Past events

January 17, 2023 – Quantity, Quality, Trust: Dilemmas and Strategies of Museum Documentation in the Age of AI – Lynn Rother, Fabio Mariani and Max Koss

Lecture 

As the digital transformation in the cultural heritage domain unfolds, the responsibility of
museums to document and be transparent no longer applies only to human users but also
to artificial users. For instance, to facilitate the return of objects to their rightful owners,
museums should publish information about the ownership history of their collections
(i.e., the provenance) not only as text but also as data that is machine-readable and
compliant with FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability).
Institutions face a dilemma in digitizing their collection information. Although museums
have already recorded much of the information to be converted into data, it is in the form
of free text and is insufficiently structured. While rerecording this information by hand in a
standard, machine-readable format would require a significant investment of resources and
time, fully automating the data-structuring process would call into question the quality of
the data produced, with the risk of perpetuating historical biases and omissions.
Focusing on museum provenance information, this paper illustrates how the use of AI
models for natural language processing tasks can help institutions automatically structure
provenance texts as linked open data. Finally, considering not only quantitative but also
qualitative needs, the paper describes how expert users can critically intervene in data
production through a human-in-the-loop approach.

The lecture will take place as part of the online conference "The Art Museum in the Digital Age - 2024". More information and registration on the conference website.

January 12, 2023 – Provenance loves Wiki

Conference

Die Provenienzforschung widmet sich der Geschichte der Herkunft (Provenienz) von Kunstwerken und Kulturgütern von ihrer Entstehung bis heute. In der Praxis hat sie besondere Relevanz gewonnen durch die notwendigen Aufarbeitungen von Raubkunst, Beutekunst und politisch bedingter Beschlagnahme durch die Nationalsozialisten und auch in anderen Kontexten. In diesem Zusammenhang kam es in der jüngeren Vergangenheit unter anderem zur Restitution von Raubkunst sowie den Rückgaben von Kulturgut kolonialer Herkunft. Die personellen und finanziellen Ressourcen für die notwendige Aufarbeitung an Museen und in der Wissenschaft sind allerdings sehr begrenzt und der Aufwand sowie die schiere Menge an Kunstwerken ist enorm. Bei der Provenienzforschung entstehen sehr große Mengen von Daten, die zu bearbeiten sind.

Im Rahmen einer Online-Veranstaltung und Paneldiskussion der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kunstwissenschaften + Wikipedia zum Thema „Digitale Provenienzforschung“ wurde der Wunsch und Bedarf signalisiert, dass es zu einer engeren Zusammenarbeit zwischen Provenienzwissenschaftler*innen, Mitgliedern der AG kuwiki und Freiwilligen kommen sollte. Vor allem die Möglichkeiten, die Wikibase und Wikidata in diesem Zusammenhang eröffnen, standen dabei im Fokus. In bisherigen Gesprächen wurden verschiedene Möglichkeiten diskutiert, wie Wikipedia und vor allem Wikidata als Tools für die Erfassung, Verwaltung, Bearbeitung und Darstellung von Provenienzen von Kunstwerken genutzt und in die aktive Provenienzforschung eingebunden werden können. Auch das Potenzial von Freiwilligen zur Unterstützung (Citizen Science) und das Potenzial durch offene und freie Datenbestände (Open Data) wurde diskutiert. Um diese Diskussion zu vertiefen und mögliche Zusammenarbeiten zu eruieren und zu starten, wurde ein Treffen zwischen Kunstwissenschaftler*innen, Provenienzforscher*innen und in den entsprechenden Themenbereichen der Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons und Wikidata aktiven Freiwilligen vorgeschlagen und beschlossen.

Auf dem Treffen Provenance loves Wiki, 12.–14. Januar 2024, in Berlin wurden sowohl grundsätzliche Fragen zu den Möglichkeiten der Wikimedia-Projekte und die Optionen der Zusammenarbeit ausgelotet als auch praktische Probleme, die bei der Nutzung von Wikidata im Verwalten von Provenienzdaten bereits aufgetaucht sind, sowie Bedarfe der Wissenschaftler*innen und Freiwilligen in diesem Bereich diskutiert und Lösungen gesucht.

Programm

Roundtable und Empfang

Veranstaltungsort: Technische Universität Berlin, Architekturgebäude/Institut für Kunstwissenschaft und Historische Urbanistik, Hörsaal A053, Straße des 17. Juni 150/152, 10623 Berlin & online
Veranstaltungszeitraum: Freitag, 12. Januar 2024, Beginn: 18.15 Uhr, Dauer: 90 min
Teilnehmer:innen: Larissa Borck, Meike Hopp, Tobias Matzner, Lynn Rother, Bénédicte Savoy, Moderation: Lambert Heller

Internationaler Workshop

Arbeitstreffen zum Einsatz von Wikipedia und Wikidata/Wikibase in der Provenienzforschung sowie Problemen und Herausforderungen bei der Darstellung von Provenienzdaten in Wikidata
Veranstaltungsort: Wikimedia Deutschland in Berlin
Veranstaltungszeitraum: Samstag, 13. Januar 2024, 10–12.30, 13.30-17.30 Uhr, Sonntag, 14. Januar 2024, 10–12.30, 13.30-t.b.d.
mit: Magnus Manske, Multichill

Wikipedia Einführungskurs

Veranstaltungsort: WikiBär in Berlin
Veranstaltungszeitraum: Samstag, 13. Januar 2024, 14-17 Uhr

Sowohl die öffentliche Abendveranstaltung wie auch das Arbeitstreffen werden auf Englisch stattfinden, um auch internationalen Gästen die Teilnahme zu ermöglichen. Der Workshop im WikiBär findet auf Deutsch statt.

Weitere Informationen auf der Webseite der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kunstwissenschaften + Wikipedia/Provenance loves Wiki

December 19, 2023 – Material Performance - Olympia Bukkakis mit Dagat Mera

Performance

Drag queen and choreographer Olympia Bukkakis presented a version of “Material Performance”. In this piece Olympia worked with, against, for, and under 10 meters of red fabric. This time she was joined by artist and janitor Dagat Mera in a performative exploration of labour conditions, queer aesthetics and the search for leftist, materialist art.

A workshop with Olympia Bukkakis was held the following day, Wednesday 20 December. Both events took place in English.

They were organised by the Center for Critical Studies (CCS) in cooperation with the Kunstraum and the Gender and Diversity Research Network.

Queen of the Heavens and of the Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering, Olympia Bukkakis is a drag queen, choreographer, moderator, and writer living and working in Berlin. Since graduating from the SODA masters at the HZT she has premiered a number of new works including, Gender Euphoria (2019), Work on Progress(2019), Under Pressures (2019), A Touch of the Other (2020), Too Much (2021), and replay (2023). Her practice is situated within, and inspired by, the tensions and intersections between queer nightlife and contemporary dance and performance. Website: www.olympiabukkakis.com

Dagat Mera moved from Mainz to Hamburg after graduating from high school in 2021 and is active there both artistically and politically. His focus is storytelling through visual and time-based media. In addition, he gave various creative workshops and workshops on political education. Since 2022 he studies at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HfBK).

December 12, 2023 CCS – Colloquium - Mimmi Woisnitza and Anna Kipke

The Center for Critical Studies research colloquium takes place three times a semester, with CCS members invited to present their research in progress.

In this session, Mimmi Woisnitza presented the following paper: “Zur Porosität historischer Darstellung: Asja Lācis’ Revolutionäre Theaterpraxis 1917-1937". Furthermore Anna Kipke presented a project with the title "Krise, Intervention, Heilung. Über (Lebensformen in) künstlerischen Praktiken des Therapeutischen".

The Center for Critical Studies colloquium is organised by Heiko Stubenrauch and Liza Mattutat.

This meeting of the colloquium will take place in German/English.

Website:

https://www.leuphana.de/en/research-centers/center-for-critical-studies/colloquium.html

December 6, 2023 –  Podiumsdiskussion: Vom Unrechtskontext zur Kooperation? Über den Umgang mit dem kolonialen Erbe

Panel discussion

Karl Braun war von 1904 bis 1920 leitender Botaniker am Amani Institut im damaligen Deutsch-Ostafrika, dem heutigen Tansania. Als er Afrika verließ, hatte er 2670 Kilogramm an Objekten im Gepäck, die er zusammengetragen hatte: Alltagsgegenstände, Waffen, Instrumente und Textilien. Kurz vor seinem Tod schenkte er die umfassende Sammlung der Stadt Stade. Diese fast 600 Objekte erzählen nicht nur von präkolonialen Kulturen, sondern auch von ihren Erwerbskontexten und den Machtasymmetrien eines kolonialen Wissenstransfers. Der Direktor der Museen Stade, Dr. Sebastian Möllers, war überzeugt: Braun hat sich die Objekte durch Ankauf und Schenkungen angeeignet – „in einem kolonialen Unrechtskontext“. Wie soll heute damit umgegangen werden? Zu diesem Zweck realisierte Möllers eine Kooperation mit dem National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) .
Darüber diskutierte er mit seiner Kollegin, der Direktorin des Museums Lüneburg, Prof. Dr. Heike Düselder, der Kunsthistorikerin von der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Prof. Dr. Susanne Leeb, sowie mit Dyoniz Kindata aus Tansania. Er forscht an der Leuphana über die Presse in Tansania und postkoloniale Studien.

Die Veranstaltung warTeil der Diskursreihe Ethik im Gespräch.

Weitere Informationen zur Veranstaltung finden Sie auf dem Plakat zur Reihe Ethik im Gespräch.

November 22, 2023 – Bread and Rose Perfume: politics of abundance and pleasure against precarity – Wilson Sherwin

Lecture

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the peak of the Vietnam war, poor Black welfare recipients across the United States organized to demand not only access to the welfare provisions to which they were already entitled, but the expansion of those benefits beyond simple needs. Examining unfinished project of the welfare rights movement and its remarkable antiwork politics, provides insights into how capaciously defined needs and desires may help usher us beyond capitalism and towards alternative social and economic arrangements.

Born and raised in New York City, Wilson Sherwin, PhD (she, her) has worked as an electrician, a nanny, a translator, and a documentary film producer. She is currently a sociologist who writes and teaches about social movements, political economy, and public policy. Wilson is a research fellow at Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society. 

A cooperation between Center for Critical Studies, Kunstraum and the Gender and Diversity Network

November 16, 2023  – The Digital Revolution as Counter-Revolution

Workshop

Far from its initial promise, the so-called digital revolution has given way to reactionary politics. So far, it has served extractive and cognitive capitalist accumulation, combining exploitation and appropriation, leading to the acceleration of the restructuring of representational government mechanisms. At this moment we are faced with the virtual and present entangled into a hybrid reality, when intricate mediation systems are mistaken for direct contact, histories and realities intertwine. Taking its cue from both the realities of the really-existing digital world, and its relation to image-making, as well as from the archaeology of the digital, the workshop explored the actuality of the digital, where derivatives, algorithms, meta-data, AI, and the likes - all non-visual entities, unattainable by the human eye - provide the perfect example to what Frederic Jameson has called a crisis of representation. With these, power becomes unattainable to the human eye, leading to new forms of aestheticization of politics.

Program

Thursday 16.11.23

Session 1
15:00-17:00

Susanne Leeb
The Digital Image Research Program

Joshua Simon
The Digital Revolution as Counter-Revolution

Ana Teixeira Pinto
AI in Fiction – A Brief Prehistory
 

Session 2
17:00-19:00

Antonia Majaca
Three Notes: Irrationalism, New Materialism, Techno-vitalism

Daniel Nemenyi
Simulating Counterinsurgencies in the Sixties: The Case of Project CAM
 

Friday 17.11.23

Session 3
10:00-12:00

Noam Yuran
Prurient Puritanism: Sex and Ownership and Capital

Zachary Formwalt
Capture and the Noncapitalist Milieu
 

Session 4
14:00-17:00

Elena Vogman and Olexii Kuchanskyi
Mental Ecologies of War: A Proposition for an Ecosophic Gaze

David Riff
Beyond Ressentiment

Priority Program The Digital Image, Project: Jameson 2.0. Cognitive Mapping in Contemporary Art
https://www.digitalesbild.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/en/elementor-22433/

July 7-8, 2023 – Drafts in Action. Concepts and Practices of Artistic Interventions

Workshop

With Raphael Daibert / Agata Jakubowska / Amelia Jones / Anna Kipke / Iryna Kovalenko / Premesh Lalu / Rachel Mader / Natalia Moussienko / Alia Rayyan / Laura Rogalski / María Laura Rosa / Franka Schäfer / Valeria Schulte-Fischedick / Paula Serafini / Beate Söntgen / Simon Teune / Annette Werberger / Mimmi Woisnitza

The international workshop examined different modulations of artistic-intervening practices using concrete case studies from the 1920s to the present, encompassing objective planning and practice in their respective geographical-historical setting.

When talking about artistic positions that intervene in social crisis structures, the following questions arise: How do interventionist goals relate to the respective forms and practices of (re)presentation? Does practice follow theory, or conversely, does the artistic process shape the objective? Is there an explicit agenda, for instance in the form of a manifesto, or does the interventionist concern manifest itself in the artistic form or in its modes of production or design? How do artistic-interventionist objectives translate into practice and how, conversely, does the respective practice change the aims inscribed in it? Where do practices transgress or rupture the frameworks of their objectives? What role do processes of institutionalization play in this? What influence do different media have and which audiences and publics are called upon, addressed, or generated by which means?

At the same time, the questions above concern the methodological approach to practices of artistic intervention: Which modes of representation and writing can be used to describe the practices in their respective situatedness? How can we extend the analytical tools provided by the individual scholarly disciplines? In the sections manifesto, collectivity, and forms of documentation, we discussed these questions with speakers from different fields of expertise and practice such as art history, curation, sociology, and cultural studies.

The international workshop „Drafts in Action. Concepts and Practices of Artistic Interventions“ is organized by Anna Kipke, Iryna Kovalenko, Laura Rogalski, Beate Söntgen, Simon Teune, Annette Werberger, and Mimmi Woisnitza.

An Event of the Collaborative Research Centre 1512 “Intervening Arts” and the DFG Research Training Group “Cultures of Critique” in Cooperation with the ICI Berlin.

July 7, 2023 – Amelia Jones "Performing Absence as Intervention: The Case of Lee Lozano"

Lecture

The artist has long been understood in conventional Western art history, art criticism, and curatorial practice as the site of active agency, the origin of the meaning and value of the work of art. By the later twentieth century, during a period of social crisis across Europe and North America, however, theorists such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida put pressure on this model. At the same time artists began mobilizing their agency in radically different ways as part of a broad societal challenging of Western hegemony, patriarchal and white dominant models of subjectivity, and structures of power more generally. Jones examined one extreme example of such a mobilization from the 1960s New York art world — the case of American woman artist Lee Lozano, who ostentatiously proclaimed her plan to “drop out” and leave this vibrant scene at the height of her career — to explore how artistic authorship itself could be seen as a key site for the inter- rogation of power in the world. The case of Lozano allows to pose the question: is a performance of withdrawal from art institutions the ultimate intervention in a period of social crisis? Or was she effectively “copping out” just at the moment when many of her colleagues (for example, in New York, feminists such as her friend Lucy Lippard, and the anti-racist protestors participating in the 1970 Art Strike) were publicly agitating on the streets and in the museums for equity and inclusion?

Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor at Roski School of Art & Design, USC. Publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012) and Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, co-edited with Erin Silver (2016). Her catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey (2020) was listed among the “Best Art Books 2020” in the NY Times, and the curated show was listed among Top Ten 2021 exhibitions in Artforum (December 2021). Her book entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance was published in 2021. Her current work addresses the structural racism and neoliberalism of the twenty- first-century art world and university.

Moderated by Christopher Weickenmeier and Mimmi Woisnitza.

The public keynote lecture is part of the international workshop „Drafts in Action. Concepts and Practices of Artistic Interventions“, July 7–8, 2023, organized by Anna Kipke, Iryna Kovalenko, Laura Rogalski, Beate Söntgen, Simon Teune, Annette Werberger, and Mimmi Woisnitza.

An Event of the Collaborative Research Centre 1512 “Intervening Arts” and the DFG-Research Training Group “Cultures of Critique” in Cooperation with the ICI Berlin.

June 23-24, 2023 – art thinking doing art. Artistic Practices in Educational Contexts from 1900 to Today

Conference

Die Tagung"art thinking doing art. Artistic Practices in Educational Contexts from 1900 to Today" eröffnete eine historische wie auch zeitgenössische Untersuchung der Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Kunsterziehung, Kunstproduktion und ideologischen Kontexten. Mit Beiträgen von Wissenschaftlern aus zwölf verschiedenen Ländern nahm dieses Projekt eine einzigartig breite Perspektive auf die Frage der Kunsterziehung ein, indem es den Prozess der "knowledgization" auch epistemologisch in breiteren Diskussionen über die (Inter-)Materialität, (Gegen-)Institutionalität und (Trans-)Disziplinarität künstlerischer Praktiken verortete und anhand empirischer Fallstudien deren historische Dimension in verschiedenen geopolitischen Kontexten für den Zeitraum von ca. 1900 bis heute untersuchte.

Über die gesamte Veranstaltung hinweg waren künstlerische Perspektiven beteiligt. Sie entfalteten einen Interventionsraum, dessen grundlegendes Merkmal darin bestand, explorativ zu sein. Die Intervening Lecture des Raqs Media Collectives, die unauffällig in die wissenschaftliche Vortragsreihe integriert ist, und die ständige Präsenz des Kollektivs in Workshops während der Veranstaltung wirkten einer monoperspektivischen Ausrichtung der Diskussionen von vornherein entgegen.

Key Lectures: Benjamin Buchloh und Tom Holert.

Weitere Vorträge: Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Nicola Foster, Tom Holert, Annette Jael Lehmann, Jeffrey Saletnik, Emily Ruth Capper, Rebecca Sprowl, Noa Sadka. Kurzpräsentationen: Dennis Brzek, Patrick Düblin, Chloë Julius, Louisa Lee, Izabelle Louise, Isabel Nogueira, Delphine Paul, Sarah Poppel, Marie-Christine Schoel, Isabel Seliger, Burak Üzümkesici, Barbara Vujanović, Jake Watts.

Detaillierte Informationen entnehmen Sie dem Programm.

Konzipiert, geplant und organisiert wurde das Projekt von Sandra Neugärtner. Die Durchführung wird von Anna Brus unterstützt. Das Projekt wird gefördert durch den Sonderforschungsbereich 1512 "Intervenierende Künste" (DFG), die Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, die Universität der Künste Berlin und die Universität zu Köln.

June 22, 2023 – Tracing the Unknown: Learning from Provenance Data –  Lynn Rother

Lecture

Recent restitution and decolonization efforts have shown that provenance has emancipated itself from being a subordinate cataloging task in museums and the art market to a self-conscious scientific endeavor with ethical and legal implications. While the minutiae of ownership and socio-economic custody changes are increasingly recorded digitally, they have yet to be analyzed on a large scale as provenance continues to be recorded as unstructured data. Experimenting with AI in structuring museum datasets, the untapped potential of analyzing object histories on a large scale has come within reach. However, the transformation of analog information and its digital offspring into structured data is not without challenges. This lecture will present experimental approaches and findings on the knowns and unknowns in provenance data.

June 13-15, 2023 – Radical Desires and Decolonial Critique

Conference

About 50 years ago, the mass-protest of gays and lesbians against discrimination was at once an assertion of a new collective consciousness, while also creating a radical new subjectivity and a collective sense of identity. They fought for social and legal equality while at the same time refused to be co-opted by bourgeois society as just another civil rights movement. Politics were supposed to be wild, playful, and subjective; experiences and desires were put in the foreground of collective action – aiming at the interconnection between subjective, bodily experiences, radical avant-garde theory and emancipatory politics. Starting with the unboundedness of (sexual) desire they sought to transgress schemes of binarity and wanted to transform society as a whole. 

Guests: Lukas Betzler (Leuphana University Lüneburg) / Hauke Branding (Leuphana University Lüneburg) / Sido Lansari (Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon, France) / Émilie Notéris (Paris) / Todd Shepard (Johns Hopkins University, USA)

Programme and further information: Poster and booklet.

An event hosted by the DFG Research Training Group Cultures of Critique.

June 6, 2023 – Revisiting Les Immatériaux

Research seminar

During the past years, the art historian Andreas Broeckmann (Leuphana University, Lüneburg/Germany) and the New Media Department of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou - in the context of its EU-funded project "Beyond Matter" -, have conducted research about the exhibition "Les Immatériaux" (Centre Pompidou, 1985), which, for the first time in decades, makes possible a comprehensive and interdisciplinary re-evaluation of this important historical exhibition.

The research seminar "Revisiting Les Immatériaux" brought together international scholars who discussed the lasting relevance of the exhibition from contemporary perspectives.

The papers presented during this seminar were being considered for inclusion in a major print publication about Les Immatériaux, due to come out in 2024, which will document the exhibition in texts and images, as well as offer reflections on its contemporary significance.

Invited participants:

Erika Balsom: « Une autre scène: Claudine Eizykman and Guy Fihman's Ciné-immatériaux »
[https://www.erikabalsom.com/]

Marie-Ange Brayer: « Dessins d'architecture et maquettes : des artefacts postmodernes? »
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/marie-ange-brayer-4a9a3356/]

Jean-Louis Boissier: « Les Immatériaux à travers leurs mots »
[http://jlggb.net/jlb/]

Corinne Enaudeau: « Les Immatériaux ou "comment exposer dans l'espace l'anachronie du temps ?" »
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinne_Enaudeau]

Sergio Meijide Casas: « Quand le philosophe prend la parole : Lyotard et les entretiens sur Les Immatériaux »
[https://usc-es.academia.edu/SergioMeijide]

Convenors:

Marcella Lista: « Les Immatériaux, questions d'actualité »
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcella_Lista]

Andreas Broeckmann: « The place of Les Immatériaux in the history of exhibitions »
[https://abroeck.in-berlin.de/]

Organised and moderated by Mica Gherghescu (Bibliothèque Kandinsky/MNAM, Centre Pompidou), Marcella Lista (MNAM/CCI, Service Nouveau média), and Andreas Broeckmann (Leuphana University).

The seminar coincides with the research done in the context of the project "Beyond Matter – Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality", and precedes a cabinet exhibition in the Musée National d'Art Moderne, dedicated to "Les Immatériaux" (opening on 5 July 2023). Next to archival materials and some original works from the "Les Immatériaux", held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, this exhibition presents the virtual 3D models of the exhibitions "Les Immatériaux" (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1985) and "Iconoclash" (ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2002).

June 6, 2023 – Actual Time of Arrival: The Acquisition of Expressionist Art by United States Museums – Max Koss and Fabio Mariani

Lecture

Max Koss and Fabio Mariani participated in the international symposium "Expressionism Revisited: New Research Approaches and Questions" organised by the Brücke Museum in Berlin. On June 3rd, they gave the talk "Actual Time of Arrival: The Acquisition of Expressionist Art by United States Museums".

In their talk, Fabio and Max examined quantitative and computational methods for revisiting traditional art historical narratives about the transfer of Expressionist paintings to the United States of America.

May 30- June 28, 2023 – DEADTIME (“Maggie’s Solo”) mit Cally Spooner und Will Holder

Exhibition

For the exhibition opening, Cally Spooner, Will Holder and Christopher Weickenmeier will have a public conversation with the students enrolled in the seminar “Assisting and the Arts of Service”.

“Maggie’s Solo” is a 44'16" audio recording of Maggie Segale dancing in “early 2020”. Starting “tomorrow”[30.5.2023], Will and Cally wrote for an hour a day, here, about, alongside and in assistance to “Maggie’s Solo”—a solo as much as a constellation. Once a week, usually Wednesdays, parts of this writing appeared in and around the Kunstraum.

Will Holder is an English typographer based in Brussels. Holder explores the organisation of language around artworks through printed matter, live readings and dialogues with other artists. Particular attention is placed on an oral production of value and meaning around cultural objects, and how live, extra-informational qualities might be analysed, documented and scored. He is editor of F.R.DAVID, a journal concerned with reading and writing in the arts. Together with Alex Waterman, he edited and typeset operatic scores for Yes, But Is It Edible?, the music of Robert Ashley, for two or more voices. In 2015 he received a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists. He is also the founder of the publishing imprint uh books.

Cally Spooner is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media — on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings. Recent institutional solo exhibitions have taken place at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium; Parrhesiades, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Swiss Institute, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; the New Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Her work has appeared in recent group exhibitions at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Centre Pompidou-Metz, France; FRONT Cleveland Triennial; BY ART MAT- TERS, Hangzhou; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; MAMbo, Bologna; Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunsthaus Zurich; the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; and REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles. Spooner is the author of recent and forthcoming monographs published by Lenz Press and the Swiss Institute (2023); Hatje Cantz (2020); Mousse (2018); and Slim Volume/ Cornerhouse (2016). Her novella Collapsing in Parts was published by Mousse in 2012. She is currently a research fellow at Overgaden, Copenhagen, in association with the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Copenhagen (2021–24).

May 21, 2023 – Why Art Criticism?

Book presentation

Im Rahmen der Veranstaltungsreihe K21 Encounters der Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf stellten Julia Voss und Anna Kipke den 2022 bei Hatje Cantz erschienen Band „Why Art Criticism?“ vor.

Der Reader leistet Pionierarbeit, indem er unterschiedlichste kunstkritische Stimmen aus der Gegenwart und aus der Geschichte versammelt und kommentiert. Die Vielfalt der Argumente, der Darstellungsweisen und der Kriterien fordert die Diskussion heraus, wie sich Kunstkritik unter Bedingungen von Globalität verstehen und schreiben lässt.

May 18, 2023 – Unlocking Collection Histories: Provenance Data and Agency - Fabio Mariani

Lecture

As part of the 1-day conference "Museum Analytics," organised by the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College, London, Fabio Mariani presented the lecture "Unlocking Collection Histories: Provenance Data and Agency".

The talk focused on the role of Artificial Intelligence in transforming provenance texts in museums into networked provenance data. In addition, Fabio will use provenance data analyses to shed light on the question of gender-specific agency strategies in the art market.

May 10, 2023 – Maintenance (Art-)Work and the Production of Presencen – Dr. Eva Kuhn

Lecture

As part of the international conference “Cooking Cleaning Caring: Care Work as a Global Issue in Contemporary Art”, Dr. Eva Kuhn, research associate at the professorship for Contemporary Art, hold a lecture on “Maintenance (Art-)Work and the Production of Presence“.

The conference brought together experts from different countries to examine artistic perspectives on topics of care work and its political and social dimensions. The conference will be held as a hybrid event in Bochum from the 10th to the 12th of May.

January 25, 2023 – A Trans Hirschfeld Renaissance w/ Leah Tigers, Dean Erdmann, Maxi Wallenhorst and Raimund Wolfert (Kunstraum)

Talk

The conversation between historian and essayist Leah Tigers, artist Dean Erdmann, and historian Raimund Wolfert, moderated by author Maxi Wallenhorst and curator Christopher Weickenmeier, engaged the recent proliferation of historical, literary, and artistic practices concerning the Institute for Sexual Science. Founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1919 and destroyed by the Nazis in 1933, the institute was the first of its kind, a focus point of sexual politics and queer sociality in the Weimar Republic. In the spirit of an “idiolectic trans history” outlined by Leah Tigers, the conversation probed the necessity for idiosyncratic as well as formalized approaches to the archive. 

dean erdmann is an interdisciplinary artist working moving and still images, sculpture and installation, often using pre-existing archives or creating archives. Their work often considers the politics of place, class and the body.

Leah Tigers is a community trans historian based out of Brooklyn, New York. Her previous writings feature trans asylum and prison experience in New York, queer migration to the western United States or California, where she lived for 6 years, and of course trans experiences in the Weimar Republic, which began partly as a personal interest in her German ancestry. She has also previously published narrative nonfiction in the history of science, which continues to stimulate much of her curiosity about the transgender subject in psychiatry and sexology. Many of her essays can be found at her personal website, www.trickymothernature.com. Currently she teaches Women’s Studies at Rutgers University-Newark in New Jersey and is working with several friends to start up a transgender literary review.

Maxi Wallenhorst is a writer living in Berlin. Next to dance dramaturgy, translation and art writing Maxi works on dissociative poetics in capitalism. Recently, essays appeared in e-flux journal and in Elif Saydam’s Two Cents (Mousse, 2022). In progress: A transvestite romance set in a half-allegorical 20s Berlin.

Raimund Wolfert, born 1963, studied Scandinavian studies, linguistics and library science in Bonn, Oslo (Norway) and Berlin. Degree: Magister Artium. Wolfert lives as a lecturer in adult education and freelance author in Berlin. He is a staff member of the Magnus Hirschfeld Society and editor of the journal “Mitteilungen der Magnus Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft”. Recent publications include „Gegen Einsamkeit und ‚Einsiedelei‘. Die Geschichte der Internationalen Homophilen Welt-Organisation“ (2009), „Nirgendwo daheim. Das bewegte Leben des Bruno Vogel“ (2012), „Die Goldbergs. Zwischen Friedenstempel, Lunapark und Haus der Modeindustrie“ (2015), „Homosexuellenpolitik in der jungen Bundesrepublik. Kurt Hiller, Hans Giese und das Ffter Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee“ (2015), „Botho Laserstein. Anwalt und Publizist für ein neues Sexualstrafrecht“ (2020) and „Charlotte Charlaque. Transfrau, Laienschauspielerin, ‚Königin der Brooklyn Heights Promenade‘“ (2021).

December 12, 2022 - January 28, 2023 –  Unterwerfungen (Kunstraum) – Philipp Gufler 

Exhibition

Kunstraum of the Leuphana University Lüneburg was delighted to announce the opening of Philipp Gufler´s solo exhibition “Unterwerfungen”. Bringing together old and new works and structured by Gufler’s ongoing collaboration with the self-organized Forum Queeres Archiv München, “Unterwerfungen” tracked the various ways in which Gufler stages archival material, resisting the heteronormative capture of a resistant past.

The installation “I Wanna Give You Devotion” consisted of six textile walls, covered with over 130 posters from the archive of the Forum. The tender and temporary architecture houses an “archive of feelings” (Ann Cvetkovich) that registers the affective dimensions of documenting and recording queer cultures. Tethered to a heterotopic idea of the public, these posters communicated and conspired, tracing queer desire and life as well as ongoing struggles. With each presentation, Gufler has asked fellow friends and collaborators to make new posters in response to the Forum collection. At Kunstraum, we presented the newest additions by CHEAP Collective and Sunil Gupta. A publication, produced in collaboration with students from the Leuphana University Lüneburg, was on display and may be picked up free of charge. The publication brought together the students´ individual and collective research into a selection of posters also shown in the installation.

Inside the installation, the 34-minute film Projection on the Crisis (Gauweilereien in Munich) is screened. Juxtaposing archival material from the Forum with artworks by friends and collaborators of Gufler, the video threads together stories of homophobia and queer resistance, with a particular focus on Peter Gauweiler’s homophobic policies at the height of the AIDS crisis in Bavaria. Loosely organized around a timeline, the camera’s almost uninterrupted tracking shot of the documents and artworks furthers the illusion of a progressive linearity, one that is revealed to be as much a function of a historical gaze, as an effect of technological dispositifs. A careful exploration of the synthetic nature of “the fictions of history” (Saidiya Hartman), the film articulates an emancipatory potential of making history.

As part of his ongoing Quilt series, Gufler has collaborated with the artist Eli Hill to produce for the exhibition his newest quilt, dealing with the legacy and memory of the philanthropist Reed Erickson (1917–92). One of the first trans men to undergo gender-confirming surgery in the US, Erickson systematically supported trans health care initiatives and members of the transgender community.

Philipp Gufler is an artist based in Munich and Amsterdam. He spans various media in his practice, including silkscreen prints on fabric and mirrors, artist books, performances, and video installations. Gufler is a member of the Forum Queeres Archiv München since 2013 and has participated in artist residencies at De Ateliers, Amsterdam; Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Maine; and Delfina Foundation, London. Artist books include Projection on the Crisis (2014 / 2021), I Wanna Give You Devotion (2017), Indirect Contact (2017), Quilt #01–#30 (2020), Lana Kaiser (2020), A Shrine to Aphrodite (2023) and Cosy bei Cosy (2023).

December 8, 2022 – Screening with Zoe Leonard, Catherine Saalfield, Philipp Gufler and Liane Klingler (Kunstraum)

A screening of

Zoe Leonard & Catherine Saalfield, Keep your laws off my body, 1990
Philipp Gufler, Lana Kaiser, 2021
Philipp Gufler, Becoming-Rabe, 2015
Liane Klinger & Philipp Gufler, Conversation with Erich Haas, 2016

November 29, 2023 – Argentina’s feminist insurgency and struggles over social reproduction – Liz Mason-Deese

Lecture

Over the past decade, a massive, innovative, and radical feminist movement has emerged in Latin America both in opposition to gender-based violence and in demand of new rights, such as the right to abortion. Questions of social reproduction are central to this feminism that has linked the devaluation of feminized labor to the violence against feminized bodies, connecting economic and financial violence to a myriad of other forms of violence. This talk explored how feminisms in Argentina center issues of social reproduction: both in terms of demands on the state to fund aspects of social reproduction and in practices of self-organization and autonomous forms of social reproduction enacted by movements themselves. From community-run health clinics to soup kitchens and educational programs, these autonomous forms of social reproduction also point to ways of reorganizing the labor of social reproduction, deconfining it from the private household and the family, and making it into a collective responsibility. 

Liz Mason-Deese holds a PhD in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a long time researcher, translator, and participant in feminist and workers' movements in Argentina. She is the translator of numerous books about feminist movements and thought around the world, including Feminist International by Veronica Gago, A Feminist Reading of Debt by Veronica Gago and Luci Cavallero, and The Feminist Subversion of the Economy by Amaia Perez Orozco. She is also a member of the Counter-Cartographies Collective and the translation collective Territorio de Ideas.

This event is organised by Ben Trott and hosted by the Gender and Diversity Research Network.

November 17-18, 2023 – What's the Matter with The Form? A pluralistic Dialogue on The Notion of Form

Graduate Conference

The Leuphana Institute of Philosophy and Science of Art (IPK) warmly invited you to the upcoming conference "What's the Matter With the Form? A Pluralistic Dialogue on the Notion of Form". The conference took place at the Leuphana from the 17th (starting at 02:00 pm) to the 18th of November (ending at 05:30 pm).

Experts and Panellists addressed the concept of form from a variety of perspectives: The concept of social form in Marx; the role that the form plays in the modern and contemporary debate in Aesthetic and finally, the critique on the form in the context of cyberfication and digitalisation of reality.

Organising Committee:

Benedetta Milani
S. Simone Spinelli
Dr. Chiara Stefanoni