On(going) Trauma
Artistic narratives on collective and individual wounds
A discursive series in 6 parts, May-Dec 2024
How do artistic practices address current and past violence, wars and humanitarian crises? Which readings, which methods of communication and which future scenarios do they develop? How to talk about trauma when words fail; How to inform about violence without repeating violence?
In joint efforts with curators, guests and participants, the 6-part discursive series On(going) Trauma provides a forum to talk about and learn from artistic and curatorial research practices in dealing with trauma from plural perspectives. Various practices are presented, in which situated knowledges and backgrounds of systematic power and violence structures are discussed, as well as activist and marginalized perspectives are illuminated. In six rounds of encounters, discourses will be addressed that deal with the following issues: media representations and image politics of violence; the growth of right-wing everyday presence; trauma embedded in and seen through bodily perspectives; traumatic witnessing and fictional (counter-)narratives; private conflicts and public discourses; as well as aspects of the fragmentary and transgenerational temporality of trauma.
The focus of the encounters is directed to the question of how coexistence and discourse is possible despite different situatedness, concerns and involvement? What could be ways to overcome the difficulty of speaking about violence and to find new languages for communicating it?
The series of events seeks to critically examine and reposition the concept of trauma in the context of the arts, by focusing on the humanitarian and socio-political consequences of crises, war and violence. Central to each encounter is an exploration on whether and how the arts can create a potentially emancipating forum for the perspectives of victims and witnesses. In view of current crisis situations and the growing international shifts to the right, experiences of violence are corroding our societies, but at the same time, talking about these experiences from differentiated perspectives and finding lines of solidarity is difficult. "On(going) Trauma" therefore acts as an experimental format of exchange and encounter, created with and for artists, curators, activists, journalists and theorists. It is designed as an open conversation format, as a space of solidarity and humanitarian perspectives. At each event, excerpts from the artistic works of the invited guests are shown in the form of screenings, readings or performances.
On(going) Trauma is a discursive series in 6 parts, initiated by Institut für Widerstand im Postfordismus / Elisa Müller and Anna-Lena Werner in cooperation with Vierte Welt Berlin. Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.
NEXT ENCOUNTER
21. September, Sat, 15-19.30
Emancipations and collective resilience: On the Body and Trauma
With Isaac Chong Wai, Iz Öztat, Jenny Mahla, Natis
Awareness Mine Pleasure Bouvar
Co-curated by Alper Turan & Anna-Lena Werner
Storing experiences and knowledges, the body is a physical reminder of both visceral vulnerability and more-than-human (collective) resilience. It is being instrumentalized to continue hegemonic narratives, hierarchical systems and violence against groups. For the third iteration of the discursive series "On(going) Trauma" at Vierte Welt Berlin, artists and the audience present are invited to share their strategies, engaging in the entanglements of the body, memory and trauma through their distinctive practices. Methods of dis-embodiment and dis-identification, fictional or ritualized bodies, as well as adaptions of different personas and collectivized selves will be critically discussed as possibilities to reclaim historical and political truths, rights, and narratives.
Register (Participation is free, seats are limited)
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BIOGRAPHIES
Isaac Chong Wai is a Berlin-based artist from Hong Kong, using performance, video, installation, photography, and drawing as mediators to investigate contemporary global phenomena. His work transforms the emotions, tensions, and memories from human interactions into performative materiality and immersive experiences. Treading the line between the individual and the collective, he examines the vulnerability of the body and the inherent violence within social systems and historical traumas and imagines alternative microcosms of human relationality. Isaac Chong Wai is a participating artist in this year’s 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere. Also this year, Chong received the Art Prize of the City of Nordhorn 2024. Chong's recent exhibitions include the Bangkok Art Biennale, Bangkok 2024 and the Biennale Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paolo 2023. His works have been exhibited at prestigious venues including the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, the MMCA in Seoul, IFFR in Rotterdam, MOCA in Taipei, and M+ in Hong Kong.
İz Öztat: In her collective and individual artistic practice spanning diverse media defined by her research, İz Öztat explores the persistence of violent histories through forms, materials, space, and language. She responds to absences in official historiography through spectral, intergenerational, and speculative fictions. İz Öztat fabricates the (auto)biography of Zişan (1894-1970), who appears to her as a historical figure, a ghost, and an alter ego. She takes on Zişan’s archives and interprets them through her practice to construct a complex temporality of action that enables the suppressed past to intervene in the increasingly authoritarian present. Öztat participated in artist residency programs in Amman, Berlin, Dublin, London, Istanbul, Madrid, Mexico City, Oslo, Paris and Yerevan. Öztat is a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Programme (2024-25). Selected exhibitions include Self-determination: A Global Perspective, IMMA, Dublin (2023); The Colony, Schwules Museum, Berlin (2018); Tamawuj, Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); Land without Land, Heidelberger Kunstverein, (2016); Salt Water: A Theory on Thought Forms, 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015).
Jenny Mahla (they/them) is a dramaturg, researcher and facilitator based in Berlin. They collaborate with various dance artists and have a strong focus on intersectionality within arts and academia. Their undergraduate paper about historically grown images of masculinity in ballet has contributed significantly to the world premiere of Iván Pérez’s “The Male Dancer”, a creation for the Paris Opera Ballet at Palais Garnier in 2018. After this successful first collaboration, they worked with Pérez as a dramaturg for Dance Theatre Heidelberg from 2018 to 2021 at Theater und Orchester Heidelberg. Since 2021 they are based in Berlin and are freelancing in dance dramaturgy and writing as well as being a facilitator for various encounter and exchange formats. Currently finishing their master’s degree at FU Berlin in Critical Dance Studies, they are researching and working at the intersection of Queer Theory, Critical Race Studies and Disability Studies. In the winter semester 2023/24, they taught the seminar "Intersectionally Queer: Decolonial Readings of Dance" together with Prof. Dr. Lucia Ruprecht for the master’s program of Critical Dance Studies.
Natis' conceptually-driven painterly practice embodies and instrumentalizes artist personas like Hasan Aksaygın, Hank Yan Agassi, and Hasso Weiss Ehrenwerth, challenges conventional notions of artist identity and interrogates the socio-political constructs that shape them and the reception of their works. Through the adoption of different personas Natis undertakes a deliberate process of de-identification. Each persona serves as a strategic departure from fixed identities imposed by societal norms and historical narratives. With Hasan, Natis explores (post-)memory through the queer-feminist/postcolonial perspectives, and examines the Cyprus dispute and the myths around homosexual "oriental" bodies. A post-human mutation of himself, Hank (pronoun: it, its) occasionally visits our time on Earth, and practices earthly materialities with a perspective that perceives (non-)human. Hasso Weiss Ehrenwerth is a British-German figurative expressionist who, as a historical white male artist, haunts the present.
Alper Turan, born in Turkey, is a curator and writer, currently based in Toronto and Berlin. His ongoing practice and research draw from transnational and transtemporal queer strategies. In response to escalating anti-queer rhetorics in Turkey and beyond, he experiments with undetectable, uncensorable queer aesthetics. Turan was a 2023–24 curatorial fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and was awarded a 2023–24 General Idea fellowship from the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. He is co-founder of STRÜKTÜR, a Berlin-based association dedicated to forming and expanding the support structures for arts & artists from the geography of Turkey. He is a PhD student in Art History at University of Toronto.
Anna-Lena Werner is a Berlin-based researcher and curator. Since 2019 she is member of the staff at the Institute for Theatre Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, seminar for Culture and Media, where she completed her Ph.D. with the study "Let Them Haunt Us. How Contemporary Aesthetics Challenge Trauma as the Unrepresentable.“ She (co-)conducted several inter-institutional research projects i.e. with Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and HKW Berlin and runs the online magazine artfridge.de since 2011. In her current post doc research, she focuses on historical and current artistic deconstructions of the (media) image politics of war and zones of conflict.
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TEAM & GUESTS
With (tbc) With (tbc) Anujah Fernando, Alper Turan, Dominique Haensell, Hai Anh Trieu, Jenny Mahla, Isaac Chong Wai, İz Öztat, Katharina Ludwig, Lada Nakonechna, Lela Ahmadzai, Luce deLire, Mine Pleasure Bouvar, Minh Duc Pham, Mykola Ridnyi, Natis, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Omer Fast, Rabih Mroué, Shira Wachsmann, Yael Bartana, Zwoisy Mears-Clarke
Concept & Curation Anna Lena Werner, Elisa Müller (Institut für Widerstand im Postfordismus)
Co-Curators (tbc) Mykola Ridnyi, Hai Anh Trieu, Alper Turan
Project Assistance Ariadna Blanch López, Sebastian Eis
Awareness Mine Pleasure Bouvar
Design Lea Kontak
Press Nora Gores
Location Vierte Welt, Berlin
Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds
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UPCOMING ENCOUNTERS
each Sat, 15-19.30
26. October
Narrative: Traumatische Zeugenschaft und Fiktionen (DE)
with Shira Wachsmann, Hai Anh Trieu / curated and hosted by Elisa Müller, N.N.
Screenings: Shira Wachsmann „The moment before,“ Hai Anh Trieu „I loved first”
30. November
Schwellen: Private Räume und Öffentliche Diskurse (DE)
14. December
Timeliness: Fragments Between Past and Future (EN)
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PAST ENCOUNTERS
25. May
Central to this first gathering of the discursive series On(going) Trauma (May-Dec 2024) are questions about representational limits and opportunities, image politics and selective framing processes of conveying war violence and traumatic events in mass media. What is at issue here is, on the one hand, the shift away from visual repetitions and reproductions of violence and, on the other hand, the creation of new methods and counter-images, as to communicate evidences of wars and conflicts. How can the atrocious images be made transparent, scrutinized, reframed? How can we learn the practice of looking at these images? Where are potentials for resistance, for visual dissent, for forming an opposition against the affects of shock and propagandistic visions? As part of this round – which has the open format of a colloquium – artists, researchers and all participants present, are invited and encouraged to discuss responses, challenges and new formats as to encounter media representations of war and trauma, the inherent power structures and the violence of images. -> viertewelt.de/programm/images-and-counter-images
With Lada Nakonechna, Lela Ahmadzai, Olexii Kuchanskyi & Omer Fast.
Hosted and curated by Anna-Lena Werner & Mykola Ridnyi
Awareness Mine Pleasure Bouvar
Screenings by Lela Ahmadzai "Silent Night" (2013), Sashko Protyah “My Favourite Job” (2022), Mykola Ridnyi “Regular Places” (2022), Omer Fast
22. June
Backlashes: Erhöhte rechte Alltagspräsenz (DE)
Im Juni entsteht in der gemeinsamen Arbeit mit Hai Anh Trieu ein Austauschformat als Reaktion auf den Anstieg rechter Alltagspräsenz, politischer Macht und Gewalt. Hai Anh Trieu und Elisa Müller laden dazu verschiedene Künstler*innnen und Aktivist*innen ein, um über ihre Wahrnehmung der Situation zu sprechen und mit uns zu teilen, wie das ihre Praxis beeinflußt. Welche Ressourcen stehen oder stehen uns gerade nicht zur Verfügung – in einer Zeit in der überall, auch in der Kunst- und Kulturförderung, die finanziellen Mittel gekürzt werden? Wie kann eine fruchtbare Allyschaft unter den verschiedenen Communities aussehen? Welche Aktionen planen wir und welche Zukunftsängste oder Hoffnungen hegen wir? Was liegt uns am Herzen? Wie können wir uns gegen Instrumentalisierungsbestrebungen zur Wehr setzen und uns gegenseitig beschützen? Wir wollen versuchen, solidarische Verbindungslinien zu ziehen. Dabei verstehen wir den Austausch und das Vernetzen selbst als widerständige Praxis. +
Mit Anujah Fernando, Dominique Haensell, Luce deLire, Pham Minh Duc
Ko-kuratiert von Juni Hai Anh Trieu und Elisa Müller / Awareness Mine Pleasure Bouvar