↓ Statement by the Organizers on the Postponement of the Events at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
This series of events, organized jointly by teachers at German-speaking art schools, confronts the current authoritarian drift. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, under the pressure of the climate crisis, and in the face of wars and increasing militarization, conflicts are also intensifying within universities: Occupations by students are evicted by the police – rarely since the late 1960s has a student movement been reacted to with such vehemence. Teachers and researchers experience defamation, are disinvited for political reasons, contracts are not renewed. Practices of denunciation, digital policing, and hate speech are encroaching upon university politics. Political actors are putting pressure on universities and curtailing their autonomy.
This authoritarian drift can also be clearly seen in the art world. The debates surrounding the Ruhrtriennale, documenta fifteen, the Berlinale and the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, among others, raise the question of why has the field of contemporary art become such a prominent arena for debates and curbs and restrictions while those processes are kept out of other fields of social and cultural life? How are art schools changing under the impact of these conflicts?
The lecture series is committed to an understanding of (art) universities as places of critical art and knowledge production, where arguments can be developed, controversies aired in public, and dissent can exist. Contributions will analyze current politics and eroding democratic orders in various formats; they will address the delegitimization of postcolonial art and theory; they will theorize intertwined articulations of antisemitic, racist and sexist violence. They will discuss forms and effects of a politically right-wing anti-antisemitism directed against emancipatory movements and increasingly openly against critical Jewish positions and individuals. They will point to the omissions of post-migrant memory culture. The series will touch upon the aesthetics of protest and occupation as well as the tense relationship between art and politics; it will examine neoliberal restructurings of art schools, look at the aesthetics of protest and occupation, and at the tensions between art and politics.
Does authoritarianism follow from this drift? If we analyze the present and resist it, which lines of flight can be found, and which possibilities will open up?
Film Screening and discussion with guests: Rose-Anne Gush and Helmut Krieger
7 pm
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Applied Photography Studio
Schwanzer Trakt 4th Floor
Oskar Kokoschka Platz 2, 1010 Vienna
Moderation and Organisation:
Movie Nights Group: Anahita Asadifar, Sofia Bempeza, Antonia Birnbaum, Yasmina Haddad, Fine Freiberg, Nanna Heidenreich, Amanda Holmes, Annette Krauss, Alexi Kukukljevic, Andrea Lumplecker, Zeynep Turel, Maria Ziegelböck
Attendance:
on-site
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.
Panel discussion with Wolfgang Kaleck (European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, ECCHR), Deborah Feldman (author of Judenfetisch, 2023), Monika Mokre (political scientist and migration policy activist) and Isabel Frey (ethnomusicologist and founder of the Jewish-Arab peace initiative Standing Together Vienna)
6 pm
Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien
Clara Schumann-Saal, AWCEG01
Anton-von-Webern-Platz 1, 1030 Wien
Attendance:
on-site
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
Reflecting back on the lecture series Facing the Authoritarian Drift, transforming experiences of backlash into subversive knowledge of abundant resistance, and strategizing in an environment of joyful company.
Guest: Goldendean (Johannesburg)
6 pm
Kunsthochschule Mainz and Online
An der Johannes Gutenberg Universität
Am Taubertsberg 6
D-55122 Mainz
Organisation:
Carmen Mörsch (Kunsthochschule Mainz)
Marc Siegel (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
Katharina Fink (Art Residency Schloss Balmoral)
Goldendean
(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. AKA Dean Hutton, 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)
Panel Discussion with
Yasmeen Daher, Sami Khatib, Basma al-Sharif (engl.)
2–4 pm
University of the Arts Berlin
Medienhaus
Grunewaldstraße 2–5
10823 Berlin
Moderation:
Angela Harutyunyan (Contemporary Art History and Theory, UdK Berlin)
Attendance:
The event is fully booked
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.
Lecture (engl.) by Teresa Koloma Beck
and discussion (dt./engl.)
5–7 pm
online
Moderation:
Katrin M. Kämpf (Queer Studies, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln)
Attendance:
Please register with facingthedrift@krisol-wissenschaft.org for the Zoom link
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.
Lecture by Michael Rothberg: From Memory Wars to Memory Work: Relational Remembrance in Pınar Öğrenci's Aşît [The Avalanche], subsequent conversation with Marianne Hirsch and Çiğdem Inan, Jumana Manna and Michael Rothberg (engl.)
ATTENTION: The university management of the HGB Leipzig has cancelled the event.
6–8 pm
cancelled
Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig
Festsaal
Wächterstr. 11
04107 Leipzig
Organisation:
Natascha Frankenberg
Katrin Köppert
Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer
Ines Schaber
(all Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig)
Moderation:
Katrin Köppert (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig)
Marc Siegel (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
Attendance:
Open to members of the university and by invitation, in presence
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
Workshop with Palestinians and Jews for Peace (dt./engl.)
5–8 pm
Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln
Organisation:
Isabell Lorey (Queer Studies, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln)
Katrin M. Kämpf (Queer Studies, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln)
Attendance:
For students of the Kunsthochschule für Medien only, register with Katrin M. Kämpf
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.
Conversation with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay on her Book The Jewelers of the Ummah (dt./engl.)
First meeting
Second meeting
Kunsthochschule Kassel, Nordbau
Room 0235
Menzelstr. 13
34121 Kassel
Moderation:
Miriam Schickler (Visuelle Kommunikation, Kunsthochschule Kassel)
Johanna Schaffer (Visuellen Kommunikation, Kunsthochschule Kassel)
Attendance:
20 Participants, in presence, please register until Jan 13, 2025 with Miriam Schickler.
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.
Screenings of Foragers and Aşît [The Avalanche], exhibition of projects from students of HGB Leipzig with Brenda Berenice Alamilla Cornejo (tbc), Esraa Dayrwan, Nataliia Oliferovych (tbc), Dominik Schabel, Inputs by Marianne Hirsch and Michael Rothberg, roundtable with Marianne Hirsch, Jumana Manna, Pınar Öğrenci, Michael Rothberg, Marc Siegel
1.30–5 pm
Wolf Kino Berlin, Weserstr. 59, 12045 Berlin
5.30–9 pm
Spore Berlin, Herrmannstr. 86, 12051 Berlin
Organization:
Natascha Frankenberg
Katrin Köppert
Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer
Ines Schaber
Moderation:
Katrin Köppert
Attendance:
public, registration for the screenings at Wolf Kino are required: vortrag@hgb-leipzig.de
In cooperation with DFG Research Network “Gender, Media and Affect”
Contributors in Summer Semester
Ruth Sonderegger (Akademie für Bildende Künste Wien)
Sofia Bempeza, Nanna Heidenreich, Annette Kraus, Maria Ziegelböck (Universität für Angewandte Künste Wien)
Evelyn Annuß, Isabel Frey (Universität für Musik und darstellende Künste Wien)
Ines Kleesattel (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel)
Sigrid Adorf, Elke Bippus (Züricher Hochschule der Künste)
Kathrin Peters (Universität der Künste Berlin)
Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Mona Schieren, Asli Serbest, Andrea Sick (Hochschule für Künste Bremen)
Carmen Mörsch (Kunsthochschule Mainz), Marc Siegel (Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz)
Andrea Bellu, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, Angelika Levi (Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach)
Statement by the Organizers on the Postponement of the Events at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
Guests and organizers of the series “Facing the Authoritarian Drift: Art Schools as Sites of Critique” have been subjected to major attacks on social media and in news outlets, such as “Die Welt”. Amidst these attacks and despite intensive discussion, the Rectorate of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig postponed the multi-day event “The Art of Memory in Times of Trauma and Grief” on the opening day for an indefinite period of time, stating that it wanted to legally examine the conditions for holding the event. Previously, the workshop “Before/After Palestine” at the Berlin University of the Arts had been attacked and could only take place after organizers agreed to sign a private liability agreement.
We, the organizers of the event series, want to make clear that the attacks are part of targeted campaigns that follow distinct racist patterns: social media activities of Palestinian and Jewish artists, academics, students in solidarity with Palestine are monitored, postings and repostings are decontextualized, and prejudicially labeled antisemitic without substantiating this accusation. Reporting on the matter is rife with defamatory terms, insinuations, and dishonest omissions. The artist Jumana Manna, for example, has long since commented on postings that are now again scandalized. Often, these reportings are accompanied by photographs of those targeted thus posing a direct threat to their physical safety.
We call on university administrations to stand up to these attacks and unconditionally defend artistic and academic freedom as guaranteed by Basic Law. We insist that art academies are sites of critique, places of dispute, of questioning the status quo, and of debating differences, including political ones.
Michael Rothberg, Holocaust researcher, current guest of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and invited speaker at the event at the HGB Leipzig, has written a statement on the postponement.
Dec. 9, 2024
We are a loose association of lecturers at German-speaking art schools, which was formed in the context of the Alliance for Critical Scholarship in Solidarity.
↓ Statement by the Organizers on the Postponement of the Events at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
This series of events, organized jointly by teachers at German-speaking art schools, confronts the current authoritarian drift. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, under the pressure of the climate crisis, and in the face of wars and increasing militarization, conflicts are also intensifying within universities: Occupations by students are evicted by the police – rarely since the late 1960s has a student movement been reacted to with such vehemence. Teachers and researchers experience defamation, are disinvited for political reasons, contracts are not renewed. Practices of denunciation, digital policing, and hate speech are encroaching upon university politics. Political actors are putting pressure on universities and curtailing their autonomy.
This authoritarian drift can also be clearly seen in the art world. The debates surrounding the Ruhrtriennale, documenta fifteen, the Berlinale and the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, among others, raise the question of why has the field of contemporary art become such a prominent arena for debates and curbs and restrictions while those processes are kept out of other fields of social and cultural life? How are art schools changing under the impact of these conflicts?
The lecture series is committed to an understanding of (art) universities as places of critical art and knowledge production, where arguments can be developed, controversies aired in public, and dissent can exist. Contributions will analyze current politics and eroding democratic orders in various formats; they will address the delegitimization of postcolonial art and theory; they will theorize intertwined articulations of antisemitic, racist and sexist violence. They will discuss forms and effects of a politically right-wing anti-antisemitism directed against emancipatory movements and increasingly openly against critical Jewish positions and individuals. They will point to the omissions of post-migrant memory culture. The series will touch upon the aesthetics of protest and occupation as well as the tense relationship between art and politics; it will examine neoliberal restructurings of art schools, look at the aesthetics of protest and occupation, and at the tensions between art and politics.
Does authoritarianism follow from this drift? If we analyze the present and resist it, which lines of flight can be found, and which possibilities will open up?
Film Screening and discussion with guests: Rose-Anne Gush and Helmut Krieger
7 pm
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Applied Photography Studio
Schwanzer Trakt 4th Floor
Oskar Kokoschka Platz 2, 1010 Vienna
Moderation and Organisation:
Movie Nights Group: Anahita Asadifar, Sofia Bempeza, Antonia Birnbaum, Yasmina Haddad, Fine Freiberg, Nanna Heidenreich, Amanda Holmes, Annette Krauss, Alexi Kukukljevic, Andrea Lumplecker, Zeynep Turel, Maria Ziegelböck
Attendance:
on-site
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.
Panel discussion with Wolfgang Kaleck (European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, ECCHR), Deborah Feldman (author of Judenfetisch, 2023), Monika Mokre (political scientist and migration policy activist) and Isabel Frey (ethnomusicologist and founder of the Jewish-Arab peace initiative Standing Together Vienna)
6 pm
Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien
Clara Schumann-Saal, AWCEG01
Anton-von-Webern-Platz 1, 1030 Wien
Attendance:
on-site
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
Reflecting back on the lecture series Facing the Authoritarian Drift, transforming experiences of backlash into subversive knowledge of abundant resistance, and strategizing in an environment of joyful company.
Guest: Goldendean (Johannesburg)
6 pm
Kunsthochschule Mainz and Online
An der Johannes Gutenberg Universität
Am Taubertsberg 6
D-55122 Mainz
Organisation:
Carmen Mörsch (Kunsthochschule Mainz)
Marc Siegel (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
Katharina Fink (Art Residency Schloss Balmoral)
Goldendean
(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. AKA Dean Hutton, 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)
Panel Discussion with
Yasmeen Daher, Sami Khatib, Basma al-Sharif (engl.)
2–4 pm
University of the Arts Berlin
Medienhaus
Grunewaldstraße 2–5
10823 Berlin
Moderation:
Angela Harutyunyan (Contemporary Art History and Theory, UdK Berlin)
Attendance:
The event is fully booked
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.
Lecture (engl.) by Teresa Koloma Beck
and discussion (dt./engl.)
5–7 pm
online
Moderation:
Katrin M. Kämpf (Queer Studies, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln)
Attendance:
Please register with facingthedrift@krisol-wissenschaft.org for the Zoom link
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.
Lecture by Michael Rothberg: From Memory Wars to Memory Work: Relational Remembrance in Pınar Öğrenci's Aşît [The Avalanche], subsequent conversation with Marianne Hirsch and Çiğdem Inan, Jumana Manna and Michael Rothberg (engl.)
ATTENTION: The university management of the HGB Leipzig has cancelled the event.
6–8 pm
cancelled
Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig
Festsaal
Wächterstr. 11
04107 Leipzig
Organisation:
Natascha Frankenberg
Katrin Köppert
Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer
Ines Schaber
(all Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig)
Moderation:
Katrin Köppert (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig)
Marc Siegel (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
Attendance:
Open to members of the university and by invitation, in presence
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
Workshop with Palestinians and Jews for Peace (dt./engl.)
5–8 pm
Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln
Organisation:
Isabell Lorey (Queer Studies, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln)
Katrin M. Kämpf (Queer Studies, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln)
Attendance:
For students of the Kunsthochschule für Medien only, register with Katrin M. Kämpf
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.
Conversation with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay on her Book The Jewelers of the Ummah (dt./engl.)
First meeting
Second meeting
Kunsthochschule Kassel, Nordbau
Room 0235
Menzelstr. 13
34121 Kassel
Moderation:
Miriam Schickler (Visuelle Kommunikation, Kunsthochschule Kassel)
Johanna Schaffer (Visuellen Kommunikation, Kunsthochschule Kassel)
Attendance:
20 Participants, in presence, please register until Jan 13, 2025 with Miriam Schickler.
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.
Screenings of Foragers and Aşît [The Avalanche], exhibition of projects from students of HGB Leipzig with Brenda Berenice Alamilla Cornejo (tbc), Esraa Dayrwan, Nataliia Oliferovych (tbc), Dominik Schabel, Inputs by Marianne Hirsch and Michael Rothberg, roundtable with Marianne Hirsch, Jumana Manna, Pınar Öğrenci, Michael Rothberg, Marc Siegel
1.30–5 pm
Wolf Kino Berlin, Weserstr. 59, 12045 Berlin
5.30–9 pm
Spore Berlin, Herrmannstr. 86, 12051 Berlin
Organization:
Natascha Frankenberg
Katrin Köppert
Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer
Ines Schaber
Moderation:
Katrin Köppert
Attendance:
public, registration for the screenings at Wolf Kino are required: vortrag@hgb-leipzig.de
In cooperation with DFG Research Network “Gender, Media and Affect”
Contributors in Summer Semester
Ruth Sonderegger (Akademie für Bildende Künste Wien)
Sofia Bempeza, Nanna Heidenreich, Annette Kraus, Maria Ziegelböck (Universität für Angewandte Künste Wien)
Evelyn Annuß, Isabel Frey (Universität für Musik und darstellende Künste Wien)
Ines Kleesattel (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel)
Sigrid Adorf, Elke Bippus (Züricher Hochschule der Künste)
Kathrin Peters (Universität der Künste Berlin)
Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Mona Schieren, Asli Serbest, Andrea Sick (Hochschule für Künste Bremen)
Carmen Mörsch (Kunsthochschule Mainz), Marc Siegel (Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz)
Andrea Bellu, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, Angelika Levi (Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach)
Statement by the Organizers on the Postponement of the Events at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
Guests and organizers of the series “Facing the Authoritarian Drift: Art Schools as Sites of Critique” have been subjected to major attacks on social media and in news outlets, such as “Die Welt”. Amidst these attacks and despite intensive discussion, the Rectorate of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig postponed the multi-day event “The Art of Memory in Times of Trauma and Grief” on the opening day for an indefinite period of time, stating that it wanted to legally examine the conditions for holding the event. Previously, the workshop “Before/After Palestine” at the Berlin University of the Arts had been attacked and could only take place after organizers agreed to sign a private liability agreement.
We, the organizers of the event series, want to make clear that the attacks are part of targeted campaigns that follow distinct racist patterns: social media activities of Palestinian and Jewish artists, academics, students in solidarity with Palestine are monitored, postings and repostings are decontextualized, and prejudicially labeled antisemitic without substantiating this accusation. Reporting on the matter is rife with defamatory terms, insinuations, and dishonest omissions. The artist Jumana Manna, for example, has long since commented on postings that are now again scandalized. Often, these reportings are accompanied by photographs of those targeted thus posing a direct threat to their physical safety.
We call on university administrations to stand up to these attacks and unconditionally defend artistic and academic freedom as guaranteed by Basic Law. We insist that art academies are sites of critique, places of dispute, of questioning the status quo, and of debating differences, including political ones.
Michael Rothberg, Holocaust researcher, current guest of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and invited speaker at the event at the HGB Leipzig, has written a statement on the postponement.
Dec. 9, 2024
We are a loose association of lecturers at German-speaking art schools, which was formed in the context of the Alliance for Critical Scholarship in Solidarity.
Facing the Authoritarian
Drift: Art Schools
as Sites of Critique
Facing the Authoritarian
Drift: Art Schools
as Sites of Critique