Seminar 6
Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ines Schaber and Anselm Franke:
who's there?
—an interrogation in the dark
October 22nd – 26th, 2007
All sessions will start at 7:00 PM
The unitednationsplaza’s October seminar seeks to negotiate the possibilities of the political and the artistic in a state of a general mental and social blackout. The week will be guided by a text by Thomas Keenan and will involve guest presenters from different cultural fields.
Keenans’ text describes the place where the aporias of so much of contemporary politics occur as a darkened frontier – a night situation of non-knowledge and non-rule where the right to question and to pass is negotiable. Name, password, knowledge and power. In this darkness the frontier itself shifts, moves like a ghost, limitless and unnatural; political responsibility becomes an experience of a certain encounter, a crossing at that darkened border.
Kennan insists that we have to fight all the new obscurantisms that appear in this darkness and fight for the extension and radicalization of all enlightments. In that sense the seminar seeks to sound out possible paths for this radicalization by considering different traditions of knowledge, artistic means, discussion and failure.
Guest contributors:
Avery Gordon
Nanna Heidenreich
Philip Scheffner
Additional guests and a daily program will be announced shortly.
Text:
Thomas Keenan,
Fables of Responsibilities – Abberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics, Stanford University Press, 1997
The text will be posted soon
Admission is free. All are welcome.
About participants:
Avery Gordon is a Professor of Sociology and Law and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Visiting Faculty at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of
Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People,
Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, and the editor of
Mapping Multiculturalism and Body Politics, among other works. Her most recent articles on imprisonment and the War on Terror were published in
Race & Class and
Le Monde Diplomatique. Her current writing aims to comparatively understand the nature of captivity and confinement today, its means of dispossession, and what's required to abolish it. Since 1997, she has co-hosted No Alibis, a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB 91.9 FM, Santa Barbara.
Nanna Heidenreich lives in Berlin and works in the field of visual culture, film/video & theory. She is one of the project directors of arsenal experimental (
www.fdk-berlin.de), works with kanak attak (
www.kanak-attak.de) and over the last decade has been involved in many film festivals (as curator, organisor, etc). She teaches (eg UDK Berlin), writes, curates, and translates.
Anselm Franke is a curator and writer based in Antwerp and Berlin. He is currently the Artistic Director of Extra City Center for Contemporary Art in Antwerp. Recent projects include
Clinic: A Pathology of Gestures at Hebbel Am Ufer, Berlin, November 2006, curated with Hila Peleg and
No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Occurs at Night at KW Berlin, September 2006, with Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ines Schaber and Judith Hopf. He has edited and published publications with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König and others and is a contributor to magazines such as
Parkett,
Cabinet Magazine,
Piktogram,
Domus and
ARCHIS. Anselm Franke is currently a PhD candidate in Visual Cultures/Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College London. Together with Hila Peleg, he is a co-curator of Manifesta 7, Trentino – Alto Adige, Italy, 2008.
Natasha Sadr Haghighian’s biography can be found at
www.bioswop.net
Philip Scheffner, born in Homburg/Saar in 1966. Lives in Berlin since 1986. 1991–1999 member of the Berlin writers group and production company ‘dogfilm’. 2001 founded the media platform and production company ‘pong’ with Merle Kröger. Since 2001 further work with experimental music/art of sound. His film project ‘The Halfmoon Files’ on an Indian POW who's voice was recorded in a German POW camp during WW2, was shown at the Berlinale this year. Together with his collegue Britta Lange, he is currently working on an extension of the project within the framework of an exhibition at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien Berlin.
Ines Schaber lives and works in Berlin. She studied fine arts and architectural theory in Berlin and Princeton. Currently she is writing her PhD at Goldsmith College in London. In her installations she questions the definitional power of photography and provokes a gaze that also questions what we don't see or what is rendered invisible. Her work has been shown for example at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, Actar Gallery in Barcelona (on Movers and Shapers) and at Kunstwerke Berlin (Picture Mining) as part of the collaborative exhibition project
No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Accurs at Night. Ines is a guestcritic and teaches among others at Technische Universität Berlin, Geneva University and Art Academy in Lyon.
unitednationsplaza
Platz der Vereinten Nationen 14a
10249 Berlin DE
T. +49 (0)30 700 89 0 90
F. +49 (0)30 700 89 0 85
http:///www.unitednationsplaza.org
For further information please write to
magdalena@unitednationsplaza.org
