Fear, Resentment, Division

Some of My Best Friends are White

29.11.23 at 19:30 | Black Box Zeppelin Universität

In the artist talk "Some of My Best Friends are White", the renowned artist Candice Breitz talks about the construct of whiteness and other racialized categories based on her artistic work "Whiteface" (2022), which is currently on display in the White Box at Zeppelin University. It addresses the dangerous fictions underlying white supremacy and asks how this violent ideology can be examined using artistic methods and what art can do to counter this ideology.

The video installation "Whiteface" (2022), which the artsprogram is exhibiting as part of the annual theme "Being Wrong" from September to December 2023, deals with racist clichés, ways of speaking and patterns of argumentation as they circulate in the mass media every day, where they form poisoned resonance spaces and offers of identification. In the work, the South African artist collages and restages white people's perspectives on whiteness and shows gestures of immunization of white people in the face of the worldwide call for their deprivation.

Biography

Candice Breitz (born 1972 in Johannesburg) is an artist based in Berlin. Her video installations have been shown internationally. Throughout her career, Breitz has explored the dynamics by which an individual becomes themselves in relation to a larger community, be it the immediate community one encounters in the family, or the real and imagined communities shaped not only by issues of national belonging, race, gender and religion, but also by the increasingly undeniable influence of mainstream media such as television, cinema and other popular culture. More recently, Breitz's work has focused on the conditions under which empathy is generated, reflecting on a media-saturated global culture in which strong identification with fictional characters and celebrities is accompanied by widespread indifference to the plight of those facing adversity in the real world. In 2022, she completed the White Noise Trilogy, a trio of multi-channel video installations that includes Love Story (2016), TLDR (2017) and Whiteface (2022).

Breitz holds degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), the University of Chicago and Columbia University (NYC). She has participated in the Whitney Museum's Independent Studio Program and was a guest artist in residence at "Le Pavillon" at the Palais de Tokyo from 2005-2006. She has been a professor at the Braunschweig University of Art since 2007.

Photo: Tobias Zielony

Phantom possession or shared life

30.11.23 at 19:00 | Black Box Zeppelin Universität

What is racism anyway? What different forms does it take and why is it so central to authoritarian politics as it is currently gaining strength globally? In her lecture, philosopher Eva von Redecker explains some of the dynamics that shape modern identities and control political mobilization. She shows how closely white supremacy is linked to the enforcement of the capitalist property system and to what extent individual racism as an expression of privilege is nevertheless a sign of powerlessness. Against the background of this analysis, however, it is also possible to trace how many contemporary protest movements are actively working against the devaluation and destruction of life. As an alternative to aggressive phantom ownership, sharing in solidarity points to other forms of planetary coexistence.

Biography

Eva von Redecker is a philosopher and author who lives in rural Brandenburg and writes about property, social change and sometimes even life and death. Her most recent book, Bleibefreiheit (S.Fischer 2023), takes on the concept of freedom in the face of the ecological crisis and proposes that it should be understood more temporally than spatially in the future. Revolution für das Leben (S.Fischer), which combines a critique of capitalism with a philosophy of new forms of protest, was published in September 2020. Eva von Redecker has been a permanent columnist for the philosophy magazine since April 2023 and moderates the discussion series "Eva and The Apple" at Schauspiel Köln.

Photo: Philipp Plum

To Hold the Ground for the Not-Yet

As concerns about the overflowing passions of “fear, resentment, and division” summon us to this symposium, I would like to think aloud about the aesthetico-political options before us from the perspective of an art institution that is theoretically informed on the one hand, and on the other, politically driven by yearnings for truth, for us, and for the world (after Marina Garces). Teasing out critique-as-proposition in the era that exhausts us by its demand to relentlessly react to a constant assault of compound catastrophes and urgencies, I will ask what would it take to instead hold the ground for the not-yet. Understanding our time as one of disastrous contestations around facts, collectivity, and the very possibility of livable life in common in the world at present, I will inquire about the practices of thinking, imagining, and social action that employ at once resistance and imagination. I will draw from artistic practices that have emerged into, from, or alongside BAK’s research projects, including Former West (2018–2016) and Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing).

If to hold one’s ground means to insist on an argument or an imaginary in spite of prevailing sentiments all around—with growing right-wing populism being the case in question for our gathering—the workshop will expand on the above set of propositions. We will attempt to do so by constructing a collective toolkit to hold ground for the not-yet through insistence on facts and the possibility of truth, and as a means for building collective pathways to imagine the world otherwise and live it as if that were possible.

This workshop will be held in English.

Biography

Maria Hlavajova is an organizer, researcher, educator, curator, and founding general and artistic director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (since 2000). Between 2008 and 2016, she was research and artistic director of the collaborative research, exhibition, and education project FORMER WEST, which culminated in the publication Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 (which she co-edited with Simon Sheikh, 2016). Hlavajova has instigated and (co-)organized numerous projects at BAK and beyond, including the series Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing), Future Vocabularies (2014–2017), New World Academy (with Jonas Staal, 2013–2016), among many other international research, education, exhibition, and publication projects. Her curatorial work includes Call the Witness, Roma Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2011; Citizens and Subjects, Dutch Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice, 2007; and Borderline Syndrome: Energies of Defense, Manifesta 3, Ljubljana, 2000. Publications she has (co-)edited include: Fragments of Repair (with Kader Attia and Wietske Maas, forthcoming 2023); Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice (with Jeanne van Heeswijk and Rachael Rakes, 2021); Deserting from the Culture Wars (with Sven Lütticken, 2020); Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent (with Wietske Maas, 2019); Posthuman Glossary (with Rosi Braidotti, 2018); and Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists (with Tom Holert, 2017), among others. She is a lecturer at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, Utrecht and Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava. In addition, Hlavajova is co-founder (with Kathrin Rhomberg) of the tranzit network. Hlavajova is a member of the supervisory board of the Academy of Visual Arts, Prague and of the advisory boards of Bergen Assembly, Bergen; Art and Culture Program at Free University, Amsterdam; and IMAGINART,Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam. In the recent past, Hlavajova served on the supervisory boards of European Cultural Foundation, Amsterdam and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She lives and works in Amsterdam and Utrecht.

Photo: Tom Janssen

The Heart of Whiteness

What are the workings of white supremacy and how do they construct, manifest, and perpetuate themselves in popular media? In which ways do racist ideologies spread in online forums? How can artistic practices analyze and counteract violent visual languages?

In the workshop, we will explore the power of images, their political potential to divide as well as connect, and examine how artistic practices can decode and undermine white hegemonies. In the process, we will look at the construction and distribution of hostile images on the web and identify how they work with, build on and fuel emotions.

Using concrete examples, the participants will work out which fictions and emotions underlie ideas of white supremacy, how these ideologies haunt online forums and form the breeding ground for right-wing radicalization and extremism. We will further engage with artistic practices and works that analyse and decode these mechanisms.

This workshop will be held in English.

Biography

Candice Breitz (born 1972 in Johannesburg) is an artist based in Berlin. Her video installations have been shown internationally. Throughout her career, Breitz has explored the dynamics by which an individual becomes themselves in relation to a larger community, be it the immediate community one encounters in the family, or the real and imagined communities shaped not only by issues of national belonging, race, gender and religion, but also by the increasingly undeniable influence of mainstream media such as television, cinema and other popular culture. More recently, Breitz's work has focused on the conditions under which empathy is generated, reflecting on a media-saturated global culture in which strong identification with fictional characters and celebrities is accompanied by widespread indifference to the plight of those facing adversity in the real world. In 2022, she completed the White Noise Trilogy, a trio of multi-channel video installations that includes Love Story (2016), TLDR (2017) and Whiteface (2022).

Breitz holds degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), the University of Chicago and Columbia University (NYC). She has participated in the Whitney Museum's Independent Studio Program and was a guest artist in residence at "Le Pavillon" at the Palais de Tokyo from 2005-2006. She has been a professor at the Braunschweig University of Art since 2007.

Photo: Tobias Zielony

Us As Them

Since 2013, an annual commemorative event has been held under the name "Mölln Speech in Exile". It was initiated by İbrahim Arslan, one of the survivors of the arson attack in Mölln on November 23, 1992, as a critical examination of the town's official commemoration. It also stands as a sign of resistance against a German continuity of right-wing extremist violence and its social consequences, symbolically summarized in the city names Mölln, Solingen, Rostock-Lichtenhagen, Halle and Hanau. Based on this event, we will address the question of how social resistance against structural and everyday discrimination can be achieved and how social cohesion can be strengthened at the same time. Our workshop will focus on the apparent conflict between a universalist humanism and an identity politics focused on the particular and the question of what solidarity can look like when it is understood as a practice.

This workshop will be held in German.

Biography

Asal Dardan studied Cultural Studies in Hildesheim and Middle Eastern Studies in Lund. She was awarded the Caroline Schlegel Prize for Essay Writing for her text New Years. Her essay collection Betrachtungen einer Barbarin was nominated for the German Non-Fiction Prize 2021 and the Clemens Brentano Prize 2022. In May 2023, she gave the first Erika Mann Lecture at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. She lives in Berlin and on the Swedish island of Öland.