Studies Program at Malmö Art Academy, from 2002–2009. He was also curator at NIFCA, Helsinki, in 2003–2004 and, prior to that, director of Overgaden – Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen from 1999–2002. His recent curatorial work includes: Reading / Capital (for Althusser), DEPO, Istanbul, 2014; Unauthorized, Inter Arts Lab, Malmö, 2012; All That Fits: The Aesthetics of Journalism, QUAD, Derby, 2011 (with Alfredo Cramerotti); Do You Remember the Future?, TOK / Project Loft Etagi, Saint Petersburg, 2011. Sheikh lives and works in Berlin and London.
Lecture: Under Siege: Contemporary Art and Its Values after the Social
(Saturday, April , 10 – 10:45 a.m.)
Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Shuddhabrata Sengupta is an artist, filmmaker, and writer with the Raqs Media Collective. Raqs has exhibited widely, including at Documenta and the biennales in Venice, Istanbul, Taipei, Liverpool, Shanghai, Sydney, and São Paulo. Sengupta is one of the initiators of Sarai. His recent work involves textual explorations of aesthetics, surveillance, and cyberculture. He is currently working on a series of new media and digital culture projects at the Sarai Media Lab. He is the current Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism (2015–16) with the Center for Curatorial Studies (Hessel Museum of Art) and the Human Rights Program at Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, New York.
Lecture: How to Conduct a Planchette on the Ghost of Money:
(Thursday, March 30, 8 – 8:45 p.m.)
Tools for Action
Founded by Artúr van Balen in 2012, the ensemble operates as an open participatory platform, facilitated by its core members Artúr van Balen, Katherine Ball and Malcolm Kratz. Workshops, interventions, and exhibitions have included a mirror barricade the prevention of a neo-Nazi march in Dortmund (2016), the UN Climate Summits in Paris, Warsaw and Cancun (2015, 2013, and 2011), the Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2014), People’s Climate March in New York (2014), an LGBTQ intervention into the Vis Swimming Competition in Croatia (2014), an intervention at the state television broadcast of Hungary (2013), a women’s rights campaign against gang rape in India (2013) and an anti-corruption demonstration in Moscow (2013).
Lecture Performance: Air as Resistance
(Saturday, April 1, 5:45 – 6:05 p.m.)
Workshop: Air as Resistance
(Sunday, April 2, 10:45 a.m. 12:45 p.m.)
Photo: Artúr van Balen
Enrique Matías Viale
Enrique Matías Viale earned his law degree from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). He then pursued a postgraduate degree at the same university and specialized in environmental law. In the year 2004, he founded the Argentinian Association of Environmental Lawyers (AAdeAA). Viale is a critical opponent of the development model based on unlimited growth and he advocates for the rights of nature and the environment. He is a member of the Ethics Tribunal on the Rights of Nature and Mother Earth and the Earth Law Alliance. Belonging to the latter organization are specialized lawyers throughout the world. In his role as jurist, he works to fight against countless instances of damage to the environment caused by humans and campaigns for restoration/regeneration of these areas. He is active in citizens’ initiatives and participates in mass gatherings that try to defend their countries/areas from exploitation through mining, tracking, agricultural profiteering, real-estate speculation, and other extreme forms. Furthermore, he has authored various professional articles on the topics of development, politics, and environmental law; and in view of these “misdevelopments,” he has authored various books in collaboration with the sociologist Maristella Svampa.
Lecture: Abberation: Resistance Against and Alternatives to Extractivism
(Saturday, April 1, 4:15 – 5 p.m.)
We Cannot Build What We Cannot First Imagine
Thiago de Paula Souza is an educator and curator who lives in the outskirts of São Paulo. His current research is on the depiction of art from South America and the African Diaspora in the the German-speaking context. This research will soon extend to non-Western contexts where he will investigate how the art communities engage in the deconstruction of hegemonic readings of histories.
Jota Mombaça is a non-binary Bicha, born and raised in the Northeast of Brazil, who writes, performs and carries out academic studies about the relations between monstrosity and humanity, anti-coloniality, redistribution of violence and visionary fiction.
Lecture Performance: Racial Politics of Opacity
(Friday, March 31, 10:45 – 11 a.m.)
(Thiago Paula de Souza)