nGbK Lecture: Unsolvable? The concept of the “double bind” for critical perspectives on social dilemmas

In German with translation into English.

Talk with María do Mar Castro Varela and Leila Haghighat. Moderated by Ebru Taşdemir

Art and art education are often caught in a field of tension: they want to initiate social change, but at the same time stabilize existing power relations. They are too deeply “connected” to these and thus find themselves in a “double bind” – a dilemma of contradictory, unsolvable messages that make any decision seem hopeless. Applied to the postcolonial situation, Gayatri Spivak thus illustrates the contradictions and global dilemmas that persist to this day, which characterize our society and make our entanglement in them visible. To what extent can this concept be used productively to analyze current social debates and entrenchments?

In this event, María do Mar Castro Varela and Leila Haghighat, editors of the anthology “Double Bind postkolonial”, will present the concept and discuss authoritarian developments and the role of art in creating critical spaces for thought and action with Ebru Taşdemir.

María do Mar Castro Varela is Professor of General Pedagogy and Social Work at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences (ASH) Berlin. She has been a fellow of the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles, a visiting professor at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and a senior fellow at the Institute for the Human Sciences (IWM). She is the founder of bildungsLab* and chair of the Berliner Institut für kontrapunktische Gesellschaftsanalysen. Her current research focuses on questions of ethics, protest, emancipation and knowledge production.

Leila Haghighat is doing her doctorate on the double bind in socially engaged art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and was most recently the administrator of the professorship for art education at the Braunschweig University of Art (2023/2024) and a fellow of the Nietzsche Fellowship of the Klassikstiftung Weimar (2023). She is a member of bildungslab* and was coordinator for cultural education at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin (2012-2017). Her current work focuses on socially engaged art, (urban) spaces, care, institutional analysis and representation.

Ebru Taşdemir is a political editor at the weekly newspaper “der Freitag”. She studied journalism and Turkish studies at the FU Berlin and has worked as a freelance author for various media. She was editor of the German-Turkish media platform taz.gazete and head of the Berlin department of taz until 2022. Taşdemir is also a member of the Grimme Prize nomination committee and a regular columnist for the “100 Sekunden Leben” series on rbb-Inforadio.