JUNGE AKADEMIE: Laboratory of Contested Space / Art & Truthtelling

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This GIF essay — a hybrid animation and text format the artist has been developing since 2018 — navigates the repercussions and the human cost of the covid-19 crisis in Brazil through anticolonial and feminist lenses. The essay discusses the eugenic policies of the neofascist Bolsonaro regime, outlining its entanglements with the deployment of biopower as a fundamental aspect of coloniality. In a non-linear timeline, the work examines the temporal processes that collapse into the current situation, discussing the central role of white supremacy in the formation of contemporary nation states in Latin America; capitalist notions of productivity and the body traced back to chattel slavery of the the colonial economy; and the confluence of anticolonial futurities and pathogen resistance.

Dr. Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist and researcher whose work engages with technologies and birth control practices and their entanglements with colonial hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality. Her current artistic research project, A Topography of Excesses, examines the transmission of indigenous and folk knowledges on herbalist practices and reproduction as decolonising forms of radical care.

Reading list

• Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, 1st edition, 2004, Autonomedia, online.
• Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience, 2012, Duke University Press Books, online.

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The role of the artist has often been crucial in unveiling the construct around the concept of truth in times of repression and beyond. In the 1980s and 1990s, underground art networks such as Neoism and the Luther Blissett Project demonstrated that truth is a material that can be moulded, it depends on who is writing the dominant narrative. The multiple identity practices under the collective name Luther Blissett exposed the failures of media reporting and exploited poor fact-checking and a lack of source investigation by mainstream journalism. They created another level of information using fakes and pranks to show that the truth is always a construction. In the current post-truth scenarios, fakes and misinformation techniques are used by right wing propaganda outlets to create their own information agenda, delegitimising the work of mainstream media as they do so. However, their form of delegitimisation of power mechanisms is based on the production of chaos to build up another form of power, which is destructive in that it targets the vulnerable segments of society. Artists need to intervene in such feedback loop of disruption by producing literacy and awareness. In order to break this loop, artists analyse how information works and how the truth is produced. The key lies in the deconstruction of information as an artistic practice, tracing the sources, producing literacy and contributing to raising awareness by showing that information always delivers a specific, biased vision of reality. In this call to artistic action, the work of artists meets the work of whistleblowers, people who expose misconduct and wrongdoing by the powerful through acts of truthtelling. In the context of whistleblowing, truth is deconstructed as an investigation of sources, of hidden data and documents, to denounce abuses of power. In the art of whistleblowing, information becomes an occasion to reveal how power works, how it is constructed and what the systemic structures behind it are.

Tatjana Bazzichelli is the founder and artistic director of the Disruption Network Lab, Berlin, leading the conference programme that has been taking place at Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin and at other locations since 2015. She has been appointed a jury member for the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Capital Cultural Fund) 2019–2020 by the German Federal Government and Berlin for the years. Previously she was programme and conference curator at the transmediale art and digital culture festival transmediale, where she ran the year-round project reSource transmedial culture Berlin project. Bazzichelli’s work at transmediale was the focus of her 2012–2014 post-doctoral research at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University of Lüneburg. She received a PhD degree in Information and Media Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Aarhus University in 2011. Her PhD research, Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking (DARC Press – Aarhus University, Denmark, 2013), was the result of her 2009 visiting scholarship at the H-STAR Institute of Stanford University. www.disruptionlab.org

Reading list

• Tatiana Bazzichelli, Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking, 2013, DARC PRESS – Aarhus University, Denmark, online.
• Tatiana Bazzichelli, Networking. La rete come arte, 2006, Costa & Nolan; auf Englisch: Networking, The Net as Artwork, 2008, Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, online.
• Stewart Home, Florian Cramer, The House of Nine Squares. Letters on Neoism, Psychogeography and Epistemological Trepidation, 1997, Invisible Books.
• Monty Cantsin (ed.), Neoism Now!, 1987, Artcore Editions.
• Luther Blissett, Totò, Peppino e la guerra psichica. Materiali dal Luther Blissett Project, 1996, AAA Edizioni.

Göksu Kunak’s interest lies in queer methodologies (especially chronopolitics) and hybrid texts that deal with the performative lingo(s) of contemporary lifestyles. In a world where experts are doomed, our reality shifts at the speed of a thumb scrolling down. Awake! is a reflection on this fragmented speed; surveillance, truth and trust. In the text, excerpts from semi-fictional interviews on diversity in business culture with the AI robot Sophia and several advertisements for objects and actions that control the body greet us through the format and hybridity of a TV/radio show. In addition to this, suggestions from Jehovah’s Witness magazines focusing post-truth culture to guide us to God and reflections on body politics such as Orientalist imagery – for instance, the Odalisque image in the Western canon – or the pharmocopornographic (Preciado) era ponder various methods of power structures.

lecture script (PDF)

Göksu Kunak (*1985 in Ankara) a.k.a. Gucci Chunk is a writer, performer and performance maker based in Berlin. Göksu performed her text-based performances at The Parliament of Bodies curated by Paul B. Preciado and Viktor Neumann as part of Bergen Assembly 2019, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Pogo Bar (invited by Léon Kruijswijk), Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneve CAMP (invited by Andrea Bellini and Julian Weber), HAU Berlin City Lights (invited by Meg Stuart and Maria F. Scaroni), Bâtard Brussels 2016 (invited by Tom Engels), Broken Dimanche Press reading series at Tropez Berlin, Pioneer Works NYC curated by Belladonna* Collaborative, 3hd 2019 (HAU Berlin) and 2nd <Interrupted =“Cyfem and Queer> curated by Creamcake, 1a Space Hong Kong as part of the exhibition Hactivate Yourself, TABLOID PRESS Readings and Montez Press Radio, NYC.

In January 2018, her first book #225 I thought this would was published by Belladonna* Collaborative, NYC. Her texts and poems have appeared in the book Portrait Wayne McGregor, commissioned by The Bavarian State Ballet, on the official page of The Absence of Paths, the Official Tunisian Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennial and on the blog The History of Painting Revisited in collaboration with Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle for the Fahrelnissa Zeid Retrospective.

Reading list

• Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, 2010, Duke University Press, online.
• Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics, 2013 in English, The Feminist Press. online.
• Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: The Fugitive Planning & Black Study, 2016, Minor Compositions, online.
• Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016, Duke University Press, online.
• Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 1961, in English 2001, Turko-Tatar Press, online.
• Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, 2015, University of Minnesota Press, online.

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On Turkish television, footage of mountains in which terrorists are said to be hiding is part of everyday reporting. These images ultimately serve domestic political stability through a seemingly external enemy. In Sahin’s video work, consisting of a montage of news images, this is contradicted by the cutting technique. The image of the mountain has become an absurd and downright comedic part of everyday life and entertainment culture in Turkey.

car, road, mountain is part of an installation that can be seen as part of the ars viva Prize 2020 exhibition at Kunstverein Hamburg. The installation consists of photographs, a video work, an advertising banner and two aircraft evacuation slides. They refer to news images and the fact that they can be manipulated. The nine photographs show various people posing on Ardahan Mountain in Turkey before what is known as the Shadow of Atatürk. The mountain itself casts this shadow when the sun is at a particular height and has become a place of pilgrimage because of it. The aircraft evacuation slides themselves become mountains in the exhibition space and connect the individual elements of the installation. (Bettina Steinbrügge, Director of Kunstverein Hamburg)

Cemile Sahin is an artist. She studied fine art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and at Berlin University of the Arts. Her works move between film, photography, sculpture, sound and text. The starting points for her works are images or stories, which she re-stages in her multimedia installations. Through this, she questions the functionalisation of media and the meaning of different perspectives for historiography, and explores the question of how history and its telling changes if it is constructed through the narratives of different perspectives. Cemile Sahin is the winner of the ars viva Prize 2020 for visual arts and a fellow of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Cemile Sahin, TAXI, 2019, Korbinian Verlag, book in German, online.

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I grew up in the GDR, a society described by Czech dissident and later State President Václav Havel as post-totalitarian. In his essay on "living in truth” (The Power of the Powerless, 1978), a standard reference work for Eastern European dissidents, Havel not only examines the relationship between power and resistance in socialism as it actually existed but also puts forward the thesis that Eastern European societies were extreme versions of Western European consumer and industrial society. What is more: They expose the technical civilization of the capitalist West’s own latent, directional tendencies. With the election of Donald Trump and the rise of right-wing populists all over the world, Havel’s thesis has gained surprising significance. So my question is: What does a look back at my socialist youth tell us about our near future?

Lecture (PDF)

Christian Tschirner was born in 1968 in Lutherstadt-Wittenberg. He trained as an animal keeper and later studied acting at the Ernst Busch University for Dramatic Arts in Berlin. He worked as an actor in Frankfurt/Main and then became a freelance director and author. He has been a dramaturge since 2009, first at Schauspiel Hannover and then at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg from 2013. Since the 2019/2020 season, he has been the chief dramaturge at the Berliner Schaubühne theatre

Reading list

• Edward Luttwak, Why Fashism is the Wave of the Future, 1994, London Review of Books, online.
• Myriam Revault d’Allonnes, Brüchige Wahrheit, 2019, Hamburger Editionen, online.
• Video Kritische Theorie „Propaganda“, online.

The main heroes of the film are the young people of Kharkiv, a big city located in Eastern Ukraine. They reached their early twenties just as war broke out in the neighbouring region of Donbass. They are not soldiers, doctors or volunteers and do not practice any other professions or vocations primarily associated with warfare. They are all artists or work in the creative industries: an LGBT activist and poet, a fashion model, a group of street artists, the creator of a computer game. If it seems that they are standing back from the challenges of the time, this would be a superficial impression. In addition to the creative principles, they are all united by the need to resist. Restricted by the war and the flywheel of Russian propaganda on the one hand, and by uncontrolled Ukrainian right-wing radicals on the other, the heroes of the film try to decipher emancipatory coordinates for living under the conditions of the time. The heroes react to and reflect on political events through their specific relationships with the urban space and the reality of social media.

Mykola Ridnyi was born in 1985 in Kharkiv and lives in Kyiv, Ukraine. He graduated from Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Fine Arts in 2008. Mykola was a founding member of the Kharkiv-based artistic collective SOSka group and co-founded the artist-run gallery of the same name. He combines different artistic activities: Mykola is an artist and filmmaker, curator and author of essays on art and politics. Site-specific installations and experimental films constitute the current focus of his practice.

Reading list

• Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of the Others, 2003, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, online.
• Andreas Treske, Video Theory: Online Video Aesthetics or the Afterlife of Video, 2015, transcript, online.
• Geert Lovink, Critical Theory of the Internet, 2019, Garage

In the context of the Laboratory of Contested Space, I will present my long-term sequence of research emerging in different formats, investigating intergenerational trauma and navigating fascist propaganda as an artist and activist: the piece is dedicated to my grandmother Anna, who was an actress and gave up her career to join and dedicate herself to working with the agricultural party in Bulgaria at the time, a representative of the Democratic party. She ended up being tortured in prison in the 1930s in Sofia, Bulgaria because of her political views and activism.

The lecture performance ANNA – Palindrome of Behaviour (2020) speaks about trauma passed down through generations via DNA; the existence of traumatic transmission, not only through the passing on of stories from parent to child by means of affective or unconscious cues but also by the imprinting of these events on DNA, through complex post-traumatic stress disorder mechanisms. Through epigenetics, trauma mutates genes, affecting the lives of families across generations. My work focuses internally on the residues of these processes and seeks to expose these effects, telling stories of individuals or groups. It creates a portrait of the present via incorporated performative praxis leaning onto scientific discoveries, in order to deliver a reflective outcome and radical thought. The method so far has been to be fully aware, to re-direct, to transform, to give a place in the performance to experience and re-enact a traumatic collective insinuation – by this experience being witnessed and shared, trauma is surpassed and can be healed.

Voin de Voin was born in 1978. He lives and works in Sofia, Bulgaria. He holds an MA from DasArts – Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam, and diploma from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, Goldsmith College, School for New Dance Development, London, and EICAR – International Film and Television School, Paris. Since July 2016 he is running an independent art space called Æther Sofia. Since 2018, he has been working with Marie Civikov on a platform for exchange under the umbrella Æther Haga in the Netherlands.

Reading list

• Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, 2008, Palgrave Macmillan, online.
• Moshe Feldenkrais, The Potent Self: A Study of Spontaneity and Compulsion: The Dynamics of the Body and the Mind, 2002, Frog Books.
• Alain Badiou, Can Politics be Thoughts, 1985, 2019, Duke University Press, online.
• Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 2015, Verso, online.
• Bruno Latour, We have never been modern, 1993, Harvard University Press, online.
• Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, 1995.
• David Rattray, How I Became One of the Invisible, 1992, The MIT Press, online.
• Patricia Kathleen Robertson, Connect With Your Ancestors: Transforming the Transgenerational Trauma of Your Family Tree: Exploring Systemic Healing, Inherited Emotional Genealogy, Entanglements, Epigenetics and Body Focused Systemic Constellations, 2017, BookBaby.
• Mark Wolynn, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, 2017, Penguin Books, online.