nGbK-Lectures 2024
Location(s):
nGbK, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 11/13, 10178 Berlin
Participants
Joerg Franzbecker, Naomi Hennig, Janine Sack, Florian Wüst, Μarta Dauliūtė & Viktorija Šiaulytė, Yvonne Wilhelm/knowbotiq, Black Audio Film Collective und Natascha Sadr Haghighian & Marina Christodoulidou & Peter Eramian
Members initiative
The format “nGbK lectures” was initiated in 2016. In panels and discussions the nGbK will intervene in the public debate, formulate statements, offer solidarity or voice outrage. At irregular intervals, members of the nGbK organise evening events dedicated to cultural-political issues.
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nGbK Lecture: WIR SIND HIER: Memory and resistance in public space
01.11.24, 19:00
Talk with Cana Bilir-Meier and Talya Feldman, moderated by Gürsoy Doğtaş
The artists Cana Bilir-Meier and Talya Feldman discuss with Gürsoy Doğtaş how the digital project WIR SIND HIER, conceived by Feldman, gives a voice to the survivors and families of victims of racist and anti-Semitic violence and expresses their demands for places of remembrance in public space.
From the renaming of streets to the design of monuments, spaces of active remembrance and resistance are claimed. As a living archive, the platform provides users with an overview of right-wing violence and police violence in Germany and the former GDR over the last 40 years, including cases of violence that have not yet been recognised as hate crimes by state authorities.
WIR SIND HIER was first presented in 2022 as a digital artwork by the Kunstverein in Hamburg and shortly afterwards as a model project of the Federal Agency for Civic Education from 2022-2023. It continues today with the kind support of the Postcode Lottery and private foundations.
The platform and installation WIR SIND HIER is a project by Talya Feldman under the auspices of the Association of Counselling Centres for Victims of Right-Wing, Racist and Anti-Semitic Violence (VBRG e.V.)
Cana Bilir-Meier lives and works in Munich and Vienna. She studied art and digital media as well as film and art education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at Sabancı University in Istanbul. She works as a filmmaker and artist as well as in art and cultural education projects. Her filmic, performative and text-based works operate at the interfaces between archive work, text production, historical research, contemporary media reflexivity and archaeology. She is co-founder of the initiative in memory of Semra Ertan and co-editor of the poetry collection ‘Mein Name ist Ausländer - Benim Adım Yabancı’. In 2021, she was a substitute professor for art education at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.
Talya Feldman is a media artist from Denver, Colorado. She received her MFA from the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Through her cross-cultural and collaborative practice, Feldman creates social change through artistic and educational projects that offer alternative and restorative narratives to violence. She has received global recognition for her work against right-wing terror in collaboration with activist and research-based networks in Germany and abroad. Feldman has received numerous awards, including the Federal Prize for Art Students in Germany in 2023, the Berenberg Culture Prize in 2022, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Scholarship Award in 2021 and the DAGESH Art Prize in 2021 for her sound installation ‘The Violence We Have Witnessed Carries a Weight on Our Hearts’ at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
Gürsoy Doğtaş is an art historian and curator. He works paracuratorially at the intersections of institutional critique, structural racism and queer studies. He has (co-)curated exhibitions including ‘There is no there there’ at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2024), ‘Annem işçi - Wer näht die roten Fahnen?’ at the Museum Marta Herford in Herford (2024), ‘Gurbette Kalmak / Bleiben in der Fremde’ (2023) at the Taxispalais in Innsbruck and the festival ‘What would James Baldwin do?’ (2024) in Berlin as well as the symposium ‘Public Art: The Right to Remember and the Reality of Cities’ (2021) in Nuremberg. In 2022/23 he taught as a visiting professor at the Institute for Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts and from this autumn he is a QuiS Visiting Research Fellow at the Städelschule and Goethe University in Frankfurt.
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nGbK Lecture: Unsolvable? The concept of the “double bind” for critical perspectives on social dilemmas
19.10.24, 19.00
Talk with María do Mar Castro Varela and Leila Haghighat. Moderated by Ebru Taşdemir
Art and art education are often caught in a field of tension: they want to initiate social change, but at the same time stabilize existing power relations. They are too deeply “connected” to these and thus find themselves in a “double bind” – a dilemma of contradictory, unsolvable messages that make any decision seem hopeless. Applied to the postcolonial situation, Gayatri Spivak thus illustrates the contradictions and global dilemmas that persist to this day, which characterize our society and make our entanglement in them visible. To what extent can this concept be used productively to analyze current social debates and entrenchments?
In this event, María do Mar Castro Varela and Leila Haghighat, editors of the anthology “Double Bind postkolonial”, will present the concept and discuss authoritarian developments and the role of art in creating critical spaces for thought and action with Ebru Taşdemir.
María do Mar Castro Varela is Professor of General Pedagogy and Social Work at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences (ASH) Berlin. She has been a fellow of the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles, a visiting professor at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and a senior fellow at the Institute for the Human Sciences (IWM). She is the founder of bildungsLab* and chair of the Berliner Institut für kontrapunktische Gesellschaftsanalysen. Her current research focuses on questions of ethics, protest, emancipation and knowledge production.
Leila Haghighat is doing her doctorate on the double bind in socially engaged art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and was most recently the administrator of the professorship for art education at the Braunschweig University of Art (2023/2024) and a fellow of the Nietzsche Fellowship of the Klassikstiftung Weimar (2023). She is a member of bildungslab* and was coordinator for cultural education at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin (2012-2017). Her current work focuses on socially engaged art, (urban) spaces, care, institutional analysis and representation.
Ebru Taşdemir is a political editor at the weekly newspaper “der Freitag”. She studied journalism and Turkish studies at the FU Berlin and has worked as a freelance author for various media. She was editor of the German-Turkish media platform taz.gazete and head of the Berlin department of taz until 2022. Taşdemir is also a member of the Grimme Prize nomination committee and a regular columnist for the “100 Sekunden Leben” series on rbb-Inforadio.
X Properties: The film programme
with films by Μarta Dauliūtė & Viktorija Šiaulytė, Yvonne Wilhelm/knowbotiq, Black Audio Film Collective and Natascha Sadr Haghighian & Marina Christodoulidou & Peter Eramian
organized by Joerg Franzbecker, Naomi Hennig, Janine Sack and Florian Wüst
How do the forces of financial capital impact on a city’s social and cultural production? How can the goal of urban development for the common good be promoted in the face of gentrification and displacement driven by the booming real estate market? In the fall of 2022, these questions were addressed by X Properties, a nGbK project that dealt with the nGbK’s own situation of its premises at Oranienstraße 25 in Berlin-Kreuzberg being sold to a Luxemburg-based real-estate investment fund. Produced as part of this project, the eleventh issue of Berliner Hefte zu Geschichte und Gegenwart der Stadt combines Berlin case studies with global perspectives on the de-/financialization of the city.
On the occasion of the publication of the English e-book version of X Properties by EECLECTIC, the nGbK is hosting a series of three film screenings that return to this debate about the economization of urban life. The four artistic/activist films explore models for coworking and cohabitation that intrude far into private spheres; reflect on the scope for individual action within the banking system; and look at migration, belonging, and memory as conditions of space-related power relations in techno-capitalism.
Good Life (2022) by Μarta Dauliūtė and Viktorija Šiaulytė documents the everyday life of a group of young people who rent “sleeping pods” measuring just a few square meters in a shared house in central Stockholm; Tech Farm, the start-up operating the facility, inspires them to lead their entire social life as a business operation:entrepreneurship becomes part of theinnermost self and community becomes a commodity. In DREXCIYA or becoming transparent, translucent, transmaterial (2017), Yvonne Wilhelm interweaves biographical storytelling and acoustic historiography in a new interpretation of the migratory movement of the trans-oceanic slave trade. In Twilight City (1989) by the Black Audio Film Collective, the journalist Olivia wanders around London in the early days of neoliberalism; in a letter to her mother, who returned to the Dominican Republic many year previously, she tells of her search for evidence of the ways wealth inequality becomes inscribed into the city, what home means, and what it may once have meant to her mother. The Broken Pitcher (2022) centers on a family’s negotiations with their lending bank about the looming repossession of their home in Larnaka; Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, and Peter Eramian present this real event that took place in 2019 using reconstructions from memory, followed by commentaries by various individuals answering the question: What do you think the bank officials should have done?
Events:
Saturday, December 2, 2023, 7 (en)
nGbK am Alex
nGbK Lecture: Film screening and talk“Good Life“
Good Life
Μarta Dauliūtė, Viktorija Šiaulytė
SE/LT/FI 2022, 72 Min.
Followed by a conversation with Μarta Dauliūtė and Viktorija Šiaulytė, chaired by Janine Sack and Florian Wüst
Good Life follows a group of young people at Tech Farm, a co-living start-up in central Stockholm. They rent “sleeping pods” of only a few square metres and get inspired to run their entire life as a
business operation. In a time of constant self-management, <i>Good Life</i> offers a deep look at how entrepreneurial ideology is affecting us. What happens when a corporate narrative becomes part of your innermost self and community becomes a commodity? Marta Dauliūtė and Viktorija Šiaulytė gained unique access to a start-up environment whose culture has such a powerful influence on contemporary society, but which seldom opens its doors to scrutiny of what lies below the slick surface of social media posts and marketing slogans. By equipping the Tech Farm residents with action cameras, the filmmakers created rare and intimate material that they contrast with 3D animations, everyday scenes in the co-living house, and interviews with financiers and residents. With wit and candour, <i>Good Life</i> presents the points of friction in the entrepreneurial dream.
Saturday, January 13, 2024, 7 pm (de/en)
nGbK am Alex
nGbK Lecture: Film screeing and talk „DREXCIYA + Twilight City“
DREXCIYA or becoming transparent, translucent, transmaterial
Yvonne Wilhelm/knowbotiq
DE/CH 2017, 21:30 Min.
Twilight City
Black Audio Film Collective
UK 1989, 52:00 Min.
Followed by a conversation with Yvonne Wilhelm and Joerg Franzbecker
In DREXCIYA or becoming transparent, translucent, transmaterial (2017), Yvonne Wilhelm interweaves biographical storytelling and acoustic historiography in a new interpretation of the migratory movement of the trans-oceanic slave trade. In Twilight City (1989) by the Black Audio Film Collective, the journalist Olivia wanders around London in the early days of neoliberalism; in a letter to her mother, who returned to the Dominican Republic many year previously, she tells of her search for evidence of the ways wealth inequality becomes inscribed into the city, what home means, and what it may once have meant to her mother.
Saturday, February 10, 2024, 7 pm (de/en)
nGbK am Alex
nGbK Lecture: Film screening and talk „The Broken Pitcher“
The Broken Pitcher
Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, Peter Eramian
DE/CY 2022, 69:00 Min.
Followed by an open talk with Natascha Sadr Haghighian, moderated by Joerg Franzbecker and Naomi Hennig
„The Broken Pitcher“ (2022) centers on a family’s negotiations with their lending bank about the looming repossession of their home in Larnaka; Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, and Peter Eramian present this real event that took place in 2019 using reconstructions from memory, followed by commentaries by various individuals answering the question: What do you think the bank officials should have done?