Teresa Koloma Beck, Prof. Dr.
In-/Security – How and for Whom?
Vulnerabilities, anti-discrimination and political conflict in academic institutions in the aftermath of 10/7

Against the background of widespread campus protest against Israel’s military operations in Gaza and the wider region, universities and other academic institutions have moved into the focus of authoritarian discourses and politics. At the center were concerns for the safety and security of students and staff. 

Based on a qualitative study, this session explores how experiences of unsafety and insecurity changed and for whom. And it discusses institutional, political as well as grassroots responses to these developments.

Teresa Koloma Beck is a sociologist studying globalization and everyday life under conditions of violence, crisis and insecurity. In doing so, she is also interested in the presence of the colonial and imperial past in contemporary societies.  She is a professor of sociology at Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg and has undertaken field research in Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan and Germany. 

Nahed Awwad
Preserving Memory Amid Erasure

How do you preserve memory in a place under constant assault by foreign forces? When the land is being erased, confined behind segregation walls, and subjected to destruction? In Palestine, where indigenous people’s archives and possessions are looted or destroyed, memory itself becomes a form of resistance. As long as I can remember, being Palestinian has meant holding onto memory — of people, of place, of a land continually under threat.

Nahed Awwad is a Berlin-based independent Palestinian filmmaker and curator with 20+ years of experience. Her work is rooted in socially engaged storytelling and often explores themes of identity, memory, displacement, and resistance. Her films were screened at Cannes, Hot Docs, and more. Awwad co-founded the POC Art Collective and curates programs highlighting diasporic and Global South voices. Her work bridges film, politics, and memory, centring Palestinian narratives and challenging dominant discourses.

Pary El-Qalqili
Disobedient Memory

Palestinian history is overwritten, distorted, and erased within German memory culture. Orientalist image politics depict Palestinians as threats. How can one exist beyond this violent imagery? My film Speak Image, Speak practices looking back at violent images as a refusal to be limited by fixing gazes (Frantz Fanon). As images are reframed, questioned, recontextualized, and counter-narrated, film becomes a tool for disobedient collective memory, challenging consolidated politics of degradation and dehumanization.

Pary El-Qalqili is a writer and director based in Berlin. She is working on an Unruly Archive, a long-term project, combining film, peformance and archival work. In her cinematic work, she explores nonlinear narratives that challenge hegemonic storytelling, looking at life that has been disrupted, uprooted, colonized and marginalized. Her current film project Speak Image, Speak explores a disobedient counter memory of Palestinian past and present in Germany. In 2025, she holds the fellowship Weltoffenes Berlin at the Berliner Programm Künstlerische Forschung.

Aurélia Kalisky, Dr.
For a Cinema That Bears Witness

I would like to reflect on the conditions for a cinema that bears witness, as a double struggle: on the one hand, against the invisibilization of Palestinians and against epistemic and aesthetic injustice linked to the so-called Palestine exception; and on the other hand, against aestheticizing or victimizing modes of looking that perpetuate a form of humanitarian compassion. How has the paradigm of the Holocaust, which largely determines our disciplines (film studies, testimony and memory studies) contributed to rendering invisible a genocide unfolding in real time? It is within this context that we must also reflect on the unprecedented attacks currently targeting theoretical approaches in Germany that challenge the very possibility of a genuinely comparative framework.

Aurélia Kalisky is a researcher in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, where she leads the project FIMEMO (First Memories and Forms of Knowledge in the Aftermath of Genocide in the Cases of the Holocaust and Rwanda). She worked at the Zentrum für Literaturforschung in Berlin and has been a visiting fellow at, among others, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, the Moses Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg CURE in Saarbrücken in 2024–2025.

She teaches at the EHESS in Paris and has long served as secretary and later co-president of the Association Internationale de Recherches sur les Crimes contre l’Humanité et les Génocides in France. In 2024, she co-founded the Association of Palestinian and Jewish Academics.

Pedro Oliveira, Dr.
Exercises in “Postura”

In this talk I will briefly discuss examples of my artistic and pedagogical work focused on how borders traverse the body in different institutional spaces. My intention is to outline what I call “posturas of listening” – a form of studying not bound by academic or artistic frameworks but as a set of dispositions of bodies in space and in relation to one another.  In Portuguese, “postura” is more than bodily posture; it includes contingent orientations, attitudes and dispositions: ethical, political, moral and sometimes spiritual. I seek to move beyond questions of whether we can listen from the perspective of the other, to ask instead which forms of positioning we might take, collectively and towards one another, to form newer alliances.

Pedro Oliveira is a sound artist and researcher studying listening and its material intersections with the violences of the European border. In his performances and installations echo, distortion, and feedback probe the limits and failures of human and machine listening, and their encounters with the (migrant) body as a site of struggle for identity and belonging. Currently he is part of the guest faculty in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Eran Schaerf
Student Strike and Amateur Reading

Student Strike and Amateur Reading Cairo, 1935. In protest against the British occupation of Egypt, Muslim students go on strike. They storm the French law faculty, where members of Jewish, Greek, Armenian, Syrian, and other minorities study, and demand that they join in a solidarity strike. For visiting student and later author Jacqueline Kahanoff the encounter between a majority and minorities leads to reflections on the interdependence of different power relations, forms of knowledge acquisition, divided loyalties, and the use of contrary value systems.

Eran Schaerf is an artist based in Berlin and Brussels. Recent projects include “Only Six Can Play this Game“, co-author: Eva Meyer, Droste Festival 2020; “Levantinism: The Anachronic Possibilities of a Concept”, co-Autor: Eva Meyer, bakonline.org 2021; “Blinded in Remembering the Present? Ask Franz,” in Hijacking Memory. The Holocaust and the New Right, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 2022; Ein jüdischer Garten, co-editors: Hila Peleg, Itamar Gov, Munich 2022; „Nomadesque,“ in Machinations, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid 2023; Gesammeltes Deutsch, Vienna 2023.

Kathrin Peters, Prof. Dr.,
is professor for visual culture studies at Berlin University of the Arts. Recent publications Am Rand des Wissens. Über künstlerische Epistemologien, ed. With Kathrin Busch, Barbara Gronau, 2023; “Kritik der Wissenschaftsfreiheit”, in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 33, 2025.

Alejandra Nieves Camacho
works as Diversity and Anti-Discrimination Officer at the Berlin University of the Arts, with a special focus on anti-racism. She completed a Master’s in International Relations at Humboldt University, Freie Universität Berlin, and the University of Potsdam, focusing on migration, gender, and intersectionality. She has participated in research projects on film and social change, migration, as well as anti-discrimination in media. 

Lottie Sebes
is a sound artist and researcher working across installation and performance. She holds a BFA (Hons, University Medal) from UNSW/USYD in Sydney, Australia and an MA from the Berlin University of the Arts, where she has been part of the community for nearly a decade—first as a student and currently as program coordinator in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts. Her work has been shown internationally at Elsewhere Living Museum (USA), PICA (AU), iMAL (BE), and iii (NL), with writing published in Sonic Scope, ECHO, and her solo publication and record Veritas Ventriloquist.

What is utopian, what is realist? Do these terms even mean anything regarding the situation in Palestine-Israel? In 2012, Eyal Sivan, an Israeli filmmaker, and Eric Hazan, the french editor of the éditions La Fabrique which has consistently published on the situation in Palestine for the last thirty years, published a book together, accompanying the film. The title: A common state between Jordan and the sea.

The diagnostic and the thesis are as follows: the supposedly realist solution to the ongoing occupation is a partition into two independent states, a Palestinian and an Israeli one, the supposed utopia is a common state with equal rights for all. This presupposition needs to be undone and inverted.

The realist “solution” has actually been prone since 1937, in the famous Peel report following the 1936 insurrection of Palestine. It has given rise to countless peace processes, agreements (Oslo I and II 1993-1995), and actually benefits from a consensus; Sharon, Netanyahu, Uvi Avneri (peace movement), and the Palestine Liberation Organization, agree on it. Yes, even Hamas, whose Charta programs the destruction of Israel, is part of that consensus:  in a declaration of 2009 in the NYT, Khaled Meshal declares that he is in disagreement on everything with Fatah, except the necessity for an independent state, in the limits of 1967. If everyone agrees, why then is this realistic solution never implemented? Because it is not a solution, but a discourse, a discourse which maintains the status quo, if one can call status quo the ongoing occupation and genocide of the Palestinian people.

By contrast, the supposedly utopian solution of one State with equal rights for all starts, not with a discourse, but with the observation that partition is impossible, that there exists one State which today exercises its power, civil or/and military everywhere, and that the occupied territories are already a part of it. Thus, undoing the violence of the Israeli State entails transforming this unjust state into a common state. This common state is not, to paraphrase Godard, a just State, but it is just a State, a State like other States, devoid of exceptionality.

The film of the same name assembles a series of 24 conversations regarding the issue of a common state, with political actors, artists, jurists, young and old, Israelis Jews, Arabs of the occupied territories and of Israel. The same questions are asked and each person answers in their maternal tongue, in dialogue with the filmmaker: the screen is partitioned between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian: one talks and the other listens, and vice versa. The screen brings together what the fragmentation of the situation separates, producing the encounters that occupation hinders day after day.

Movie Nights:

is a format for a transdisciplinary exchange: Starting each time from one film, we open the space for a conversation about the relations between production of images and their conditions – modes of narration, authorship, history, politics and effects on society. We show fiction, documentaries, movie and television productions in regard to the actual situation, focusing on Palestinian and Israeli films. The movie nights are hosted and organized by the departments of Applied Photography, Klasse für Alle, Art and Communication Practices, Philosophy, and Transcultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Dr. Rose-Anne Gush

is currently Assistant Professor at IZK – Institute for Contemporary Art at TU Graz. Her research interests include political aesthetics and theories of ‘global art’, the relationships between colonialism, fascism and capitalism, and gender and ecology. Recent articles are published in Berlin Review, FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, Camera Austria, Brand-New-Life Magazine, Third Text, and Kunst und Politik. Her first monograph, Artistic Labour of the Body, is forthcoming in the Historical Materialism book series with Brill and Haymarket

Dr. Helmut Krieger

senior scientist and senior lecturer at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna, holds a PhD in political science. His research areas are, among other things, Israel/Palestine, social movements in the Arab speaking world, transformative research epistemologies for conflict and war zones as well as critical political economy perspectives combined with decolonial approaches.

In the course of the current authoritarian turn and global fascist developments, hard-won anti-discrimination policies are increasingly coming under pressure. In the USA, for example, trans and queer rights are under massive attack from the right, and institutional equality measures are being suspended. At the same time, anti-discrimination rhetoric is being hijacked to discredit or sanction critical political voices. In the German-speaking context, of all places, accusations of anti-Semitism are being used to silence criticism of current war crimes and violations of international law.

As part of the inter-university lecture series Against the Authoritarian Drift and the ICGP series Performing the Political, we will discuss international and local legal issues and their social dimension, the interconnection between anti-Semitic, racist and sexist violence, and current attacks on university autonomy.

Funded by the Gender|Queer|Diversity Call_mdw

On 12 May 2025, a follow-up workshop on the topic ‘Defining Anti-Semitism’ with Isabel Frey will take place in the IKM Library.

13:00–15:00
IKM Bibliothek (E 01 22)
Anton-von-Webern-Platz 1
1030 Wien

Dean Hutton

(they/them) makes trouble. Working at the intersections of trans media visual culture, performance and community action, their practice bridges genres of documentary, fiction and fantasy to produce radical queer counter narratives, and experiences for repair and resistance. Their strategy of simple disruptive actions share moments of soft courage, affirming the rights of all bodies to exist, be celebrated, and protected. An artist-in-residence at the University of Johannesburg, their research embraces collaborative praxis and embodied play to produce new forms of artWork – sculptural objects made from sustainable materials and living biomatter that works to support ecosystem health, and build cultural and ecological value for local communities.(1976, ZA)

As the last lecture of the series “Facing the Authoritarian Drift: Art Schools as Sites of Critique” (https://krisol-wissenschaft.org/en/facing-the-drift/), our session invites you for a hybrid encounter - both online and at the Kunsthochschule Mainz - to PAUSE, STRATEGIZE and be in ABUNDANCE together. There has been a lot of - largely productive - discussion in our various organizational contexts over the past months. The title of the lecture series has also unsurprisingly proved to be performative since several events were met with institutional resistance. Strategies were developed to ensure that events would nevertheless take place. These experiences have led to the production of knowledge about ways of facing the authoritarian drift, together.

We therefore think it’s an ideal time to pause, to listen, to exchange and to learn.

We invited Dean Hutton, artist and troublemaker, based in Johannesburg, South Africa, to join us online for a conversation-input about STRATEGIZING. In their contribution, they will share experiences from the past two years of working in solidarity with a number of movements in the shape of CAMP - the Community Art Mobilisation Project. They are the director of CAMP where they “make soft spaces for hard questions.” They leverage art practice and cultural production to create “narrative repair” by developing impactful visual strategies, content and material. They collaborate with artists, activists, and frontline communities for direct actions and interventions that connect intersectional struggles, green development, and climate justice with our daily lives and potent futures.

The conversation between Dean Hutton and Katharina Fink will be followed by an exchange of knowledge, questions and thoughts between all of us, moderated by Marc Siegel. In this, we stay ABUNDANT - sharing practices and exercises to pause and to remain in action. In the analogue space of Hörsaal @ Kunsthochschule Mainz, there will be the opportunity to simultaneously do stuff with your hands and bodies, like cutting out CAMP stickers, eating fruit and staying hydrated.

“CAMP is a tactical resourcing unit that is fleet, fluid, and flexible. We design and act when others ponder their theory of change. We are problem solvers who prepare and resource intersectional movements through art builds; developing counter propaganda strategies and leverage the attention economy in actions that engage evolving audiences in new contexts in high visibility and low risk ways. We work in service and that means our outputs depend on what we are asked, what is required of us and what we can offer with abundance.”

“At CAMP we create a space that nurtures the courage to act, pushing ourselves and each other to embrace change in ways that are both loving and transformative. By resisting alienation, apathy, and nihilism, we model how to thrive in a world fraught with systemic injustice and fear. We refuse silence and complicity, instead choosing to foster connection, encourage courage, and reject isolation.”

We ask, is it possible to think the potential genocide – historically, politically, critically – without turning the event itself into a figure of thought? Can we conceive of thinking as active, interventionist and intricately connected to the very material reality it thinks, rather than as merely contemplative? Is there a philosophy before/after Palestine, in the protracted temporality of Palestinian political non-subjectivization? Given the way in which every second is being recorded, documented, and shared, often instantly and by the victims themselves, what can art do or how can it do differently?

Yasmeen Daher:

is a feminist activist and writer with a PhD in philosophy from the University of Montreal, specializing in ethics and political philosophy. She is currently co-director and editorial director of Febrayer, a Berlin-based network for independent Arab media organizations.

Sami Khatib:

is a research associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut and a founding member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). He co-edited Critique: The Stakes of Form (2020) and authored Teleology without End: Walter Benjamin's Dislocation of the Messianic (2013).

Basma al-Sharif:

is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker exploring cyclical political histories and conflicts. She has exhibited at MoMA, the Whitney Biennial, and the New Museum. Based in Berlin and represented by Galerie Imane Farés in Paris.

Securitisation is a process by which issues of public concern are transformed into matters of security. It leads to the emergence of securitised social spaces which are marked by a complex entanglement of individual experiences, discourse and public policy. Based on preliminary insights from an ongoing qualitative study the lecture explores recent dynamics of (in)security and securitisation in/of academic institutions and everyday campus life and discusses their relevance in the horizon of broader societal transformations.

Teresa Koloma Beck:

researches globalisation and everyday life under conditions of violent conflict and crisis, with an interest in the present of the colonial and imperial past. She is a professor of sociology at Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg.

Katrin M. Kämpf:

researches in the field of history of sexuality and feminist Science & Technology Studies with a particular interest in technosecurity cultures and queerfeminist technologies of care. She is an assistant professor for Queer Studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

Art can open up a space in which traumas become accessible as zones of indeterminacy and radical unavailability. The fact that the art and culture scene in particular is currently under pressure from state surveillance and political interference may be due to this. At a moment when answers seem urgent and clear demarcations necessary, art in its logic of refusing brevity and explainability is seemingly difficult to endure. The haste to disinvite artists and question funding commitments seems to follow the script of a memory culture that is based on supposed unambiguities and ultimately (re)produces exclusions: Under the premise of the German raison d'état, which centers on unconditional support for Israel's policies, Jewish life is to be protected by partly repressive measures (see resolution draft), which, among other things, often lead to Palestinian life and Palestinian narratives not being perceived.

We associate the question of the art of memory with the wish to discuss remembrance beyond hegemonic scripts. What can art achieve in times of deep grief and how can it be a medium for a practice that does not isolate us from each other in trauma, but rather connects us in grief?

Marianne Hirsch:

Columbia University, writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in global perspective.

Çiğdem Inan:

is an interdisciplinary sociologist with a teaching and research focus on affect theory, queer-feminist and decolonial philosophies and racism studies. Inan is also a publisher at the publishing collective b_books (Berlin) and editor of the publication series re fuse.

Katrin Köppert:

is an art and media scholar and currently Assistant Professor of Art History/Popular Cultures at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. Together with Simon Strick, she is currently head of the research project on “Digital Blackface. Racialized affect patterns of the digital” She is a spokesperson for the Alliance for Critical Scholarship in Solidarity.

Jumana Manna:

is a visual artist and filmmaker who grew up in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial heritage and the history of place. Her work addresses the tension between the modernist traditions of categorization and preservation and the recalcitrance of decay, life and its regeneration.

Michael Rothberg:

is the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization(published in German by Metropol Verlag), and Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation.With Yasemin Yildiz, he is completing Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance for Fordham University Press. He is currently a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Marc Siegel:

In cooperation with the DFG Research Network Gender, Media and Affect and the lecture series Postcolonial Critique, Decolonial Perspectives

While the war in Israel, Palestine, and now Lebanon is costing more and more lives, a fierce dispute is taking place in Germany over the authority of interpretation and about war narratives in relation to the Middle East conflict. Racism, antisemitism, and dehumanisation determine the debate about which victims are mourned and whose deaths are justified, denied or even celebrated.

In this social climate, what can solidarity with the people affected look like?

We want to initiate a process in which we can open up common political spaces with radical empathy and develop our tolerance to ambiguity for different perspectives.

The Palestinians and Jews for Peace initiative:

consists of Palestinian, Jewish, Israeli, and other emancipatory friends who are committed to a differentiated dialogue and compassionate, respectful interaction with one another in Germany. Their aim is to show that there are infinitely more than just two sides, that all people are learners, and that the struggle against fascism, racism, and antisemitism must always also be fought with oneself.

We invite Ariella Aïsha Azoulay to talk with us about her new book The Jewelers of the Ummah. A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World. Azoulay writes about the disruption of Jewish-Muslim life in the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa).

In the first meeting of the two-part event, we discuss a chapter of the book that each participant has read beforehand. At the beginning, we decide how we want to talk to each other, i.e. we give ourselves rules for communicating with each other in a conflict-laden discursive field.

In the second meeting, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay will talk to us about her book project via Zoom.

We are organising this conversation as part of the event series Against the Authoritarian Drift because we want to counter the repressive narrrowing down of discourse in German-language contexts, and we want to learn from criticism that does not reproduce binary models of thought.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:

is a theorist of photography, a film essayist, a curator, and a Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University in the USA.

Securitisation is a process by which issues of public concern are transformed into matters of security. It leads to the emergence of securitised social spaces which are marked by a complex entanglement of individual experiences, discourse and public policy. Based on preliminary insights from an ongoing qualitative study the lecture explores recent dynamics of (in)security and securitisation in/of academic institutions and everyday campus life and discusses their relevance in the horizon of broader societal transformations.

Teresa Koloma Beck:

researches globalisation and everyday life under conditions of violent conflict and crisis, with an interest in the present of the colonial and imperial past. She is a professor of sociology at Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg.

Katrin M. Kämpf:

researches in the field of history of sexuality and feminist Science & Technology Studies with a particular interest in technosecurity cultures and queerfeminist technologies of care. She is an assistant professor for Queer Studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

Art can open up a space in which traumas become accessible as zones of indeterminacy and radical unavailability. The fact that the art and culture scene in particular is currently under pressure from state surveillance and political interference may be due to this. At a moment when answers seem urgent and clear demarcations necessary, art in its logic of refusing brevity and explainability is seemingly difficult to endure. The haste to disinvite artists and question funding commitments seems to follow the script of a memory culture that is based on supposed unambiguities and ultimately (re)produces exclusions: Under the premise of the German raison d'état, which centers on unconditional support for Israel's policies, Jewish life is to be protected by partly repressive measures (see resolution draft), which, among other things, often lead to Palestinian life and Palestinian narratives not being perceived.

We associate the question of the art of memory with the wish to discuss remembrance beyond hegemonic scripts. What can art achieve in times of deep grief and how can it be a medium for a practice that does not isolate us from each other in trauma, but rather connects us in grief?

Marianne Hirsch:

Columbia University, writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in global perspective.

Çiğdem Inan:

is an interdisciplinary sociologist with a teaching and research focus on affect theory, queer-feminist and decolonial philosophies and racism studies. Inan is also a publisher at the publishing collective b_books (Berlin) and editor of the publication series re fuse.

Katrin Köppert:

is an art and media scholar and currently Assistant Professor of Art History/Popular Cultures at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. Together with Simon Strick, she is currently head of the research project on “Digital Blackface. Racialized affect patterns of the digital” She is a spokesperson for the Alliance for Critical Scholarship in Solidarity.

Jumana Manna:

is a visual artist and filmmaker who grew up in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial heritage and the history of place. Her work addresses the tension between the modernist traditions of categorization and preservation and the recalcitrance of decay, life and its regeneration.

Michael Rothberg:

is the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization(published in German by Metropol Verlag), and Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation.With Yasemin Yildiz, he is completing Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance for Fordham University Press. He is currently a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Marc Siegel:

In cooperation with the DFG Research Network Gender, Media and Affect and the lecture series Postcolonial Critique, Decolonial Perspectives