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Telling Impossible Stories
Spring Symposium with
Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt
IKL Doctoral Studies in Philosophy and PhD in Practice, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
How do we tell impossible stories, and how do we listen to images of intentionally muted subjects? When we look at photographs of the horrors of slavery, or when we confront depictions of the violence that continues to constitute black live today, how do we tell the stories nesting at the limits of the unspeakable and the unknown? Can careful looking, attentive listening and critical fabulation contribute to the experiments in freedom that unfold in slavery’s shadow? How can we attune all our senses to the different affective frequencies and tell different stories, as we tell stories differently?
Thursday, April 11th, 6pm
mumok cinema, mumok, MuseumsQuartier, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna
public lecture by Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University, New York:
„An Experiment with the Chorus“
The lecture will consider the role of artistic, creative and speculative method as a critical practice intended to challenge the constraints of the given and to imagine a new planetary scheme.
Friday, April 12th, 10am
IKL Karl Schweighofer Gasse 3, 1070 Vienna, room 3.06
public lecture by Tina Campt, Barnard Center for Research on Women, New York:
„Prelude to a New Black Gaze“
What is a “black gaze”? This talk is both an invitation and a provocation to reflect on our current moment of diasporic countervisuality by engaging some of the new critical visual vocabularies with which black artists are confronting their audiences, and the radical practices of refusal their work is creating.
in cooperation with mumok
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Afro-Pessimism: Theorizing Anti-Blackness
with Frank B. Wilderson III
A cooperation between mumok, Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna, and the PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
December 13th, 7pm
Reparations… Now
mumok, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna
Introduction by Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski and Janine Jembere
Screening: The Dutchman (1966), Anthony Harvey (55 min) and
Reparations… Now (2005), Frank B. Wilderson III, (20 min)
Followed by a discussion with Frank B. Wilderson III
December 14th, 3pm – 8pm
Afro-Pessimism: Theorizing Anti-Blackness
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Augasse 2 – 6, 1090 Vienna, 4th floor, BC 4.2
3pm Welcome by Anette Baldauf and Andrea Steier
3pm – 5:30pm Presentations by Sophie Schasiepen, Belinda
Kazeem-Kamiński, Janine Jembere, Doris Posch, Maren Grimm and
Jakob Krameritsch in discussion with Frank B. Wilderson III
5:30pm – 6pm Break (snacks and drinks)
6pm Lecture by Frank B. Wilderson III: The Ruse of Analogy
Afro-Pessimism and the Ruse of Analogy
Afro-Pessimism argues that the regime of violence that elaborates and positions Black people, worldwide, is not analogous to the regime of violence that elaborates and positions the Gramscian subaltern. Until recently, practitioners of Cultural Studies have, for the most part, assumed the opposite—that though structural violence performs differently on different populations, an essential regime of violence undergirds the subjugation of all sentient beings; and, furthermore, it is claimed, all sentient beings are Human beings. Afro-Pessimism interrogates the explanatory power of these claims by demonstrating how the cultural production and ontological coherence of the Human is secured through the impossibility of analogizing the violence that subjugates the subaltern and the violence that subjugates the Black. Afro-Pessimism argues that the ruse of analogy is, more often than not, the besetting hobble of our labors on- and interventions through cultural objects; a blind spot that subtends one of Cultural Studies’ first principles: that all sentient beings possess the capacity to transform limitless space into nameable place, and endless duration into recognized and incorporated events. In short, to wield cultural objects and, in so doing, change the fundamental nature of their lives. At every scale of abstraction, from psychoanalysis’s topography of the psyche or the Bakhtinian chronotope, ascending to Gramsci’s civil society or the dream of a new, postindustrial Commons calved from the glacier of globalization, cultural optimism, or optimism in culture production, prevails—as though the transformative powers of discursive capacity were hardwired into being itself. This presentation interrogates this logic and reflects on the stakes for Cultural Studies.
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HAUNTOPIA / WHAT IF
Concept: Anette Baldauf, Renate Lorenz and the PhD-in-Practice Program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Research Pavilion, Campo S. Cosmo, Giudecca 621, Venice (Vaporetto stop Palanca)
Opening hours (May 11-October 15): Tue-Sun, 10am-6pm
Exhibition, September 8–October 15, 2017
Opening, September 7, 2017, 7pm
Conference, September 8–9, 2017
The conference employs the concept of haunting to create a language for the ways in which an unfinished past makes itself known in the here and now (Avery Gordon) and violent histories, or stories, initiate ongoing disruptions, wronging the wrong (Eve Tuck). Haunting often takes place when an official narrative insists that the violence of subjection and injustice is overcome (e.g. after the liberation from colonialism, after Stonewall, at the end of a war) or when their oppressiveness is strictly denied. Now ghosts “appear” as agency in-between subjectivities, images, and spaces and insist on a response. As the haunting becomes real, it stimulates an imagination of how things could be otherwise. What are the means and possibilities of our inquiries to welcome the specters of the past and make unresolved social violence demand its due?
Keynote lectures: Avery Gordon (UC Santa Barbara) and Eve Tuck (University of Toronto)
Lectures_performances_artists’ presentations
The conference is organized in collaboration with the European Artistic Research Network (EARN).
The Research Pavilion: Utopia of Access is created and hosted by Uniarts Helsinki and realized together with the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme and the Swedish Art Universities’ collaboration Konstex in co-operation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Zurich University of the Arts.
www.researchpavilion.com
#researchpavilion
HAUNTOPIA / WHAT IF
Exhibition and conference program
Thursday, September 7, 2017
7:00 exhibition opening
on-going memorizing choreographed by Read-in
In Circulation
8:00 presentation of the zine by Katalin Erdődi
8:30 performance by Keiko Uenishi
Listening Experiments of 罔両(Mouryou, translated as Penumbrae)
9:00 drinks
Friday, September 8, 2017
1:00 performance by Janine Jembere and Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński
In the Breaks No. 3—On Violence
1:30 keynote lecture by Avery Gordon
moderated by Sílvia das Fadas and Katalin Erdődi
3:30 break (guided tour of the exhibition, upon request)
4:00 session 1 (7 x 10 min inputs) moderated by Sharon Morris
– Anna Bunting-Branch (Slade, London), From Specters to Speculations: Feminist Failures and Future Fictions
– Moira Hille (Academy, Vienna), Ghost Ship
– Andrea Ray (Malmö Art Academy, Malmö), ReCast LIVE ON-AIR
– David Steans (FAHACS, Leeds), The Making of The Making of The Make-Up Scene
– Alaena Turner (FAHACS, Leeds), A Guest + A Host = A Ghost
– Rafal Morusiewicz (Academy, Vienna), Queering/Reading/Editing Tadeusz Konwicki’s How Far Away, How Near (1971)
– Hristina Ivanoska (Academy, Vienna), Document Missing: Performance no. 6 (Her Name was Hope)
6:00 picnic in the garden
8:00 performance by Masha Godovannaya and Sílvia das Fadas
Her* Hands and his Shape
followed by Haunting Parables, a film program curated by Sílvia das Fadas
Saturday, September 9, 2017
12:30 performative screening by Naomi Rincón Gallardo
The Formaldehyde Trip (excerpts)
1:00 keynote lecture by Eve Tuck
“I don’t want to haunt you, but I will,” and other admonitions from future ghosts
moderated by Moira Hille and Janine Jembere
3:00 performance by Jeremiah Day
Ghost Dance Song
3:30 break (guided tour of the exhibition, upon request)
4:00 session 2 (7 x 10 min inputs) moderated by Henk Slager
– Christian Bili (Head, Geneva), Salvialand. Mapping the territories of the Salvia Divinorum
– Yvonne Feng (Slade, London), Tracing the Unspeakable
– Zsuzsi Flohr (Academy, Vienna), Grandpa’s Backpack
– Irina Gheorghe (GradCam, Dublin), The Treason of Presence
– Zosia Hołubowska (Academy, Vienna), Singing as An Analytical Practice. Wandering Spell.
– Ilya Orlov (Academy, Helsinki), Political Occultism in the Eve of the Centenary of the Revolution
– Ioana Marinescu (Slade, London), A Writing of Erasure. Bucharest
6:00 performance by Lisa Nyberg and Julia Giertz
Guided Meditation for Un-settling Rhythms
6:30 good-bye party
The HAUNTOPIA / WHAT IF Conference is organized by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna as the annual event by the European Artistic Research Network (EARN). www.akbild.ac.at
The Research Pavilion is created and hosted by Uniarts Helsinki and realized together with the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme and the Swedish Art Universities’ collaboration Konstex in co-operation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Zurich University of the Arts.
www.researchpavilion.fi
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The Enigma of the New and the Modern
20.01.2015 – 21.01.2015 | Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Wien, M20
Discussing Artistic Practices in the Cities of Vienna and Addis Ababa.
A collaboration between Alle School of Fine Arts at the University of Addis Ababa and Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
In recent years, cities around the globe have undergone radical changes. An alliance of state and market forces has intervened in cityscapes and urban life, counting on the unbroken promise of urban development and modernization. But in many cities, top down planning meets bottom up movements, informality mutates formality and a discussion on the relationship between the new and the old, progress and development, history and future counters the enigma of the new and modern.
The main aim of this coming together of artists, architects, historians and cultural theorists from Vienna and Addis Ababa is to share our experiences with city transformations and the challenges, possibilities and pragmatics of artistic interventions in the urban environment. Together we want to reflect on how and under which conditions artistic interventions take place. What strategies are employed, what resources are available, who are some of the collaborators/partners, who is the audience, how is it addressed and what visions, fears and desires guide the artistic interventions?
Participants: Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew, Mihret Kebede, Brook Teklehaimanot, Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis, Bekele Mekonnen, Carola Dertnig, Elke Krasny, Petja Dimitrova, Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski, Paula Pfoser, Mara Verlic, Annette Krauss, Moira Hille, Julia Wieger, Vladimir Miller, Hong-Kai Wang, Johannes Puchleitner, Christian Kravagna, Stefan Gruber, Anette Baldauf and others.
Tuesday, January 20th
2pm
Welcome by the Vice Rector, Andrea Braidt
2.30 – 5pm
Film and Decolonization
In the framework of Christian Kravagna’s lecture course on film and decolonization, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film “Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana” (Notes for an African Orestes, 1970) will be screened and critically discussed as a major example of an avant-garde cinematic approach to African decolonization by a European director.
Wednesday, January 21st
10am – 1pm
Urban transformations in the city of Vienna and Addis Ababa
In this session, we hope to engage in a discussion on the different histories of the respective cities – what have been some of the key urban interventions that shaped the city structure, what are some central conditions and tensions of urban life, how does an urban public manifest itself, how is top down planning translated into everyday life?
Input Vienna: Stefan Gruber, Mara Verlic, Johannes Puchleitner, Anette Baldauf
Input Addis: Brook Teklehaimanot, Bekele Mekonnen
1pm – 2pm
Lunch Buffet
2pm – 5pm
Artistic practices in the cities of Vienna and Addis Ababa
Here we hope to discuss questions like: What are some of the artistic practices developed in the cities dealing, in some, maybe peripheral way with the tensions discussed before? What are their relationships to the city administration, the market, but also the art schools?
Input Vienna: Carola Dertnig, Petja Dimitrova, Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski, Elke Krasny, Paula Pfoser, Plattform Geschichtspolitik
Input Addis: Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew, Mihret Kebede, Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis
7pm – 10pm
Screening at Mumok Cinema, Museumsquartier, 1010 Vienna
The program presents short films and video works that deal with (acting in) urban space. The central focus of this program is on artists’ reflections on city structures and the current transformations of public space. (https://www.mumok.at/en/events/enigma-new-and-modern
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Summer School 2014
Summer School COMMONING THE CITY
June 22nd – 29th, 2014 / Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
Organizers: Spaces of Commoning Reserach Team (Anette Baldauf, Stefan Gruber, Moira Hille, Annette Krauss, Vladimir Miller, Aras Ozgun, Mara Verlic, Hong-Kai Wong)
In recent years, theorists, activists and artists have explored the power of commoning in urban struggles for social justice and redistribution; they have persisted on human rights to clean water and air, healthy food, shelter, health and education threatened by the ongoing enclosure of public goods. Somewhat paradoxically, capitalism has also started to promote the commons in its own way, seamlessly merging the alternative value systems of the commons into turbo-capitalism. The Vienna International Summer School “Commoning the City” investigates this ambiguous territory of claiming and reclaiming. It studies the diverse and often competing practices that constitute commons in the city; it discusses the field of forces that give rise to and foster urban commons. It analyses commons’ relationship to the state, the market and urban struggles; it studies their means of nourishment and facilitation as much as it analyses the mechanisms of exploitation and control. Taking seriously the ambiguous nature of commons in the context of pervasive capitalist expansion, the school searches for valuable means to differentiate, to qualify and contextualize urban commons, while at the same time discussing instruments to challenge and disrupt the capitalist enclosure of urban commons. Can we explore together the potential for non-capitalist urban life? What kind of urban cultures can we produce, what spaces can we create, what cities can we imagine?
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Not Now! Now! – the very exciting temporal politics of arts-based research
Date | 17.10.2013 – 18.10.2013
Venue | Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Main Buliding, Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna, Aktzeichensaal (conference) / Aula (exhibition)
Lectures by: Sharon Hayes (New York), Mathias Danbolt (Kopenhagen), Nana Adusei-Poku (Berlin), Jamika Ajalon (London, Suzana Milevska (Skopje / Wien)
Inputs by: Yva Jung (London), Ana Hoffner (Vienna), Dana Samuel (Montréal), Rana Öztürk (Dublin), Yasmine Eid Sabbagh (Vienna), Mara Lee Gerden (Gothenburg), Andrea Ray (Malmö), Ingrid Cogne (Vienna)
Exhibition with works by: Sharon Hayes, Ana Hoffner, Anna T., Henriette Meise, Xiaoyan Men, Tanya Ostojic
© Renate Lorenz
The conference NOT NOW! NOW! focuses on chronopolitics. While the field of temporality studies is relatively wide, the conference will lay special emphasis on the question of the temporal politics in the field of art. The conference departs from the premise that artistic practices are considered a productive means to challenge orderly and rigid temporal concepts and their effects on bodies and the organising of the social: How exactly and by which formats and methods can artistic practices intervene into normative, “straight,” linear and normalizing concepts of time? A specific selection of exemplary art works as well as recent debates in postcolonial and queer studies will be the starting points for our common discussions.
Contemporary queer and postcolonial studies have investigated the way in which biographies and their temporal courses are responsible for the appraising of some biographies over others, for the demand for able-bodiedness and the degree to which our notions of the normal and the respectable are constructed based on a logic of reproductive temporality. They seek to produce alternatives to a developmental concept of time, alternatives which counter the temporal cycles of nation states and capitalist markets. This coalesces with the desire to displace colonial concepts of noncoevalness by which some groups are characterized as progressive, others as regressive.
How can these temporal frameworks of normalcy on the one hand and cultural and
bodily otherness on the other hand be profoundly reworked? Is it through installating a synchronous time (Homi Bhabha), through the unruly figure of anachronism (Mathias Danbolt), or the digging for and re-enactment of past potential futures, futures that, Kodwo Eshun says, are unrealized? Is it through “temporal drag”, which bridges times by means of desire, values past feminist / denormalizing accomplishments and allows for “rage and longing, scorn and affection, for seemingly obsolete objects and subject-positions”? (Elizabeth Freeman) Or is it “re-speaking” in its double meaning of reenactment and resisting, a concept that Sharon Hayes claims for her own artistic practice?
The conference aims at participating in the debate around arts-based research by enriching the field through the investigation of chronopolitical interventions and the analysis of particular artistic practices and methods, which already have been developed.
Thursday, October 17
3 pm – 3.30 pm
Intro: Renate Lorenz
3.30pm – 4.30pm
Sharon Hayes: Strategies of anachronism, citation and respeaking
Chair: Mathias Danbolt, Ana Hoffner
4.30pm – 5pm break, refreshments
5pm – 6pm
Nana Adusei-Poku: “[…] To confront every second as if it has always been in existence, though its materiality is fleeting”
Chair: Christian Kravagna, Giulia Cilla
6pm – 7pm “exhibition-tour”, Aula
7pm picnic
Friday, October 18
1pm – 2pm
Jamika Ajalon: “outside your timezone/ a stranger in a strange land/ NOWHERE is my home”
Chair: Dorit Margreiter, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh
2pm – 3pm Inputs I
Yva Jung (London), Ana Hoffner (Vienna), Dana Samuel (Montréal), Rana .ztürk (Dublin)
Chair: Elske Rosenfeld
3pm – 3.30pm break, refreshments
3.30pm – 4.30pm
Suzana Milevska: VEILS/FOLDS/ARCHIVES: Production of face in space-time
Chair: Anette Baldauf, Till Gathmann
4.30pm – 5.30pm Inputs II
Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh (Vienna), Mara Lee Gerden (Gothenburg), Andrea Ray (Malmö), Ingrid Cogne (Vienna)
Chair: Moira Hille
5.30pm – 6pm break, refreshments
6pm – 7pm
Mathias Danbolt: Dormancy: Art, Timing, and the Politics of Suspension
Chair: Renate Lorenz, Mareike Bernien
7pm Drinks
Abstracts / Lectures
Sharon Hayes
Strategies of anachronism, citation and re-speaking
Although I’ve often looked at my own work as engaged in strategies of anachronism and historical return, re-examining my relationship to feminism and, in particular, the moment in which I became a feminist, has led me to interrogate the way in which my work is grounded in an understanding of a given public as transhistoric. In this talk, I will address several works made between 2003 and 2013 that utilize strategies of anachronism, citation and re-speaking to address such transhistoric publics.
Nana Adusei-Poku
“[…] To confront every second as if it has always been in existence, though its materiality is fleeting”1
Thinking about the meaning of Blackness in the contemporary was the starting point for the research from which this paper derives. The more I engaged with this question in connection to contemporary Black artists and the curatorial concept post-black the stronger I was immerged in questions about time, history and the contemporary. Time also represents a central theme in the photographic work by New York based artist Leslie Hewitt, who uses not only the medium of photography strategically in order to force the spectator to decelerate the gaze, her work also opens up questions about the relational aspects of race, its marginalized histories, contemporary perceptions and archival meta-narratives.
This talk will explore Hewitt’s innovative photographic work ‘Riffs on Real Time’ and argue that it allows the spectator to break out of the singularity of perception or identities and to realize the intrinsic temporal multiplicity outside of linearity in which we exist. I will stress this point through exploring the idea of Racial Time, Real Time as well as Queer-time in order to highlight the inevitability to dissolve the idea of Blackness from its one-dimensional conceptualization in order to open a space for a confrontation with the polysemic quality of our time and self.
1 Leslie Hewitt in Interview with Kate Menconeri 2008/09
Jamika Ajalon
“outside your timezone/ a stranger in a strange land/NOWHERE is my home”
WOC, (women of color) and their narratives- spoken, written, and lived, disrupt the ‘official’ chrono-political timeline which concretize historical presents (read ‘modern times’) and futures. Her intersectionality not only allows her the skills to navigate portals into different possible futures, but allows her access to different ‘time-zones’ within each passing moment. Pulling from ideas put forward in my paper ‘Fugitive Archetypes of Resistance (FAR): a Metamorphical Narrative’, I will reference, among others, the works of Tony Morrison, Octavia Butler, and the legendary General Harriet Tubman to explore ideas around ‘re memory’ and the ‘retelling’ of pasts and presents as a function of mental and cellular time travel. I will attempt to show how, WOC, as eccentric futurists, under the totem of FAR, are time travelers, predicting and producing fantastical futures through recreating the ‘fantastic’ in her own image.
In light of this I will take contemporary images which pull on ‘historical references’- i.e. Lincoln the Vampire Killer, and They called her Moses (on the life general Tubman)-and interpose them with narratives that come from the directly lived, and imagined experiences of WOC. I will do this through audio visual anti-lecture which will include spoken word, sonic land scape and looped images to articulate the disruption of the normative timeline via the dissonance of WOC narratives.
Suzana Milevska
VEILS/FOLDS/ARCHIVES: Production of face in space-time
This presentation will look at different models of contemporary artistic research and performative practices dealing with the issue of the veil. The political spacetime relationships that have been created by this garment for centuries still prompt many complex and conflicting cultural and socio-political implications in different contemporary cultures and spaces. Chronopolitics and geo-politics of veil’s folds and fabrics touches on a very long list of urgent topics such as the relations between visual culture and patriarchy, religion, feminism and queer politics, even surveillance, terrorism, racial profiling and national security. Therefore the artists researching the veil not only inevitably ponder these issues but they also establish new chronopolitical paths and trajectories of “folding” and “unfolding” and other inflictions within time-space phenomena. I will be looking at different media art projects and artists dealing with the visual and socio-political aspects of wearing the veil because I want to argue that they address singularity and production of face (in terms of Deleuze/Guattari conceptualisation of the phrase), regardless the invisibility of women’s face and body under the veil.
Mathias Danbolt
Dormancy: Art, Timing, and the Politics of Suspension
This lecture will examine the poetics of dormancy-temporary suspension of activity- in the context of a queer chronopolitics of art, activism, and history. States of dormancy tend to generate anxieties due to temporal and ontololgical uncertainty. Inhabiting the in-between of sleep and consciousness, activity and passivity, life and death, dormancy marks an indeterminate potential for sudden presence and reappearance, as in dormant viruses or diseases. Drawing on the Danish artist Henriette Heise’s exploration of dormancy in her textile installations Darkness Machines, this lecture examines the politics of temporal suspension in artistic and activist work. Inspired by the attention to the timing of politics in the title for this conference-“Not Now! Now!”-the lecture focuses on aesthetic practices that suspend activity until another “now” comes into play. A suspension that is less about a messianic waiting for the “still to come,” but more like the suspended activity of volcanoes that signal a build-up of a rupture of energy.
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