Curating through Conflict with Care (CCC) is a work group commissioned by the general member assembly of nGbK and a collective research project. It is led by Maithu Bùi, Ayasha Guerin, Moshtari Hilal, Duygu Örs*. 

Working and organizing across a multiplicity of languages and borders to explore the role and responsibilities of curatorial practice which the group understands to be full of contradictions of care. Treating „the conflict“ or „the contradiction“ as a methodology to identify and reveal the paradoxes of inclusive curating, they draw upon contemporary case studies to explore how to advance best practices and existing debates. In August 2023, they curated a series of workshops and hosted a three-day symposium in Berlin for young art workers from across Europe to share experiences and strategies for navigating conflicts in their workplaces. With the launch of this online platform, the notes and collaborative insights from this gathering as well as additional materials in various formats are accessible to all, shared as a collective resource with the goal of connecting experiences, knowledge, and spreading strategies to support art workers to shape change in the art world**. 

*Sophya Frohberg was an active member until June 2022 and Viviane Tabach until April 2021.
**All texts published here reflect the opinions of the respective authors and working group members and are not congruent with those of the association.

© Logo und Bilgestaltung lotsofbroth (Tessa Curran)

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We are not in a sterile space, a vacuum, untouched by the outside world. And yet many think that art could be free of conflicts, that we could avoid them by leaving them unspoken. 

But these conflicts are not created by speaking them out in the first place, and they cannot be separated from our material reality. They lead all the way into the exhibition spaces and panel discussions, into the work contracts and raw materials of our artworks.

Curating Through Conflict with Care, CCC for short, is a collective research project. Together as art workers we are looking for curatorial strategies and methods to deal with conflicts in the art industry.. We want to break out of the logic of damage control. 

In doing so, we take our experiences with racialization and marginalization as a starting point for analysis and work on exemplary conflicts in order to better understand which questions of power remain unanswered.

When does criticism interfere and who does it interfere with? 

Which conflicts are struggles for resources? 

Who can survive conflicts? 

And whose existence is at stake? 

Which conflicts serve to exclude? 

Who is allowed and able to speak when, about what 

and with what self-evidence?

Conflict is perceived as an obstacle, a disruption of relationships. 

Conflicts are a negotiation and exercise of power relations. 

They are rarely isolated, but together form a context, a system and atmosphere. We want to make these contexts recognizable and to learn to break through them together. 

Conflicts are not isolated controversies either. But again and again, people who recognize and name problems are treated as the problem. They say that the tone, space or time is inappropriate. 

In reality, conflicts are fleeting symptoms of deeper relationships. 

We work in and out of them.

Contemporary curatorial practice is full of contradictions of care. 

Even the term „inclusive curating“ seems inherently contradictory.

Selecting and omitting remains inherent in curating. 

We ask: If curating means „caring/care-work,“ then who and what do curators* care about?

Curating should support collective goals rather than self-serving career models. 

For CCC, curating means caring about conflicts and giving them time and space with those affected. In doing so, curating should not control, but contextualize. 

We ask about the reasons for conflict and seek to engage with different perspectives. How can we confront conflicts honestly?

Curators are mediators. They represent and distribute power, space and visibility in the art world. They interact between institutions, artists and the public. The role and responsibility of curatorial practice needs to be examined and collectively reshaped. 

Curatorial practice is seen as elitist, partly because of its external perception. Only a few have access. And although more and more art workers with historically excluded perspectives are entering the art world, they are still isolated. They are intellectually discredited and economically exploited. Without structural and methodological changes, atmospheres remain that prevent power-critical work.

CCC invites BIPOC artists, organizers and interested individuals for collective research. 

During the retreat we will focus on methods and strategies of curatorial work in dealing with conflicts.  

There will be workshops, lectures and discussion sessions with us and mentor*s, but participants are also invited to share their work and experiences. 

We want to know: 

What does it take to feel comfortable in this industry and to remain able to act? 

How has conflict been handled in the workplace in the past? 

How can our work sector take more responsibility for the history of colonialism, fascism, discrimination and exploitation?

The goal is:

To share experiences and knowledge with each other, 

to discuss strategies 

and to help art workers 

to help shape change in the art world.

Collaborative results and insights are then accessible to all and shared as a collective resource on our platform.

We invite practitioners who have had experiences with racism and, beyond that, classism, trans and queer hostility, sexism, and structural discrimination in the art world. We intentionally want to bring these perspectives together and strengthen the ways of dealing with conflicts. 

Curating through Conclict with Care, 2022
Written and directed by Curating through Conflict with Care
(Ayasha Guerin, Moshtari Hilal, Maithu Bùi, Duygu Örs)
Editing by Alice Z Jones
Sound Design by Pamier Hilal
Animation and Logo by Tessa Curran

Symposium Curating through Conflict with Care

The nGbK working group „Curating through Conflict with Care“ (CCC) hosted to a three-day summer symposium from 4 to 6 August 2023. 

The symposium used conflict and contradiction as a methodology to identify and work through the paradoxes of inclusive curating. CCC addressed these contexts as a starting point for further developing best practices and existing debates on curatorial responsibility. The nGbK working group invited workers in the arts to exchange ideas on how to further develop the role of the curator and address contemporary challenges. Together they gathered experiences and ideas for (extra)institutional changes that put care at the center. The programme was divided into three thematic areas: Friday was about curating, Saturday about conflict and Sunday about care work.

Everyone could apply via our open call, whether as a contributor to the programme or as a participant. A large proportion of places wasreserved for BIPoC participants who self-identify as such. This ensures that those who are excluded from these spaces due to discrimination, access difficulties and unaffordability are given the opportunity to explore this work together.

Unlearning “curation” & undoing artworld hierarchies
with CCC (Ayasha Guerin, Duygu Örs, Maithu Bùi, Moshtari Hilal)
We will introduce ourselves, our research project, our structure and vision for the symposium. Why do we need to unlearn curation? How can we undo artworld hierarchies? And what resources do we need to work?

Curating in Germany
with Aïcha Diallo, Cate Lartey, Mable Preach
What does curating look like beyond the German mainstream and canon? Drawing from their local practices in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and beyond the curators share their experiences with and outside of German institutions. To what extent can we undo the coloniality of the structures we work from? And what does it mean to be a bridge between a community and the institution?

Alternative Curatorial Methods
with Azadbek Bekchanov, Edna Bonhomme, Mawena Yehouessi, Felisha Maria Carenage
These art-workers will share insights and questions developed from experience with alternative artist-run spaces, co-organizing working groups to address questions of curatorial control and curatorial kindness, and strategies of taking care with language and critique towards decolonial methods for Europe’s cultural and education spaces.

Caring Infrastructures (DE + EN) 
with Sascia Bailer 
„Caring Infrastructures“ is a concept that attempts to counter structural barriers in the arts with infrastructures of care. This is about critically examining different elements of curating (e.g. budgeting, communication, visibilities, parenting, power etc) and re-exploring them with feminist care ethics (as democratic practice).

somtam manifesto
with Mon Sisu Satrawaha 
This workshop will explore care through sharing knowledge. “Unthaitled” aims to transcend the identity of Thai women beyond the confines of stereotypes in the colonial gaze. The central element of our exploration will be the iconic Thai dish „Som Tam“, we will unravel the intricate narratives woven into its preparation, ingredients, and cultural significance. „Som Tam“ becomes a gateway to understanding the multifaceted experiences and struggles of Thai women within the context of marriage migration.

Mindfulness Exercises
with Shivā Amiri
“It’s time to Rest / Rest will make us more human / Rest as Resistance / We need rest”  (The nap ministry by Tricia Hersey)
An embodied social justice approach that looks at the  body based connection between the body and social justice intersectionally. All are invited to participate each morning in various mindfulness exercises. 

Collective Code of Conduct
in working groups 
Based on the discussions from the first day this writing session aims to translate what we have learned into practical steps and agreements. How could a collective code of conduct look like in order to help us work better together, navigate conflicts and be careful of our resources and time?

Reflecting Conflict
with Parand Danesh, Rubén Ojeda Guzmán, Hajra Haider Karrar
Drawing from their own practices and research the speakers take a closer look at conflict in the most conventional sense of the term, when it is about militarization, about oppression, about war and genocide: How do the materials we use, the themes we explore, the fundings we receive – enable and disable artists and the cultural landscape? While working with vulnerable and oppressed experiences, how can we research and curate responsibly? How can we map and link seemingly isolated conflicts to learn from their patterns?

Curating Conflicts
with Lama el Khatib, Fogha Mc Cornelius Refem, Cẩm-Anh Lương 
In this sharing circle we want to understand the possibilities of conflict-based curating in the art world. What are bottom-up and top-bottom approaches and what makes the difference? By examining curatorial, collaborative, and artistic cases and works, we aim to open a dialogue about shared experiences and finding possible strategies.

Censorship and Scapegoating
with emet ezell , Sinthujan Varatharajah, Zoé Samudzi
This circle critically discusses the cost of speaking in the German public and the search for a different cultural sovereignty: How does a critical engagement with structures and atmospheres of the German (institutional) and cultural industry look like? What hierarchies of victimhood and legitimacy can be identified and how are they being used by those in power? And to what extent can curatorial and artistic work practice integrity and navigate disguised censorship?

A manifesto for radical care or how to be a human in the arts
with Tian Zhang
Join Tian Zhang for a collective reading and discussion of her text „A manifesto for radical care or how to be a human in the arts“. Drawing on her experience in curatorial, community and collective practice, this manifesto is a provocation for reimagining how we relate to each other, to work and the arts. Together we will discuss how these principles can be applied in life and practice.

A reflection in transmissions: Curation as caring belonging
with Feben Amara und Jasmine Grace Wenzel 
The similarities between curating and caring as sustaining activities have already received much discursive attention. However, the care of relatives, which members of the cultural sector also have to provide on a daily basis, hardly plays a role. Cultural workers who provide care are constantly moving between coping with reproductive work - in and outside the cultural sector - and being overwhelmed by it, which often leads to exclusion from the formal and informal networks of cultural work contexts. In this Sharing Circle, we want to orient ourselves and exchange ideas based on questions we have brought with us. Through which structural changes, but also curatorial attitudes and practice (designs), is it possible to maintain the affiliation of those cultural workers who, for their part, care for others? How could inclusion be conceived and expanded in this context? What could the inclusion of such life realities in curatorial practice look like? We would like to approach the answers to these questions together and encourage exchange through various text-based impulses.

Collective Voices 
with Azul Carolina Duque 
We will engage with our voice as an organ that can be collectivized and we will touch sound from a place of ‘depth’ as opposed to ‘mastery’. This practice invites us to interrupt our colonial desires to use our voices for external validation, and instead place our bodies as offerings in the service of resonance. This session is grounded in the notion that by fracturing extractivist patterns of relating to ourselves ( and to each other) as a resource, we can begin to re-member how to ‘care’ for one another in more response-able ways. We will play with the dissonance, resonance and (in)balance of the following questions: How can we increase risk in proportion to care? How can we de-center ourselves, declutter the noise, and dis-invest from our harmful ways of thinking, feeling and relating? How do we embody a political practice of healing and well-being? 

Artistic Responses to Conflict and Care
with Yumna al-Arashi, Havin Al Sindy
As artists, how can we understand and work through the conflicts that surround us? How can art making be a mindspace and tool to take care of conflicts, contextualize, remember or overcome them?

by Ayasha Guerin (CCC)
2024

Curating Through Conflict with Care (CCC) is a project group that formed in the early days of the pandemic, on the heels of global BLM protests, when calls for decolonization of education and museums were being answered with “post-colonial” programs, “diverse” leadership appointments, and new public institutions that promised to address colonialism’s violences. It is painful to reflect on the limits of those 2020 promises. As we enter this final phase of our project four years later, we are (at the time of this writing), six months into an Israeli military assault on Gaza, Palestine. The suffering and killing of over 33 thousand Palestinians to date has been protested by millions of activists globally, while South Africans (having gone through their own experience of apartheid) have taken this case to the International Court of Justice, charging Israel, the U.S. and weapon-supplying western powers (including Germany) with enabling genocidal crimes. The week we’ll publish this text, Nicaragua will take Germany to the International Court of Justice, accusing the country of facilitating and breaching the genocide convention by supplying Israel with military and financial assistance. Meanwhile, in Germany, there is little to no media coverage of this accusation and any discussion of this violent “conflict” has been met with institutional silence and censorship [documenta fifteen] [Archive of Silence], while a cultural strike of hundreds of international artists have vowed to withdraw participation in German exhibitions and programs in response [Strike Germany]. 

CCC met in the context of the 11th Berlin Bienale’s curatorial workshop, which, for the first time, prioritized the involvement of local art workers from “the rising majority,” an identity signifier that we troubled almost immediately upon meeting one another and trying to identify shared experiences and political commitments. While the BB11, titled “The crack begins within”, explicitly explored questions of collectivity and breakthrough, the conflicts that emerged in the awkwardness of the workshops, (which suffered from having to move online after one week), were not recognized by the majority as the opportunities they were, to explore the politics that bothered us around race, privilege, exclusion, platforming, and silencing in the art world. We branched off as CCC, to realize space to think collectively about how we might use conflict as a methodology for locating and attending to violence in the arts and how we might care for each other, historically excluded from formal art spaces, as we grow change in Europe and beyond?

The votes were close, and the election was dramatic, playing out over several rounds of live counts on zoom, but with the selection of our project by nGbK membership, we could support CCC research with a two-year budget. The first phase of our project (2021-22) was a research phase, in which we read together, met to share experiences, and studied specific case studies of curatorial conflict. This timeline for this work coincided with the scandal surrounding Ruangroupa’s collective curation at Documenta15 and the public attacks on racialized artists who participated in the arts festival. The conflicts and contradictions in the Documenta case study propelled us towards the planning of our Berlin symposium in 2023. We invited people who had experienced Documenta15 and other art censorships first hand. We also held an open call to gather people who we did not yet know, but who were also invested in the central questions of our research.

With our project budget, we organized the CCC symposium, a mini residency that would host the rapid-firing of 60 minds, working in a marathon-like effort to exercise valued knowledge, bridge connections, and build trusting relationships over three days. It meant providing travel and accommodation for more than half the group to participate. Whether joining as a panel speaker or an active  listener with smaller contributions, we paid everyone a stipend to contribute their time. The majority of participants were in their 20s and early 30s, and most identified as people of color. All of us have been working, to some capacity, in Europe, (and most hold a local connection to Germany.) 

We knew this meeting would be the first to gather a new generation of art workers for private conversations about the issues that affect us. We knew that many participants, like us, straddled positions as insider-outsiders in cultural institutions: some are independent curators who are also artists and writers, others are museum educators who work for several different institutions as freelancers, many are first generation university students and workers who keep creative practices but struggle to identify as “artists.” We all rely on our relationships with institutions to pay our rent, even if they are profoundly uncomfortable places for us to do our work. 

As we prepped the working space in the hours leading up to the CCC symposium, we quickly and impulsively scrawled two questions onto paper thought-bubbles and tacked them onto a green wall: What can we demand of institutions? and How can we organize ourselves outside of the institution? These were questions that we had internally discussed over three years of project group work, comparing stories and strategies from each of our lives and working contexts.

The green wall did not fill with direct responses, but these questions lingered in the room, shaped spirited debates, prompted lists, mind-maps, and provocations that the symposium’s participants produced in pods of group work. In more than one pod, there emerged a critique of the impulse to write clear proposals for institutional change, a resistance to “do all the work for the institution for free.” Beyond the issue of wages, we agreed that a meaningful code-of-conduct requires the individuals of an institution to spend time writing and committing to their own ethical code – and that this code ought to respond to the specific contexts of the work. There is no one-size-fits all solution to “decolonizing institutions” or implementing caring protocol. To generalize an institutional code-of-conduct, would empty the text of its radical potential. 

I thought of land acknowledgements that announce an art event is taking place on stolen land without commitment to Indigenous sovereignty. Land acknowledgements, which are prevalent in Canada, where I have been working for two years, can be an important step towards reconciliation and restitution, but without the research, listening practices, and cooperation of and with Indigenous peoples, land acknowledgements become empty scripts recycled across uncaring institutions, a formality rather than a force of change. Azul’s contribution, “a Recipe for land acknowledgements” acts as an intervention and invites us into another way of accountability. [A Recipe for Land Acknowledgements.]

While we did collect a list of suggestions for institutional protocol [Link to Protocol]  the second question: how do we organize ourselves outside of institutions, was the one that produced more thought and recommendation. Perhaps because it is the approach we all have more experience trying (out of necessity), and therefore have put a bit more hope in. Some participants suggested that instead of approaching the question of how an institution should act, we should rather ask how to protect ourselves as we enter into work with institutions, expecting the predominantly white art institution (PWAI) will be violent. Perhaps we needed to be writing a roadmap for navigating PWAI institutions, something more akin to an Art World Greenbook. [Archive of Silence]

Other groups questioned whether approaching these topics defensively was the right call. Why define our strategy as alternatives to white power structures? Shouldn’t we rather be using this space to dream beyond? To make radical calls and push expectations further? 

We spoke a lot about the challenges of working collectively. Knowing where to spend your energy and when to conserve it. Coalition work is not inevitable [Do we have to like each other to care for one another?], and our capacities to do this work quickly and efficiently are usually low. Everyone was asking “why don’t we have an art worker’s union?” And if we did, what kind of things could that union negotiate on our behalf? We’ve included a Q&A on our platform with Zoë Claire Miller of BBK, the closest thing to an artist’s union Berlin has, to further some of this questioning.  

We circled back too, to the question of mentorship. What is it? And why have so few of us experienced it? Could we mentor each other? And what kind of mentoring structures could we imagine? We discussed the need to self-define our own value systems before entering into work with one another and before working with institutions. Whether as an employee or a freelance art worker, in order to navigate the institution, one needs to map one’s own value system so as not to get lost inside, alone. Reflect, what is it you care about? What do you need to feel supported to enter working relations with others? How do you build and keep trusting working relations?

None of us approach this work from the same positionality. We represent different social classes, native languages, and migration backgrounds. We’ve been shaped by different traumas and responsibilities. We come with different expertise and experiences working collectively, internationally, interculturally and intergenerationally. There are different vulnerabilities in navigating the institution as someone on payroll vs. as a freelancer. We agreed, we need ongoing research to map our distinct vulnerabilities in order to enter working coalitions that work for all of us. 

Care and Conflict were themes of the symposium, but conflict was much more attractive of a container for our conversations than care. 

“What even is care?” participants asked aloud. We need to talk about care,” we agreed. Care discourse in the museum too often stands in as reference and solicitation of feminized labor. It repulses those of us resistant to play the role of the art-world mammy, where Black/WoC curators, mediators, and educators are expected to take care of white feelings in institutions showing work about violence and conflict. During our collective reading of Tian Zhang’s Radical Care Manifesto, we considered, who cares for the care workers? We agreed, care is not charity, but solidarity. 

More importantly, we agreed we needed this space to care about the real world conflicts affecting our work, including political conflicts, like border wars and genocides that some participants have personally lived through and which shape core principles and investments. If only we had more time together… Our conversations on “Conflict” day were challenging and generative in their engagement with the differences within our group. We wrestled with definitions of complicity, agency and power. We modeled the kind of collective learning that CCC yearned for in our first meeting, at the BB11 curatorial workshop.  

Our last conversation in the symposium was marked by a complete restructuring of the scheduled program so that we could discuss the violent systems we’ve inherited and our personal and collective responsibilities to change them. I learned, there is so much value in committing time that is flexible to allow for generous listening and mutual understanding, so that the roots of our conflicts are respected as we reach towards resolution. Meaningful, inclusive, collective work takes patience. 

The reflections on this platform offer small glimpses into an art-work discourse that developed over three days and ran late into the nights at the outdoor tables of Südblock, Kottbusser Tor, despite an unusually rainy and cold August. Publishing these texts, we enter the final phase of CCC; the sharing phase. We are making collective insights available to the public via this website as we discuss how to continue our work, albeit in a less institutionally formalized way, once the official project support of nGbK is over. 

Our working group formed within conflicts and, even as we came together, the group did not progress without conflicts. We’ll end the third phase of our project working together with two fewer members than when we started. Each of us has struggled through varying capacities to contribute to the collective work in an ongoing pandemic as we’ve experienced several destabilizing challenges to our families, including an international move, a new birth, and several deaths of loved ones. It is a testament to our dedication to these research questions and to each other that we are still meeting regularly across a nine-hour time difference and organizing opportunities for others to join the conversation.

by Maithu Bùi (CCC)
2024

Conflict 

We consider Conflict as a methodology, as a commitment to transparency and accountability, while navigating conflicts. It requires active engagement and perseverance in discourse and confrontation to foster understanding, reconciliation, and ideally, improved conditions. It is a process and skill that demands not only resources like dedication to time, but also the ability and willingness to engage exhaustively in care work. At its best, Curating Conflict is a collaborative act aimed at finding better solutions, establishing a shared understanding of clear and transparent objectives among multiple stakeholders, while challenging dominant narratives and creating spaces for diverse perspectives to coexist and interact. Care, as a guiding principle, encompasses compassion, empathy, and responsibility towards others in action. How can we genuinely do care work and build support systems and strategies to stand in solidarity with those in need? In contrast, fake solidarity engages in performative acts and symbolic gestures. If compassion means suffering together, then caring means enduring suffering and the disagreeable by taking responsibility and holding each other accountable. Curating Conflict is an approach that genuinely values diverse perspectives in conflicts and aims to maintain open spaces for people to freely express their views. Holding these spaces open is crucial and requires creating environments where individuals feel empowered to express themselves without fear of reprisal or censorship. Maintaining open spaces for free expression and confronting uncomfortable truths fosters understanding, reconciliation, and resistance.

Carewashing and Careshifting

Carewashing, like greenwashing and artwashing, is a surface-level approach, that exploits the rhetoric of care for marketing or branding purposes and relies on the appropriation of performative acts and symbolic gestures. It lacks genuine impact or accountability and does not challenge power structures or systems to maintain a sanitized image. Careshifting redirects the public attention to a conflict for which there is a wider public consent. It happens when institutions and institutionalized people prioritize image and reputation management over substantive action. Careshifting is the easiest to detect when a conflict to avoid is most obvious in the public eye. At its worst, it ends up scapegoating easy targets. Both tactics are conflict avoidance tactics that SILENCE or downplay the uncomfortable and seek to suppress dissent, while maintaining a facade of harmony. This approach stifles meaningful dialogue and compassionate improvements and perpetuates systemic injustices. It is through collective efforts to confront conflict and challenge oppression that more just and compassionate communities can be created. Curating Conflict as a methodology and Carewashing are therefore contrasting methodologies for addressing conflicts within institutional contexts.

Code of Care = Commitment to Confront Conflict

• Commit to transparency, accountability, and social justice whenever attempts at carewashing, careshifting, and scapegoating could be made.

• Instead of avoiding conflicts, embrace conflict as a method for finding better solutions and understanding.

• Identify areas where conflicts and tensions are present and could arise, both within and outside institutions.

• Approach conflicts with openness and fairly compensated care work.

• Challenge dominant narratives and power structures.

• Recognize and address inequalities and injustices within the space.

• Be transparent about the processes, decisions, as well as the level of support and solidarity.

• Explain the rationale behind your actions.

• Commit to perseverance in discourse and confrontation to foster understanding, reconciliation, and ideally, improved conditions.

• Establish protocols to ensure consistency based on established and agreed-upon rules and procedures.

• Share institutional infrastructures and procedures to facilitate the development of better solutions. 

What if referring to a conflict is turning into a conflict? In our editing process we decided to keep the text that might cause a conflict and juxtapose is with a contextual/institutional note. By keeping both interpretations of a conflict, we allow the reader to learn about the contradictions, rather than glaze over them. Here are some of the editorial notes that adresss conflicts:

e.g.: you want to hold space open for others, but also distance yourself from their position as an institution. Use a disclaimer:
„DISCLAIMER:  The answers in the interviews do not represent the views of nGbK.“ [1]

or

„All texts published here reflect the opinions of the respective authors and working group members and are not congruent with those of the association.“ [2]

Name the conflict by its name without othering

Be prepared to engage in care work, always reserving time and space for adjustments.

e.g.:  “genocide”
„Editor’s note by nGbK: To the time of publishing, Germany is on trial before the International Court of Justice defending itself against Nicaragua’s accusation of complicity in genocide in the Gaza Strip. In the case of South Africa against Israel, the International Court of Justice on 26 January 2024 ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent any acts that could be considered genocidal according to the 1948 Genocide Convention.“ [1][3]

e.g.: “BDS”
„Editor’s note by nGbK: On May 17, 2019, the Bundestag adopted a motion entitled „Resolutely opposing the BDS movement - combating anti-Semitism“ and condemns the BDS campaign and the call to boycott Israeli goods, companies, scientists, artists and athletes: No organizations that question Israel’s right to exist should receive financial support. The federal states, cities and municipalities are called upon to support this stance.“ [1]

e.g.:  “Jewface”
„See Wikipedia: “Jewface is a term that negatively characterizes inauthentic portrayals of Jewish people. The term has existed since the late 1800s, and most generally refers to performative Jewishness.”“ [3]

Compassion:

• Build empathy and understanding towards others.

• Unlearn violence through informal and formal education and training.

• Learn to understand and respect everyone’s experiences and perspectives.

• Prioritize the voices of marginalized individuals and communities.

• Provide and create platforms for them to share their experiences and perspectives.

• Protect these voices by supporting their position, rather than scapegoating them.

• Create space and opportunities for dialogue and critical engagement.

• Invite multiple perspectives to find better solutions together.

• Actively listen to marginalized voices, implementing protocols and procedures to ensure inclusivity.

Action:

• Take action to address underlying issues.

• Promote and insist on better solutions within institutions.

• Follow up and establish sustainable and adaptable procedures.

• Ensure that efforts go beyond performative acts and symbolic gestures.

• Be transparent about the kinds of support offered and provide support and solidarity.

Reflect and Repeat:

• Check if conditions improved 

• Continuously and critically reflect on practices and strategies in focus groups. Be honest.

• Collect and evaluate feedback from stakeholders regularly.

• Include external consultation with different perspectives, expertise, and practices.

• Learn from what worked and what did not work.

• Proactively update infrastructures, procedures, and approaches.

• Schedule dedicated time and plan resources for updates.

• Repeat. Better solutions are not a one-time event.

[1] nGbK Disclaimer and Editor’s note by nGbK in: Do we have to like each other to care for one another?
[2] nGbK – Curating through Conflict with Care (CCC) and nGbK – CCC Symposium 2023 with Contributions
[3] Editor’s note by nGbK in: What are legitimate grounds for claiming an identity?

by Moshtari Hilal (CCC)
2024

The art scene is referred to as a “scene” for multiple reasons. It serves not just as a backdrop for theatrical displays of performativity, posing, and positioning, but also as a space that often intellectualizes its detachment from the mundane realities of mainstream consumption and labor. While the arts can resemble a marketplace, an industry, or even a discipline, it remains undeniably an arena where creativity intersects with commerce, depth contends with surface, and where individuals struggle for recognition amid exploitative working conditions.

In this chaotic environment, traditional mindsets emphasize the power of professional friendships and networks. Yet, a growing trend suggests that the evolving identity and representation economy is ushering in alternative voices to penetrate these exclusive circles of cliques and nepotism. While calls for diversity have opened some doors and spotlighted individual names, substantial change remains elusive. 

Projects centering identity politics, caring infrastructures, and safe spaces in the arts hold value in empowering marginalized voices and fostering affirmative discourse, but their efficacy in driving structural change is limited. Often reliant on volunteerism or low-wage labor, these initiatives sometimes garner fleeting attention or become tokens for corporations and institutions, constrained by narrow themes. In Germany, marginalized groups have to convincingly argue that their interests and needs align with  multicultural democracy or liberal anti-discrimination funds  in their applications. These infrastructures and the selective governmental investments tend to perpetuate competition among the marginalized, making them susceptible to state influence and censorship.

To shift our focus from cultural particularism towards pragmatic collective efforts, we must first recognize ourselves as workers under capitalism, dispelling the myth of the creative genius, as well as the essentialism of the authentic informant. We need a practical understanding of what it means to be an artist, treating it not as an eccentric and exclusive career but as labor, that can be measured in time and energy invested, deserving fair pay and credit. Honest discussions about material needs and practicalities, rather than glamorizing the bohemian artist archetype, are essential to pave the way for greater inclusivity and opportunities for marginalized demographics. 

The misconception that precarity and trauma fuel creativity hinder us to acknowledge that in fact privilege and comfort create the most inspiring working conditions for artists. Conditions such as stable housing, studios, travel, and leisure time enable artistic expression, allow experimental and controversial research and exploration. By acknowledging shared material interests, we can then address political responsibilities, how to advocate for ethical practices while challenging institutional narratives and influences. To do so, we need to meet our essential needs first. Old-school leftist organizing tools like unionizing, strikes, boycotts, and wage transparency could serve as effective means to achieve these goals. Collective solidarity enables us to voice criticism without fear of material loss and to shape the political reality reflected in our artworks.

The last few months, with the cancellations and defundings of multiple dissident artists in democratic and liberal states such as Germany, have painted a cautionary tale for many cultural workers. While curators allegedly receive calls from state officials demanding active censorship, other institutions cave to smear campaigns initiated by right wing blogs and remove artists, writers and cultural workers from their programs without genuine efforts to mediate. While some organizers and curators were reported to the police for their use of language and  expression of political protest, others have already been subject to house raids by police forces. The Berlin Senate for Culture at one point tried to push for a clause stipulating that public funds in the arts would depend on the political views of workers on Israel, thus bureaucratizing the monitoring and sanctioning of geopolitical analysis and dissent. However, due to successful organizing, the clause was dropped for now. 

Many cultural workers became painfully aware of the limits of individual positions in conflict with state sanctioned narratives and interpretations of the world we live in. The arts scene was in desperate need of a reality check and finally woke up to a highly political status quo that was hiding behind the detached abstraction and cynical sarcasm of the art world. Now minimal pastel colored installation artists become targets of censorship based on their personal beliefs, while hyperpolitical curatorial projects, despite their previous symbolic use of resistance vocabulary,  remain silent and passive due to their dependence on public funds.

It’s time to ditch the superficiality of identity politics posturing and embrace the transformative power of goal-oriented organizing. By setting clear objectives, mobilizing resources, and coordinating efforts to achieve specific outcomes, artists and cultural workers can harness their collective power to effect meaningful change, challenge the status quo, and make a lasting impact on the world around them. One big issue among left-leaning, progressive and critical groups is the fragmentation of efforts and resources despite their shared needs and goals. Often groups fall into conflict and split based on disagreements about theory, language,  even aesthetics . Disagreements are felt as personal attacks, contradictions are judged as moral failure, and criticism is often perceived as a destructive stance instead of a constructive exchange of views. 

Organizing as a tool and process is misunderstood as a retreat, a shelter in the making. Many tend to forget that we do not come together, because we like each other, instead it is an urgency, a need, a common enemy, that forces us together. Therefore the solidarity in coming together and fighting together is not necessarily shared love for one another, but most probably shared anger, shared fear, shared conflict that we want to address, resolve or confront. The utopian idea of trauma-bonding over discrimination in safe spaces distorts the reality of political organizing that we need to hold space for conflict, for difference, for contradictions and dissent. The power of collective efforts lies in our numbers and our finding common goals and strategies despite our conflicts by focusing on the most urgent and most dangerous threats to our lives. 

Advantages of Goal-oriented organizing 

Long-term Impact and Sustainability: Unlike ad-hoc initiatives or projects driven primarily by personal relationships, goal-oriented organizing focuses on creating lasting systemic change and building sustainable structures, networks, and capacities within the arts.

Strategic Focus: By adopting a goal-oriented approach, art workers and cultural organizations can strategically align their efforts. Goal-oriented organizing prioritizes clear objectives and strategic planning, ensuring that efforts are directed towards achieving measurable outcomes. This focus on results and impact helps to maximize the effectiveness of collective action and resource allocation. 

Accountability and Evaluation: By setting clear goals and objectives, goal-oriented organizing facilitates accountability and evaluation of progress and success. This transparency and accountability are essential for building trust, maintaining momentum, and adapting strategies as needed to achieve desired outcomes.

Strength in Numbers: By organizing collectively, artists can leverage their collective strength and influence to negotiate better terms, secure improved working conditions, and challenge unfair or exploitative practices within the arts industry. This can be especially beneficial for artists who may not have the same bargaining power or resources individually.

Community Building and Networking: Organizing provides opportunities for artists to connect, collaborate, and build supportive communities beyond their personal networks. This can foster creativity, innovation, and mutual learning, as well as provide emotional and professional support for artists navigating the challenges of a career in the arts.

Social and Political Engagement: Organizing allows artists to engage more actively in social and political issues, using their platforms and influence to raise awareness, mobilize support, and effect change on a broader scale. This can include advocacy for social justice, human rights, environmental sustainability, and other important causes that intersect with the arts.

A Closer Look at Two Methods

DISCLAIMER: The answers in the interviews do not represent the views of nGbK. 

Strike Germany
— 5 Answers about their Strategies and Learnings

Who are you and how did you come together, why did you choose to stay anonymous? 

STRIKE GERMANY is a call to strike, and not an organisation in and of itself. It is entirely without affiliation or funding. We are a broad coalition of artists, filmmakers, writers and cultural workers based in Berlin. We remain anonymous to allow the call to speak for itself, and make space for a dynamic response to Germany’s doubling down in its commitment to supporting Israeli state violence in Palestine.

Why did you choose Strike and not for example Boycott to express your protest and dissent? And what are the conditions and demands of your strike? 

By choosing the framework of a strike, STRIKE GERMANY is appealing to artists and cultural workers as people whose labor can be withheld—not just their money or attention or name. A strike emphasizes that there are concrete demands being made. We firmly support the Palestinian-led call to Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Israel ¹ , and chose to call our demands a Strike to distinguish our campaign.  STRIKE GERMANY is addressed to cultural workers who are invited for shows, festivals, and panels at German cultural institutions. 

Why did you focus your Strike on Germany and will it be limited to this State or are you considering a Strike US too? 

STRIKE GERMANY focuses on Germany’s cultural institutions because of their proximity to the German state. While we are well aware of US complicity in the prosecution of Israel’s war in Gaza, it is not at all clear that withdrawing cultural worker labor from the US economy would have the same effect as it does in the German context. Indeed the threat of STRIKE GERMANY itself was enough to send the commentariat aflame, and spawned numerous panicked and paranoid feuilleton articles within days of the call being published. Germany is our target because, for better or worse, Germany is where we call home—and despite the state’s ever more firm commitment to not incorporate us, we are here.

How do you support cultural workers that face essential material loss by joining the Strike? 

We invite those working in Germany to sign in solidarity if they are able, however STRIKE GERMANY does not primarily target cultural workers who are based in Germany and dependent on local structures for their livelihood and residency status. We applaud and encourage other groups and alliances to create strike funds to support those withdrawing their labor for German institutions, but we acknowledge that as an informal coalition we could not commit to operating such an infrastructure. The urgent call for workers to act acknowledges that this action will take different forms shaped by our particular precarities. But to not act affirmatively in calling for the liberty and dignity of the Palestinian people here in Germany and in Palestine, as so many institutions in Germany still have yet to do, leads only to moral bankruptcy in the face of ongoing genocide ² .

What were unexpected alliances or conflicts in the process?

In an interview, Turner prize winning artist Jesse Darling said of STRIKE GERMANY, „The strike has been criticized for not having clear objectives but it reflects the precarious conditions of cultural workers. And as artists, we’re workers of the image and the word, and these actions are what we have at our disposal.“ The call to STRIKE GERMANY is clear in its commitments to the liberation of the Palestinian people. Any ambiguity lies in our being addressed to a broad and varied coalition of cultural workers, none of whom share the same working conditions. By remaining open to many strategies, our movement is made stronger. Independent coalitions like DJs for Paletine and Ravers for Palestine answered and preceded our call and we remain inspired by the work of Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) in the US. Campaigns to refuse German cultural funding have also sprung up internationally, in South Africa, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, UK and the US. The power in collective struggle lies in our capacity to imagine what we might do together; it relies on our willingness to forgo the typical measures of success in the field of cultural work, looking instead to the twinned horizons of liberation and revolution.

Why  Art Unions
— 5 Questions to a bbk member

Why should we join an Art Union?

You should join an art union for the same reasons a worker in any field should join their union. Unions offer protection, power in numbers, and a platform to voice common interests, the statisticsl correlation between labor conditions & union membership is well-documented. In the arts, a field where workers are all self-employed and so have no recourse to many legal means of workers’ protection / rights, unions are especially important. The bbk berlin is the only union in the field of the arts I know that provides free legal consultstion for its members—in a field where abuse of power is rampant and most workers are not wealthy, this is also a key benefit.

How can one join an Art Union?

By filling out the membership form—in the case of bbk berlin, this: https://www.bbk-berlin.de/en/membership.

Why do you think that most of our CCC participants are invested in transformative questions and looking for solidarity, but are not members of your union? How would you change that?

I would rather be on the asking than the answering end of this Q! 

The bbk berlin is in a transitional phase, its formerly rather homogeneous membership currently shifting. While our membership used to be majority older, German native speakers, recently many more young, PoC and international artists have been joining, but we are still less known among these demographic groups in the city. Those who join shape our work with their votes, their active participation in working groups, their feedback, and the option to run as a candidate to be elected onto the board. We are self-organized / artist-governed to a greater degree than many similar organizations—so membership means the chance of shaping our work to a great extent. I think that the bbk berlin has an image problem to a certain degree, based on its complexity—we have two non-profit subsidiaries, and within them many offices / workshops / fields of activity. So some artists associate the bbk berlin with only one part that they are aware of, say, the studio program or the sculpture workshop, and aren’t aware we are a union. It’s difficult to communicate the complete range of our work effectively, because it’s vast.

What are the main conflicts within the union and how do you approach them?

Our main conflicts are generational conflicts, varying political views within our membership, currently especially how much / whether we should take a stand on political issues beyond cultural policy in Germany. We have the typical problems of working as a collective—finding compromises in group with diverse beliefs, work-life-balance, self-exploitation.

We approach them through conversation—and when it comes down to decisions, taking votes.

How connected is your union with other workers outside the arts?

We collaborate with and support campaigns where there is an overlap with the interests of artists—some examples are parental benefits for freelancers, protests over the rent crisis in Berlin or against Nazis. We work together with ver.di as well. But the vast majority of collaboration with other organizations is within the arts: with the unions and institutions in the Coalition of the Independent Scene or the Rat für die Künste.

The nGbK working group „Curating through Conflict with Care“ (CCC) hosted to a three-day summer symposium from 4 to 6 August 2023. 

The symposium used conflict and contradiction as a methodology to identify and work through the paradoxes of inclusive curating. CCC addressed these contexts as a starting point for further developing best practices and existing debates on curatorial responsibility. The nGbK working group invited workers in the arts to exchange ideas on how to further develop the role of the curator and address contemporary challenges. Together they gathered experiences and ideas for (extra)institutional changes that put care at the center. The programme was divided into three thematic areas: Friday was about curating, Saturday about conflict and Sunday about care work.

Everyone could apply via our open call, whether as a contributor to the programme or as a participant. A large proportion of places wasreserved for BIPoC participants who self-identify as such. This ensures that those who are excluded from these spaces due to discrimination, access difficulties and unaffordability are given the opportunity to explore this work together.

Content

Curating through Conflict with Care (CCC) Symposium Program 2023 curated by Ayasha Guerin, Duygu Örs, Maithu Bùi,  Moshtari Hilal

Conflict as methodology: Reflections on how we’ve learned together in symposium by Ayasha Guerin (CCC)

Curating Conflict without Carewashing? by Maithu Bùi (CCC)

Do we have to like each other to care for one another? by Moshtari Hilal (CCC)

Was sind legitime Gründe für die Behauptung einer Identität? by emet ezell

Responding to Questions on Conflict by Parand Danesh

A Poem: Rent is due by Fatim Selina Diaby

A polyphonic hypothesis by Azadbek Bekchanov

A Recipe for Land Acknowledgements. by Azul Dugue

Curating space: Bottom-up/Bottom-down/Bottom-around Reflections by Cẩm-Anh Lương

Unbehagen Pflegen by Felisha Carenage

These three days, I am a sponge by Maike Siu-Wuan Storf

To Unite is to Recite Reflections on the CCC Symposium by Mon Sisu Satrawaha มอ่ น ศศิุสาตราวาหะ 

Post-Conflict or Institutionalization of Conflict by Rubén Ojeda Guzmán

Documentation Through Observations: How (not) to document conflicts by Pegah Byroum-Wand

All texts published here reflect the opinions of the respective authors and working group members and are not congruent with those of the association.

A Syllabus
by Jonas von Lenthe (Wirklichkeits Books)
2020-2024

Manufacturing Consent in Germany is a collection of freely accessible materials that provide a structural understanding of the increasingly repressive climate within the German cultural landscape. Central to this is the nationalized politics of Holocaust remembrance, which has been effectively instrumentalized, as is clear from the various articles, lectures, press releases, and podcasts, by the right-wing in Germany. The extent of this form of disciplining has been particularly palpable in the days since the massacres by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023 and the ensuing collective punishment of Gaza by the Israeli army. While the majority of civilian protests against the war crimes of the Israeli army were banned in Germany with the explanation that they were anti-Semitic – a ban that was enforced with frightening police violence –, German institutions largely remained silent about the human rights violations committed in Gaza. The articles linked in the Syllabus are from the last few years and, while addressing anti-democratic tendencies, they are the product of inspiring and transnational discursive spaces that thrive despite them. We want to oppose the German press’ depiction of anti-Semitism as a phenomenon of the Arab-migrant milieu by recognizing that the so-called “denazification” project after 1945 remains unaccomplished; it is the German majority society which is saturated with anti-Semitic continuities. With this compilation we hope to stimulate reflection and promote a discussion on how to oppose this current repression; we believe that opposing it is necessary for the struggle against racist, anti-muslim and anti-Semitic violence and the struggle towards a dignified life for the Palestinian people. Our hearts and thoughts are with all killed, dispossessed, abducted and displaced people and their loved ones. The syllabus was first published on November 5, 2023. It was expanded on April 16, 2024; the new additions are highlighted in gray.

[Link to Syllabus]

founded by Parand Danesh

LEARNING FROM CONFLICT is an online platform that aims at creating a unique pedagogical space for sharing academic resources and field impressions produced by emerging social scientists examining various facets of armed conflicts and extreme violence, including genocides, politicides, wars, civil wars, revolutions and any forms of racial and/or gender segregation. The main purpose of the platform will be to give young researchers, who have recently returned from challenging fieldwork, an opportunity to share their insights concerning specific conflicts and their singular context of formation and perpetuation through podcasts and short field notes that will launch next fall.

Our goal is to gather a set of unifying and fundamental characteristics to wars, violent mass mouvements and genocides in order to document and index their shared features. We want to exploit the theoretical knowledge they offer on the emergence, management and resolution of violent conflicts in order to, one day, apply it back to the fieldworks from where we, as social scientists, have drawn them from in the first place.

The platform was founded in 2022 by Parand Danesh, Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris) curently based in Berlin as a Junior Fellow at the Centor for the History of Emotions of the Max Planck Institute for Human Develpment.

by Azul Dugue
2024

Why:

“Land Acknowledgements” emerged in what is known as Canada today, and are a way to express responsibility to the past history, current reality and future commitment to Indigenous people’s struggles in their lands. 

Even though the European art scene openly engages in critical conversations around racism, hetero-patriarchy, ecological extractivism and capitalism, it somehow does a fantastic work at remaining silent on how it directly benefits from historic and ongoing global structures of colonial violence. 

Land acknowledgements are:

Honest recognition of global structures of violence: including the dispossession, genocide, ecocide, invisibilized underpaid labour, and environmental exploitation that (historically and ongoingly) enable the conditions for the current colonial systems to flourish. 

an acknowledgment of life and of self: of land as a living entity that belongs to itself. Of our bodies as land made of the same rivers, glaciers, toxins, soils, winds, plastics, and fires as the territories we are part of.

A spatio-temporal acceptance of complicity: a mature political questioning of how we benefit from intersecting crises.

A statement of commitment to un-learning our internalized harmful ways of being, thinking and feeling, and to supporting those who put their lives on the line to resist colonial violence. 

An important but insufficient step towards caring for intergenerational and global conflicts with humility, honesty and self-reflexivity. 

Land Acknowledgements are NOT: 

A tokenistic way to perform allyship, to gain social capital, or to state one’s benevolence or ‘woke-ness’. They are not a generic script that can be universally applied. 

Since Land Acknowledgements are deeply contextual, nuanced and personal, this is an incomplete list of questions that can serve as a starting point: 

1. What historical violences were necessary for [insert the nation-state where you are based] to be what it is today? Who are the humans and other species that have historically paid the price for this infrastructure I benefit from? Who will be the future ancestors that will bear the costs, unless things radically change? 

2. What are the neo-colonial global supply chains that provide my food, health care, road, clothes and shelter? What are the conditions that enable the mines that bleed the minerals in my computers and phones? Who’s lives are at risk because of my waste (i.e. the level of CO2 released into the atmosphere, or the plastic waste that sustains my lifestyle?). Who are the most affected communities by the climate and nature emergency? 

3. What are the paradigms that mask this violence as progress and development? 

4. How can I honor these hard truths from a place of accountability, honesty and care? How can I do so without centering myself through guilt? How can acknowledging that I am part of the problem contribute to a deeper relational accountability towards it? 

Note: Allow the process of creating a land acknowledgement to pierce and collectivize your heart. Make it personal and be specific. Look up the names of the corporations, products, foods, and people(s). Remember the specific moments, and date them if needed. Name your denials and realizations. 

a poetic intervention
by emet ezell
2024

Each year, more and more white Germans convert to Judaism. They dye their hair brown. They clasp Jewish star necklaces around their necks. They change their names to Rachel, to Hannah, to David, to Nathan. 

“Jew-facing”*— Germans, often with Nazi heritage and sometimes with a fabricated ancestral rumor, who try to pass as Jewish, either through formal conversion or simply pretending. 

This phenomenon transcends the political spectrum. Germans on both the right and the left love to claim a Jewish face. But one cannot convert out of an ancestral lineage. History is a porous thing, but it is not formless. It is not without implication.

What are legitimate grounds for claiming an identity? Who decides?

Often, white Germans want more than to convert. They want power. They want to speak on behalf of all Jewish people. They want moral justification and an exotic thrill. 

When one converts to Judaism, one does so in order to join a Jewish community. But what is conversion when the community has been entirely decimated?   

In Germany, conversion is a career booster. German converts apply for Jewish scholarships. They sit on boards of Jewish foundations, run synagogues, and direct art museums. Throughout Germany, academic positions in Jewish Studies are held by German converts or pretenders, many of whom serve a Zionist apartheid agenda.

The more I speak with others about “Jew-facing” in Germany, the more I begin to understand its geopolitical implications. There are real material, social, and cultural resources at stake. 

For white Germans, Jewishness remains an extractable and valuable resource: an instrumentalized costume. One that allows Germans to forge a Jewishness in their own image.

In contemporary Germany, converts to Judaism often serve a liberalizing agenda. They allow the State to congratulate itself on the renewal of a particular sort of Jewish life, one divorced from history and religious practice. In a sick reversal of genocide, German conversion to Jewishness remains colonial: a need to possess Jews, control them, speak for them, and now: become them. 

What are legitimate grounds for claiming an identity?

Far before Israel’s genocide** on Gaza, Germany’s orientation to Jews resulted in obscene repression and silencing of Palestinians. In the past few months, this has only increased, with Berlin police banning Palestinian actions, events, and conferences. 

Germany’s censorship and repression is often done under high-pitched accusations of anti-semitism. But who defines anti-semitism in Germany? 

Solidarity with Palestine is for me, and many other Jews, a fundamental political priority. The phenomenon of German converts and similar imposters makes it harder to forge real networks of solidarity between Jews and other groups who have experienced or are now facing genocide. 

In many ways, “Jew-facing” parallels a similar phenomenon in North America, a context to which I am particularly attuned, having been raised in the United States. 

Each year, more and more white people in both the USA and Canada claim Indigenous heritage through DNA testing. The veneer of “science” (eerily eugenic in its biological determinism) allows these white people to instrumentalize Indigeneity. Under the pretense of heritage, they seize scholarships, tribal enrollment, professional and artistic positions. 

Professor and researcher Dr. Kim TallBear notes that these individuals are often seeking “identity without relationship.” Her words boomerang back to me from between the stolpersteine: identity without relationship. 

I understand my own Jewishness to be an act of ancestral and cultural integrity. When I enter a synagogue in Berlin, an ostensibly Jewish space, I am surrounded by blonde hair and blue eyes. No one in the building knows how to pray. Beside me, a woman screeches in high soprano. 

I want to lean over and whisper in her ear: we don’t sing like this! Masking as Jews, Germans infiltrate Jewish space and censor Jewish expression. The parasitic relationship between Germans and Jews remains.  

The colonizer wants everything, even victimhood. And the colonizer will do anything to get it— hasn’t this always been their way? 

Yet victimhood cannot be the only pathway towards cultural, social, or political participation. We must forge other ways of being together, other webs of solidarity. 

Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec writes: 

“If we can only claim legitimacy through victimhood, then we have lost the ability to have real, political, responses to real, political, problems.”

We are losing our ability to respond. 

As artists, curators, and cultural workers, how can we organize outside of these exploitative frameworks of victimhood? Amidst so many layers of deception, what can guide us? 

I want to offer a term, which I learned from Krawec, that has helped me in navigating this tangled web of relations. The term is cultural sovereignty: the ability of a cultural group to define, determine, and govern itself. 

What I find powerful about this concept is its ability to shift the gravitational force away from personal identity markers and towards collective power. 

Thinking through and with cultural sovereignty forces a confrontation with the nefarious ways in which hegemonic – in this case, German— power functions. 

Censorship, scapegoating, protest bans, and language erasure: Whose voices are heard and whose voices are silenced? Which freedom struggles are considered legible, urgent, and why? 

Rather than fetishizing or weaponizing representation, we need to consider the larger impacts of our curatorial choices. How can we see through the layers of deception in real time? 

If cultural sovereignty were a guiding value in curatorial decision-making processes, perhaps the German-convert foothold might shift. 

This piece is excerpted from a larger lyric essay and remains a poetic intervention based on personal experience and exploratory research.

For Further Reading: 

1. Krawec, Patty.  Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining our Future. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2022. 

2. Tallbear, Kimberly. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.   

3. Tzuberi, Hannah. “’Reforesting’ Jews: The German State and the Construction of ‘New German Judaism,’“ Jewish Studies Quarterly, Issue 27, Vol. 3, 199-224. 

4. Tzuberi, Hannah. “When the State Converts: Identification and Moral Panic in Contemporary Germany,” Association of Jewish Studies: 53rd Annual Conference, December 17-21, 2021.

* See Wikipedia: “Jewface is a term that negatively characterizes inauthentic portrayals of Jewish people. The term has existed since the late 1800s, and most generally refers to performative Jewishness.”

** Editor’s note by nGbK: To the time of publishing, Germany is on trial before the International Court of Justice defending itself against Nicaragua’s accusation of complicity in genocide in the Gaza Strip. In the case of South Africa against Israel, the International Court of Justice on 26 January 2024 ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent any acts that could be considered genocidal according to the 1948 Genocide Convention.

by Fatim Selina Diaby
2024
.
.
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.
.
a payment delayed 
.
.
a response  
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pending  
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.
Rent is due 
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a contract finalized 
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a signature Forced 
.
Rent is due 
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at cocktail hour  
.
a new request  
.
Rent is due 
.
a Collaboration in  
.
white theft  
.
i refuse 
.
Rent is due 
.
i don’t pay  
.
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.
i don’t give
.
exclude 
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include 
.
exploit  
.
me  
.
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.
Rent is due 
.
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.
Last. 
.
Time. 
.
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.
i don’t eat 
.
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.
i don’t sleep 
.
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.
i don’t breathe 
.
Rent is due  
.
i think about 
.
DE
.
Nazification  
.
i think about
.
This
. 
Nation 
.
Rent is due 
.
colonization 
.
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exploitation 
.
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Rent is due 
.
sorry 
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No. 
.
it’s a misunderstanding  
.
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Rent is due 
.
an explanation  
.
arriving 
.
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Rent is due 
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we never said  
.
we are responsible 
.
.
(Rent is due) 
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for everything

collected during the workshops at the symposium Curating through Conflict with Care 2023.

• organizing requires trust building. The first question we ask to enter work together is: WHAT DO WE NEED TO FEEL SAFE TO WORK WITH ANOTHER? We return to this question and discuss it frequently.

• step into co-mentorship roles with one another by scheduling check-ins, sharing resources, inviting each other to share responsibilities/ roles

• Offer to share your contract and negotiation language with others who are in your position

• If you can’t accept an invitation, suggest others who you are in co-mentorship with to take the work

• If you can’t honor an agreement or deadline you made with a collaborator, communicate this as soon as possible AND suggest alternatives so the work doesn’t fall on another person without their agreement. 

• Ask institutions who want to work with you to contribute a fee to an organization or community group that your work has been supported by

• gossip is political resistance: share warnings about institutional exploitation to protect others 

• Show up through discomfort: if a collaborator is harmed at work, ask how you might help to hold space for private conflict mediation and accountability processes 

What are the negotiable conditions of a contract? What are not?

Artists should negotiate: 

• firstly, that all verbal agreements also be put in writing

• You can refuse unlimited user rights for work done under contract (name your own terms of use, including time-based rights)

• You can add clauses for political safety, including the right to take an artwork down

• You can add clauses for protections against censorship 

• You can insist that your per diem payment comes upfront, not after the work period

• You can insist on childcare 

• You can insist on free entry to your art (if not for all, than for low-income people)

• You can insist institutions contribute a fee to an organization or community group that your work has been supported by

• You can insist on professional documentation of the work and ownership of copyrights 

• You can request overview of language and communication (promotion and outreach related to our work, content and names)

• You can insist on support for visa processes  

• You can insist the institution pay all travel and food expenses during work 

Before signing a contract:

• Set expectations: against clear outcomes, “my practice is process-based with open-ended outcomes” 

• You can request overview of language and communication (promotion and outreach related to our work, content and names)

• Request one direct contact that is responsible for you 

• If you need to travel, request support for visa process  

• Insist that all verbal agreements be put in writing! 

by Parand Danesh
2024

Within the context of a normalized conflict zone and normalization of militarization, how does conflict shape our practice?  

Because the routine of militarization produces countless visible and invisible scars on landscapes and human bodies on a daily basis, it can trick us into focusing our attention on the immediacy of conflict – that very immediacy that makes conflict impersonal. To this immediacy that serves political and mediatic purposes, we must oppose a progressive, slow, intimate, micro-level and bottom-up approach of conflict so as to take account of the lived experiences of its normalization and, therefore, be able to formulate countless counter-narratives. Also, conflict – especially in normalized zones – challenges us to question how, why and to the service or disservice or whom violence has become inseparable from otherwise neutral geographies and ordinary people. For those of us who both work on and come from territories marked by years, decades or even centuries of conflict, our practice gets shaped by a reflexive and sensitive approach to the study of conflict precisely because it has become part of our ordinary. In my opinion, there lies the care component that can shape our relationship to the conflicts through which we curate. 

How do the materials we use, the themes we explore, the fundings we receive – enable and disable artists and the cultural landscape? 

Be it photography, video or mixed-media, the materials we use can generate the same effect of immediacy I was referring to above. For instance, a violent image might capture the reality of a conflict and even bear witness to it but it might simultaneously eclipse the wider context or subject the people portrayed in it to even more violence, symbolic this time. Regarding the question of fundings, resources often come with expectations. Whether state-sponsored, NGO-driven, or from private entities, there is always a narrative that needs to be pushed forwards when funds are allocated. Therefore, it is our responsibility to critically examine who funds our work as artists, researchers and curators, and why, as it invariably influences the cultural landscape we are part of. In addition to this, while funding can enable greater visibility and give a platform, it can also force us into certain themes in a non-intuitive fashion and/or reinforce mere trends. So we must be careful.

While working with vulnerable and oppressed experiences, how can we research and curate responsibly without exposing or exploiting the marginalized positions? 

I believe that individuals and groups affected by the violence that rages in conflict-torn territories should be allowed to be actively involved in shaping their own narratives. Informed consent should be put at the center of any project involving private citizens and full transparency in intent and methodology should also be a priority to ensure a respectful, authentic and dignified ethics-first approach. 

What are the best methods to be careful when approaching polarized, politically charged and historically excluded narratives? 

When addressing contentious topics, a multi-faceted approach helps. I believe in the power of very local sourcing and long-term fieldworks. The closer we get to the lived realities of conflict in its day to day management, in the very layers of its canvas, the better we can fact-check, confront and integrate testimonies and recollections. Equally important is being cognizant of the wider theoretical frames that help us analyze the deeper biological, cognitive, behavioral and historical mechanisms of conflict within any political or social setting. This can help us draw invariants from a various set of case studies and see patterns in the formation and perpetuation of conflict. Finally, we also need to be aware of our own biases and positionality throughout our whole creative and intellectual process.

collected during the Symposium Curating through Conflict with Care 2023 in Berlin.

• Do artists have agency? Can they give or share agency?

• What would a freelance artist agency look like?

• What structures do we need to build to take meaningful risks in the Art World? 

• What is the relationship between the vision for what we want and the time we have to do it? 

• How can we organize our time: suspend time, occupy time when thinking about strike and unionization?

• Why have no unions recruited us?

• Where are the spaces that we need to speak freely?

• What is mentorship?

• Does less work mean more sustainability (for our own mental health, for planetary systemic health)?

• How do we deal with the temporality of projects? 

• How do we deal with the waste of art-world temporality (the material waste of temporary exhibitions and art handling: the paint, plaster, chemicals)?

• How to take care of the continuity of any “social event”?

• Where are the artist’s lawyers?

• What are the limits of trigger warnings? 

• What do we expect of the curator’s offer/invitation?

• What is “equity” in the art world?

• How do we stop the cannibalizing of “equity” and “transparency” language that is meant to take away our negotiation power and to foreclose discussion?  

• What are the negotiable conditions of a contract? What is not?

• How do we build a stronger “worker” identity? 

• How do we protect our energy for our artwork?

• What kind of work can we delegate to support systems?

• What are the questions we have to ask ourselves for honest check-ins to avoid burn-out, loss of integrity, shame? 

WISHLIST

• Paid mentorship programs 

• Artists’ agencies / agents 

• Artists’ unions 

• Guidelines that public money be bound to fulfill union working conditions, 

• Institutional working conditions and employment should be regularly audited, evaluated by unions 

• Budgets for wellness and therapy when working with traumatic topics 

• A map of art grants, residencies, fellowship-resources to break from pay-check to pay-check survival mode

• A taxes workshop for artists

• Childcare for working artists

Or: „Who cares about the bottom?“

Reflections
by Cẩm-Anh Lương
2024

How can curatorial practices incorporate diverse perspectives and voices, and what conflicts can arise? Where can we find a history that includes unheard, marginalized, feminist, and postcolonial voices from the bottom up? 

These were some of the questions raised during a symposium on “Curating through Conflicts with Care”, featuring Lama Al Khatib and Cornelius Refem Fogha Mc. As a “bottom-art-practitioner”, I was struck by the need for a bottom-up approach to identify the challenges in existing infrastructure and create a more inclusive art ecosystem. While several approaches came to mind, these questions in particular lingered in my mind. So, how can we start from the bottom and work our way up (and perhaps back around to the bottom again)? Who cares about the bottom? 

Short answer: the bottom is the fundamental. Without the bottom, there would be no top! 

On one hand, there might be people like me – a first-generation migrant, newcomer, mother, career switcher, mature student, and artist (depending on the year I arrived in Germany). On the other hand, there may be white, native, established artists with existing networks who center their artwork around inclusivity and are praised for their efforts to provide accessibility for migrants or refugees who are excluded from art institutions. Who benefits in the long run after an exhibition is curated? Does the collective continue to exist? Who receives credits? Who returns to oppression after experiencing a Cinderella moment – a shooting star moment – only to disappear (down) into the cruel mundanity of those at the bottom? 

Sara Ahmed suggests that diversity workers aim to encourage organizations to commit to diversity, but the interpretation of that commitment varies within those organizations. ³ The reality is that there is no specialized space for those at the bottom, and top-level administrators often do not take diversity work seriously, making it difficult for those in less esteemed positions. As multiple deadlines approach and challenges arise, those not at the top struggle to perform at the same level due to the additional obstacles they face. 

During a community project in 2021 which focused on the experiences of BIPOC and transnational students in a predominantly white space, it became clear that universities often fail to recognize the importance of spaces organized by students for socializing. The “performance space” was created for those who needed it, not for those who fit a certain category. Tokenization and internalization lead to cracks between participants, revealing the hierarchy of the bottom. While working on a prestigious exhibition in a collective last year, I learned again of a repeating pattern of hierarchy. The words used to praise diversity and fight exclusion from within art institutions often fail to capture the violent realities hidden between them. What unites those at the bottom with those at the top? Where do we find common ground? 

While pondering these big questions, I looked out of my window to my neighborhood and noticed a natural wonder on the lawn – a circle of fungi known as a fairy ring. ⁴ It grew miraculously after a few days of heavy rain in early August in Berlin. This natural wonder reminds me of a mindfulness exercise led by Shivā Āmiri on the second day of the symposium where we formed a circle, mindful of our surroundings and breathing. It was a temporal sweet moment of (physically) union among the participants, as we formed a circle in the crack (literally) between the buildings of Südblock, while the city pigeons were still picking at their crumbs on the ground next to us. 

Viewing curatorial practice as a social activity that focuses on the connections between objects, people, places, and discourses (Maria Lind & Jens Hoffmann), ⁵ what can we learn from the natural infrastructure of a fairy ring? A fairy ring begins with the mycelium of a mushroom falling in a favourable spot and sending out a subterranean network of fine, tubular threads called hyphae. Similarly, curatorial practices can start with diverse perspectives and voices. Power imbalances between established trees and the fragile fungal network can lead to conflicts, which may not be visible to ignorant human eyes. How can fungal networks communicate with their surroundings to share resources? Language barriers, different environments, and other temporal issues can hinder communication. Some members of the ecosystem, such as trees and wildflowers, have already included mushrooms in their “biodiversity and inclusivity program.” Others may still be fragments of mycelium floating around in the ground, hoping for visibility and inclusion. After all, without the nutrition provided by some hyphae in the network, could this tree exist long-term, firmly, visibly, sustainably at the top? 

Curatorial practices can start by attempting to identify potential networks before they even exist, just as a fairy ring is formed by the mycelium of a mushroom. This involves communicating with and building trust among artists or members of collectives, which cannot be achieved overnight! 

The mushrooms that grow up from this circular underground mat form a similar pattern above ground, reflecting diverse perspectives and voices in curatorial practices. Diversity and inclusion should be an ongoing process that requires continuous attention and effort, much like how the outer edges of the fairy ring keep growing year by year. 

by Azadbek Bekchanov
2023

What stories are being told? From whom? For whom? Are we listening to the right ones? These are the questions that are always on my mind. It is about trying to build infrastructures, in a broad  sense, that can host stories that need to be told, again and again. This is what I am trying to do  since years now. I would like to talk about the concerns that I have. I feel like it’s finally the time to  do it after 3 years of being part of an artist-run space with people I’m close to and some less so. It  is not even that much, but I feel like I have things to say that I hope are a bit interesting or are  making sense. Talking about those topics is nevertheless tricky. It involves personal stories one  tries to make sense out of. It comes with the risk of overexposing your personal background and  conflicts. The white art world is so fond of our personal stories, of how it is difficult to grow up  when you’re from a diasporic background and the subsequent conflicts that come with it. They  need those stories because they don’t know how to deal with their culpability. 

Our stories become fungible material that can be extracted so they can live with their illusion of white innocence. They  feed off our conflicts to impose their own narrative, deciding who deserves to be heard and who doesn’t. How do we deal with it? How do we create infrastructure that can help protect us from a white gaze that will try, sooner or later, to use it against us? If we think of language as infrastructure, we can use it to make images and shape it to tell stories that are not that easily accessible to everyone. Telling stories by ourselves, for ourselves, is an important method that we need to bring into practice again. It is about whom we’re talking to, whom we tell our stories to.  

I feel like most of the curatorial projects I did were about rethinking questions in a collective way:  How do we carry memories from the past? What can these memories tell us about our reality? I  am interested in how we can retell stories that have been silenced because when they are  repeated over and over again, they begin to sound differently. This is how I feel about my  curatorial work; it is the same story that I am telling over and over again – of familial fragments, of  memories that I have inherited from my parents. It is about a fantasy of something that has left us. Curatorial practice can carry these questions because of its polyphonic nature. Many voices  inhabit us from our past, from what we have inherited, and it is time that we begin to make them  sound again.

by Pegah Byroum-Wand
2024

Back in August 2023, when the symposium took place, I took notes in my little notebook in black and red ink as a “documentarian” of the event. I knew that sharing experiences and knowledge of working in, alongside, with, or against (German) cultural institutions would be a contested topic. But eight months later, the world and humanity have been turned upside down in horrific ways once again, and I am lost for words. I am shocked by what marginalized people are experiencing in this country once again, particularly in the cultural and academic fields, but it is not very surprising, taking into account the long history of racism, colonialism, and antisemitism in Germany.

Documentation ascribes meaning and visibility to things. Documentation can be a written account of talking points, it can serve as proof or a source, and might also serve as an archive that ascribes authorship and knowledge to the perspectives of individuals. This would, however, contradict the character of emancipatory movements’ collective voice ⁶ . As empowering and existential as naming and attribution are most of the time, citation can also make individuals into targets of defamation, especially in our current societal climate. Considering the participants and organizers of CCC a temporary and collective three-day movement, the following documentation neglects individual authorship and attributions.

At the beginning of the symposium, I tried to capture as much as I could in my notebook to provide a „complete“ picture. But I am wondering: What am I (not) aware of because of my social positionality? This documentation is a summary of what I was aware of, as a cis-gendered, able-bodied, academic, woman and racialized person with German passport privileges and parents who were political refugees. My notes are not chronological but themed summaries of the CCC debates. 

My reflections are marked by „«…»“.

Prologue: Reflections on internalizing institutional settings at the symposium 

« During the opening panels of the first day („Unlearning Curation & Undoing Artworld Hierarchies“ and „Alternative Curatorial Methods“) I recognized a pattern that I had noticed in some past events by self-organized, grassroots, or other power-critical groups, and some of the events organized by myself, too: We try very hard to question institutional frameworks, exclusive notions of professionality, urgency, and work performance. Or briefly: We try to overcome „White Supremacy Culture in Institutions“ ⁷ . Yet, here we are, reproducing norms inherited from working in/with such institutions, for example organizing panel discussions on a stage with a seated audience in front of the stage, listening to the panel guests sitting above. All eyes are towards the stage and the panelists perform under the usual gaze politics.
We could start practicing some kind of „oppositional gaze“ ⁸ as a form of resistance, and change these hierarchical settings of exchange, couldn’t we? When starting to work in sharing circles later, we interrupted the logic of these hierarchical gaze politics more and more, and created mutual exchange on a more equal level.“ »

(Alternative) Curatorial practices within and outside of German institutions

The panel discussion on „Alternative Curatorial Methods“ revolved around the question of how to prevent common curatorial practices that reproduce inequality and how to develop alternative ones instead. After all, being part of the art and cultural scene in Germany can sometimes mean being complicit in power, oppression, exclusion, censorship, or exploitation.

An example of a common curatorial practice discussed by the panelists is the combination of visual and textual elements to emphasize the authority and credibility of the written word. This method is normalized in many cultural institutions and curatorial settings. One alternative practice presented on the panel is the collage as a method of multi-perspectivity and multi-directionality that undermines authority. It enables us to gain back our agency within institutional and curatorial work.

The sharing circles following the panel centered on two interesting aspects of the discussion, among others. Firstly, it is discussed that to counteract the danger of being complicit in exclusionary curatorial methods or generally in exclusionary practices of the institutions, we need to care about and cultivate our feelings of discomfort. In doing so, we can normalize having (uncomfortable) discussions, articulate our demands and needs, and also build support structures within and outside of institutions, as workers on payroll or as freelancers. This debate intensifies during the following days of the symposium when talking about censorship and scapegoating, work conditions, and negotiating contracts. 

Secondly, the pitfalls of representation politics, tokenism, and gatekeeping in curation are pointed out by the participants. Sometimes we are being put on the spot and are seen as representatives of a certain homogenized and marginalized group. Therefore, we should remember that we must also serve as an infrastructure for other marginalized artists and cultural workers, academics, and practitioners to come. We should be aware that even when our curatorial work might be critical, we are often still satisfying a problematic audience’s needs to realize our projects and enhance our careers. Therefore, it is also crucial to reflect on how much we are profiting from our communities’ struggles. 

« My reflections on the collage not only as a method of curation but also as a method of collaboration and working together during our symposium are: Which words can describe collective agency in the space of the symposium? Are our perspectives connected, braided, intertwined, separated, or alienated? What happens to our feelings and fears, to our tears and traumas? Who is missing from the symposium? We are building up structures and networks together, articulating demands together, but can we also tear down oppressive walls together?

« People with many privileges can withdraw from feeling uncomfortable – people with little or no privileges might not be able to do so. (Former) marginalized persons might gain powerful positions within institutions and become „native informants“ ⁹ , gatekeeping their status. They maintain their position by being complicit to the structural powers that marginalized them in the first place. Can we call these kind of native informants „Toxic Tokens“?» 

Curating Conflicts, Censorship, and Scapegoating in Germany and Beyond

The panels „Censorship and Scapegoating“ and „Curating Conflicts“ address the topic of conflicts and complicity in the fields of arts and culture. Conflicts can lead to scapegoating and censorship by cultural institutions, particularly by people in power like directors.

The panelists argue that the mentioned people in power, and many other people too, often strive for some kind of quick fix for conflicts. Sometimes they even silence critical voices to avoid confrontation and accountability and maintain their privilege of not feeling uncomfortable. Accordingly, we as artists and cultural workers of all kinds should become more comfortable with addressing conflicts collectively. At the same time, this requires a lot of resilience and strength because criticism articulated outside a set institutional framework is often perceived as an attack. In this context, one panelist promotes the method of „intentionally creating conflicts in the space of lies“ to confront strategies of silencing and censorship within institutions and in public debates. 

The example emphasized by a panelist is the topic of Jewish identities in Germany, and how cultural institutions deal with them. Many times, Jewish identities are being appropriated in German discourse. Public criticism by leftist Jews, targeting German politics, is dismissed in the media and institutional debates. In many cases, discussions regarding Jewish identities and antisemitism are more about Germany itself than about enhancing heterogeneous Jewish perspectives and protecting Jewish lives. This goes hand in hand with the ignorance towards Jewish-Muslim relations and alliances, global south coalitions, Palestinian-Israeli coalitions, and many more.

The sharing circle also discusses documenta fifteen and how political decision-makers in Germany dealt with the curatorial conflicts, showing how deep racism and antisemitism are still engrained in German society. Racism and antisemitism became (and still become) weapons against the very people who are affected by it. The public debate and the steps taken in the aftermath of documenta fifteen showed that the identities of marginalized and racialized people are evaluated through the scope of German identity. This affects tactics of divide and conquer by the German state regarding which demands by local and international social movements are acknowledged or discussed publicly and which are silenced or criminalized (Afghanistan, Iran, Kurdish Movements, Palestine, etc.)

The tone-policing, and censorship in and outside of German institutions lead more and more to a self-censorship of affected people. Jobs, contracts, and professional reputations and existences are at stake. The discussants also raise the question of how to protect ourselves from being surveilled and punished by the state. One conclusion was that we need to continue building coalitions and ally-ships, which are crucial to keep up spaces of critical debate.

Being (in)dependent: Artists/Cultural Workers and State Funding

Spaces of critical debates and discourse within institutions are mostly accessible to artists and cultural workers by being funded. Funding in the field of arts and culture in Germany is granted by the state and is motivated by social trends, identified by (cultural) politics, activism, and political agendas. However, state funding often leads to complex relationships of interdependence and dependency between the funder and the funded person or group because it affects questions of artistic freedom, entitlement to the artwork, and many more. 

One example is the engagement with the violent colonial history of Germany which was implemented in the coalition agreements of the Bundesregierung in Germany only in 2018, leading to a range of funding for decolonial art, projects, and research. 

«The lack of sustainability due to the limited funding of these projects serves to maintain the status quo of society. Funding is given to conduct projects but often ends before structural changes can happen.»

Taking into account the conditions of state funding and the insecurity linked to it, the participants of CCC engage in creating a code of conduct on days two and three. The code of conduct includes ideas for creating networks, working in and with institutions, focusing on negotiating contracts, and knowing labor rights and legal terms. This includes workers on the payroll as well as freelancers. Since we are producing for an art market, it is important to normalize being paid for de-briefing, pre-and after-care, and writing long applications.

A code of conduct can be understood as a framework of guiding principles, including accountability, inclusivity and anti-discriminational approach, mutual respect, and work conditions. Codes of conduct create conditions for workers and institutions regarding their terms of collaboration to agree and rely on. One crucial aspect of the discussion is the negotiation of contracts, considering the vulnerabilities of freelancers and workers on payroll alike (see CCC posters). The discussants agree that support and communication structures outside of institutions can be very helpful in sharing knowledge and resources on legal aspects. Mentors, e.g. elders, who help with bureaucracy, are needed to ensure that there are no terms of policing, discrimination, and censoring included in the contracts. Moreover, many discussants emphasize the need to unionize and organize and to turn to existing counseling organizations such as Diversity Arts Culture in Berlin. All these measurements create more self-confidence and knowledge to articulate demands instead of waiting until being granted permission.

Some more questions of the group regarding contracts and working conditions are:

• What do we need to feel safe and appreciated in our work environments?

• How can we become comfortable with articulating our needs and desires?

• What are the terms of communication, working hours, and access to institutional resources (e.g. material, technical support)? 

• Who is the contact person?

• How are we dealing with visa issues, ownership of the work, or shared knowledge?

• Can the contract include aspects of process orientation and flexibility regarding the artwork?

• How are we addressing and dealing with discrimination (discrimination of people who are neurodivergent, affected by racism, classism, sexism, ageism, and ableism)? What are the structures of accountability and protection?

Articulating independent visions and creating networks of care 

Most panels and sharing circles of day three, e.g. „A manifesto for radical care or how to be a human in the arts“ and „Kuration als pflegende Angehörigkeit“, underline one important relation: on the one hand the crucial knowledge of the laws, rights, and work conditions within institutions and engaging with them to contribute to structural changes towards equality. On the other hand the development of our visions and goals that are independent of the status quo, but focus on practices of care.

While it is important to know about the institutions we are working for (on payroll) or with (as freelancers), we should not exhaust ourselves with changing and re-contextualizing existing organizational structures in the field of arts and culture only. There must be space and energy to create very own visions and dreams, instead of only „serving“ the needs and desires of the institutions. The sharing circles discuss on the one hand the idea of being more driven by collective positive values and sustainable visions for art, culture, and society rather than being defensive in conflicts with institutions. On the other hand, defensiveness is sometimes a sign of not feeling heard or seen and needs to be acknowledged. Inspired by feminist curatorial methodologies, among many more, we should focus on care and empathy as commons. 

In this context, as pointed out in the last sharing circle of day three, it is also important to appreciate the work of those, who have paved the way for us.

« But who are „we“ and „our“ values?»

«Do we have to define ourselves in relation to what we reject? Is there space to invent something new? »

Post-Conflict or Institutionalization of conflict
by Rubén Ojeda Guzmán
2023

Almost two months have passed since the CCC symposium, and it’s time to reflect on what happened and extract the corresponding narratives. I will focus on three topics that caught my attention during the symposium: institutionalized conflict, institutional porosity, and the battlefield. These themes are linked to my experience as an artist who is in a kind of self-imposed exile due to the violence and militarization of the war on drugs.

This situation has led me to repeatedly question the historical, philosophical, or social function of my artistic practice and the art system in general. Especially considering that the diaspora resulting from crises, extending across Europe, takes on a unique aspect when it comes to art. Undertaking a European tour adds a distinctive weight to the artist’s curriculum, which, when viewed from the place one departs, garners significant attention.

This nobiliary situation, for lack of a better term, of recognizing artistic careers through a center – involving stops in Madrid, Berlin, or London – aims to be institutionalized. However, rebellion, reaction to conflict, and the expression of crisis are distinct statements made by artists and curators from the so-called global South. How can one reconcile this contradictory impulse to embody the crisis with the desire for institutionalization in global centers?

I would like to believe that this struggle for institutionalization is, in addition to a possibly narcissistic aspiration, a dispute over the historical narrative of art. I believe this because the path to institutionalization is both bureaucratic and social, rewarding only a few, yet artistic, curatorial, and related work is overflowing. The center exerts a dual force: attraction and centrifugation, in which everything is drawn towards it so rapidly that the reaction is a centripetal force pushing everything outward, marginalizing it.

In this metaphor, the museum is a centrifugal machine that could be seen as a cultural vortex that draws artists, critics, curators, and other cultural agents into its core due to the promise of recognition, prestige, and visibility. However, once inside the vortex, one is trapped in a circular movement where the same structure that attracted them to the center also marginalizes or limits them in terms of access, recognition, and full participation.

Nevertheless, vortices often have some permeability at their edges, and the art institution is also porous: it allows the entry and exit of objects, subjects, and discourses. It permits a certain degree of entry and participation, even as it maintains a centralized and exclusive structure at its core. The machinery lets trends in and filters them. It instrumentalizes crises localized in conflict zones or racial and sexual minorities. Institutional porosity is in the service of a political agenda. The machinery is a political display and feeds on the critical nature of art.

But the museum must be seized. Although it will have to be contested again later. What needs to be ensured is the indeterminate nature of ‘the artistic’ and, therefore, of dissent. Since art is a concept lacking a definition, which institutions claim to provide, it must be contested. Art is a battlefield. Art is conflict.

Listing without guarantee. This list was collected during the symposium 2023 in Berlin („Add yours and take a picture“). For context, we recommend doing your own research. We also recommend the White Pube with a funding library for successful project applications: https://thewhitepube.co.uk/funding-library/

ARAB FUNDS FOR ARTS + CULTURE

IWMF- INTNL Womans Media Foundation

CAMARGO Foundation 

BALDWIN FOR tHE ARTS

INTERFLUGS

Berliner Projektfonds Kulturelle Bildung

NeU Start Kultur

Bezirksamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg

DurchStarten

VG Bild Kunst Projet Fund

Stiftung Kunstfonds

Spartenoffene Förderung

Reflections on the CCC Symposium 
Mon Sisu Satrawaha มอ่ น ศศิุสาตราวาหะ 
2024

In the aftermath of my participation in the Curating through Conflict with Care (CCC) symposium, from time to time, I still look back and reminisce about the dialogue among fellow participants prior to the symposium’s final session. If I remember it correctly, as we shared the outcomes of our group discussions, we transitioned into a spirited debate about the feasibility of articulating our aspirations to institutions and effecting transformative change. The symposium’s attendees hailed from a variety of backgrounds and geographies, but funnily enough the conflicts we go through are universal. 

Amid these discussions, the notion of solidarity and potential unionization emerged, prompting inquiries about the beneficiaries of such unity and whether this idealistic impulse can reconcile with the inherently capitalist nature of the art world. 

I left the CCC symposium with inspiration and lots of questions. The undercurrent of care was evident, but somehow it became complicated to make care practical while conflicts are so easy to occur. I tried to visualize care – a term often laden with commercialized imagery of embraces and kind gestures. People holding each other, a mom looking at their child with loving eyes, hotel staff welcoming you with their smiles, a medical team healing sick people. Is the demonstration of care contingent upon physical expressions? Can genuine care be adequately conveyed through verbal utterances? These musings encouraged a tentative willingness to explore new dimensions of care. 

When it comes to strategies, the institutionalized practice of care seems to be further away from actually being care. Power imbalances and deceptive facades tarnish its sincerity. However, there were some actions happening for a while – demands for equitable compensation, inclusive accessibility for marginalized groups (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, differently-abled individuals), and fostering interdependencies among humans and the non-human sphere. These demands have persisted across time, from pre-pandemic eras to the present day, underlining the recurrent need for progress. 

Though it may sound quite grim: I see it as a good sign that we do agree that these are the issues we need to recognise. As Zhang Tian mentioned in her manifesto which resonated during our readings, the journey towards nurturing a “care economy” necessitates the set and respect of boundaries. Empowering the care we need an unwavering commitment to both reciting care and staunchly opposing injustice. While systemic unionization might appear constraining, an organic approach can be an option. It may start by asking a simple yet profound question: “How are you?”, conversations during meal sharing, or participating in the symposium. In hope that these small steps would integrate into a more harmonic caring artistic ecosystem.

References 

Ndikung, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng, The Delusions of Care (Berlin 2021).

von Bismarck, Beatrice, and Meyer-Krahmer, Benjamin (eds.), Cultures of the Curatorial 3: Hospitality. Hosting Relations in Exhibitions (Berlin 2015). 

k\are (Habraschka, Agnieszka, and von Matt, Mia), “Collective Care Manifesto” in Elke Krasny, Sophie Lingg, Lena Fritsch et al. (eds.), Radicalizing Care. Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating (London/Wien 2021), pp. 92-97. 

Zhang, Tian, “A manifesto for radical care or how to be a human in the arts” in Sydney Review of Books, July 2022, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/a-manifesto-for-radical-care-or-how-to-be-a-human-in-the-arts/ (accessed April 4, 2024).

by Maike Siu-Wuan Storf
2024

During these three days, I am a sponge. I, who have so far spent most of my time in artificial spaces, half aquarium breeding, half table sponge, soak myself up with seawater. I let thoughts, ideas, feelings, words, people, the themes and content, the care with which this event was curated and the encounters in between flow around me. I am a very shy sponge and when the microphone makes the rounds to share the final thoughts, I am afraid that only water will come out of my mouth, salty and bittersweet, unfiltered. A moment later, I pick up my child at the subway station after the daddy weekend and dive back into the circle with him for a brief moment, letting him paddle in the light of the tender glances and being grateful that I was allowed to be part of this circle. I will tell him about it. That as a sponge I heard about what it could be like to swim with dolphins and how many stories there are to be found in togetherness.

My child has actually become a compass or a kind of symbolic figure for me in questions of art, curation and care. The responsibility for and the confrontation with this little person challenge me to go into conflict with my outside and my inside instead of fleeing into fantastic parallel worlds. This is a personal experience of my parenthood that I don’t want to generalize or presuppose in any way.

But this experience has taken me from salt-enriched fresh water to salt water. I can no longer move in the same way as before, I have to find a new form and constantly question the framework that I have given art. As a person and as an artist. 

“Social Sustainability” is the building block that I get to discuss and think about together with a school of dolphins during the symposium. We realize that we long for two forms of social sustainability. We want long-lasting solidarity, loyalty and commitment in our work contexts so that we can act without fear, and we want our work to be sustainable, barrier-free and non-elitist, accessible and effective. To dissolve the divisions and hierarchies between content and mediation. And there should be food in the process. I can imagine that the secret of implementation lies in a symbiosis of art, conflict and care. If we understand art as a form of care work with which we can confront conflicts and reinterpret care work as art that helps us to negotiate conflicts. This may be too simplistic, but it could also be a small rock in wild waters that I cling to and continue to take in water from there. Art could be the playing field on which we practice for a better society and formulate our demands for it.

In this respect, I know one thing for sure: if what has taken place over these three days needs a name, then the word for it is “art”. Deep down in my sponge-like cell structures, I feel that I have been part of a very special moment. I am a happy sponge. Those were three wonderful days by the sea in the aquarium at Kottbusser Tor.

Sharing is Caring: how to create systems of mutual support

• organizing requires trust building. The first question we ask to enter work together is: WHAT DO WE NEED TO FEEL SAFE TO WORK WITH ANOTHER? We return to this question and discuss it frequently.

• step into co-mentorship roles with one another by scheduling check-ins, sharing resources, inviting each other to share responsibilities/ roles

• Offer to share your contract and negotiation language with others who are in your position

• If you can’t accept an invitation, suggest others who you are in co-mentorship with to take the work

• If you can’t honor an agreement or deadline you made with a collaborator, communicate this as soon as possible AND suggest alternatives so the work doesn’t fall on another person without their agreement. 

• Ask institutions who want to work with you to contribute a fee to an organization or community group that your work has been supported by

• gossip is political resistance: share warnings about institutional exploitation to protect others 

• Show up through discomfort: if a collaborator is harmed at work, ask how you might help to hold space for private conflict mediation and accountability processes 

The following material was collected during the workshops at the symposium Curating through Conflict with Care 2023 or comissioned afterwards.

The Kindness of Others in the German Art Education System
by Felisha Carenage
2024

Pflegen and sorgen are German words for causing as well as caring. Unbehagen pflegen can be used in the sense of für Unruhe sorgen;  creating or causing unrest or discomfort. Unbehagen pflegen can also be literally interpreted as caring for discomfort; approaching conflict with care. 

Unbehagen Pflegen is thus the name of a project that I initiated at the beginning of the 22/23 academic year. The yearlong educational concept for fine art and design students at the Muthesius University in Kiel, Germany, includes collective reading, collaborative writing, and visiting exhibitions, lectures and installations with a mind towards Critical Race Theory and Social Engagement. I suppose that this essay will show how I fell into the trap of art mediation ¹⁰ which is an exhausting kind of Minority Tax that people pay when their critical positions aren’t well-received. In any case I am trying to navigate this circumstance to find and build community.

Summer 2022

The first post-pandemic, post-George-Floyd, post-Zoom summer in Europe was filled with multiple art biennials, a Triennale, Art Basel and 100 days of documenta ¹¹ , an exhibition that occupies the entire city of Kassel every 5 years, which was founded in the 1950s on the basis of repairing Germany’s image in the art world ¹² .

I spent a weekend at documenta fifteen and attended the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art on multiple occasions, being familiar with the curator’s and his collaborators’ Social-Justice-oriented work from an institution that never reopened after 2020; La Colonie ¹³ in Paris, where I had lived since obtaining my German MFA in 2017. Aside from this, there was a lot of cultural funding being given out for decolonial work in institutions, especially for artists with a so-called ‘migrant background.’ I was excited to see so many young, interesting artists, writers and curators in spaces of exchange, and was soaking up information and impressions and strategies. 

In Kassel, at documenta fifteen, I was housed at the Alice Yard space ¹⁴ , exchanging with other bi-and trilingual artists and cultural workers, some of whom had entered Germany in their teens, during the ‘long summer of migration‘ ¹⁵ . In talking about my postgrad research on harbour cities in North Germany, I mentioned that through structural and infrastructural discrimination, a lot of people were invisibilized, so that it is not widely accepted that Germany is a post-migratory society ¹⁶ . In response, a colleague pulled up the English-language Wikipedia article on the country of Germany, to find statistics to demonstrate that in fact, non-white people were a democratically insignificant minority. 

What does it cost to go look at a painting? 

Travelling to these spaces and being able to experience artworks and dialogues first-hand is an integral part of the education which I had received in the pursuit of my Masters of Fine Art, and of which I was now an active part. Since 2017, I have had modest teaching contracts at the Muthesius University. The freedom with which I chose my topics was typical of the German art education system, which is at once famously liberal and infamously beholden to the ego of one’s professors ^{17 18} .

What is, however, a non-negotiable for entry into most German university Programmes – especially art schools – is the language requirement. Non-European, non-German students must have extremely advanced German-language proficiency in order to be matriculated, in order to get a visa. Permission to reside in Germany, purchased with the complicity of living one’s life and developing one’s artistic practise in a language that is often violently xenophobic ¹⁹ , meant access to all of Europe, to art in museums, galleries , fairs and open spaces. 

The 22/23 Winter semester started just as the 59th Biennale del Arte in Venice was closing; this exhibition is practically the Olympic Games of exhibitions, with artists‘ work shown in pavilions accorded to countries, rather than, necessarily, with galleries or independent associations. It was to Venice, then, that I first took my Unbehagen Pflegen students, and it was here that one of them who had arrived late and intoxicated, so confident of his place in my class, in the school, in Europe, advocated his right to remain a disturbance in my seminar with the words, “Wir sind hier in Deutschland!” ²⁰ .

The Kindness of Others

The anti-racist pedagogy that Unbehagen Pflegen requires is built on that from which I had benefited in my own education at Howard University and the University of the West Indies, institutions which were founded as nerve centres of resistance and futurity. The precarity in which my weak passport and personal circumstances placed me means that, for almost 4 decades, I have been dependent not only on scholarships and visas, but on the kindness of others in institutions, often ones designed to uphold white supremacy. 

However, because of apparently radical educational systems like those at HBCUs ²¹ and in the English-speaking Caribbean, I had come to see some institutions not as safe spaces, but as safer spaces, where doubts and fears and immaturity and inexperience could be addressed. That which made these systems radical was their practise of being ethical ²² ; their pedagogy meant to factor the fragilities and concerns not just of educators, but that of students as well. 

This is the crucial difference between educators, students and practising artists who are committed to Social Justice, and those who feel they would be negatively affected by changes in the Status Quo. Being invested in the professionalisation of graduates means preparing students for careers in an art world that demands they advocate for themselves, that denies them the comfort of apoliticism. I don’t exclude privileged students with financial, language and passport privilege from this, and it is the task of the institution to do so, as well. This, I learned in Germany, is a big ask of educators and administrators whose lives are completely unaffected by their free use of the word N****. 

Artmakers in a nation-state that is so fractured, so guilty, are plagued by especially potent fragilities. How can we be kind to each other, to ourselves?

What can we collectively demand of institutions? 

(preliminary guidelines for institutions that care)

Transparency 

• Transparency about funding and budgeting: how can money be spent for a given project? What was the salary of the last person who held the position you’re offering?

• Make open-calls truly open: hold an open meeting/gathering, make selection criteria and quotas transparent for more equitable selection

Artist Support 

• If an event is cancelled beyond participant’s control, pay a cancellation fee of at least 60 percent

• Support artists’ visa process 

• Provide a travel budget and per diem for living lots 

• Establish infrastructures and well-being budgets for therapy, body-care etc. when requiring art workers to mediate traumatic subjects and violent works

• Ask if an artist requires childcare, provide this if they do

• Support emerging artists to meet with more experienced ones

• The institution should take financial responsibility for materials, space, transportation

Agency 

• Allow artists to maintain control of how their work is presented, consult with them about the context in which their work is shown

• Against censorship, do not remove an artwork without public conversation and artist’s agreement  

Accountability & Respect

• Keep healthy boundaries on working hours, set realistic time-management expectations

• When asking for artist’s proposals, provide funds to develop ideas in the first place 

• Allocate funds for community engagement

• Allow more open space for non-formal artists 

• Artists should have the option to stop working with the institution if agreed upon budgeting or timing proves unrealistic

• Break the stipend logic: pay artists a living wage for their work

• Make sure that people who are not chosen for competitions get something out of the process: skillshare, networking, access to institutional resources

How can we organize ourselves OUTSIDE of institutions?

invest in our own communication infrastructures:

• set up online list-serves, telephone chat groups, and most importantly: 

• make IRL space for inclusive conversations 

work towards art-workers’ union-structure: 

• work towards working alliances that acknowledge common exploitation,  attend to common needs and make collective demands

• bring others up with you, include more art-workers in your process

pass on opportunities to peers if you’re unable to take them: 

• name alternatives

informal structures have their limits: 

• we need recognized rights and right to sanction institution 

• knowledge about our rights

How can we organize ourselves WITHIN institutions?

Pre-care guidelines for freelance artists entering into work with institutions 

Take the steps necessary to define your own value systems:

• Abolish internalized gatekeepers of the “artist” profession → actively work against this elitist agenda

• Relinquish values of self-worth that may be tied to exclusivity → you can bring others up with you, you don’t need to do this work alone 

• Insist on the boundary/separation of business and personal relationship when an associate invites you into institutional work (no exploitation of “friendship”)

• Set your own expectations for appearing as an artist representative: 

“In order to agree to be on a panel, I need…_____” (consider community access needs in addition to your own)

You may ask: 

• Why have I been invited? Who else will be on this panel with me? To avoid tokenism, is there more than one “representative?” 

• Are there diverse perspectives? Who is invited? Who is not invited?

• Is there a local representative? Paying respect to the local context 

• Is the conversation accessible? Is there barrier free entry (ramps,) sign language interpretation, free tickets for low-income attendees 

Prepare yourself to communicate in (y)our best interest:

• Play out negotiation conversations with a friend or trusted colleague 

• Ask an elder or a mentor to support you in your negotiation process. They may act as your second pair of eyes, your agent, your assistant, whatever title you need to give them to support you in an unfamiliar context. Bring 3rd party agent/assistance to take notes, supervise negotiations 

• Consult the institution’s references: Ask people who have worked for this institution before about their experience

• Before agreeing to work with an institution, ask the following questions (be willing and ready to lose work or walk away if values aren’t aligned):

Why am I right for this position?

Who will be hired if not me?

Are you prepared to give me a contract?

How are you profiting from my work?

How will I be paid? What is the pay schedule?

Navigating the Institution

We recognize there are differences in how we can navigate the process of working with an institution as someone on payroll vs. a freelancer. We need ongoing research to define our distinct vulnerabilities. 

Vulnerabilities on payroll

• working within entrenched power hierarchies of the institution, it may prove more difficult to be heard

• less flexibility to negotiate terms of working environment once your contract is signed 

• If you’re fired, may lose health insurance that you and your family depend on

• tight schedule, less opportunity to organize outside of the workplace

Vulnerabilities as freelancer  

• less job security, must rely on your reputation for future work 

• less potential peer support in new and unfamiliar contexts 

Whether an employee or a freelance art worker, either way, in order to navigate the institution, you need to map your own value systems first: What is it you care about? What do you need to feel supported to enter working relations with others? How do you build and keep trusting working relations?

Guidelines for art workers employed by institutions 

• The infrastructures we enter are not caring infrastructures → expect to build new processes of accountability and peer-support 

• Do your own research (call former employees and ask about their experiences)

• Create formalized alliances with your co-workers →  be in solidarity within uncaring structures

• Trusted co-workers can be co-mentors and comrades: CC them on your emails, bring them to your meetings, they are your accountability partners, your second pair of eyes

• synchronize collective actions and demands based on shared interests, not personal relationships

• Insist that representation does matter in meeting groups, working groups, commissions, juries etc. 

• Learn the financial structures and mechanisms within the system: e.g. what kind of money goes where? How do artists get paid?

• Your invitation is powerful: invite art workers and artists that are not regulars or residents 

• Find ways to include unemployed and freelance art workers in your struggle to enact institutional change