Lecture Series Artistic Research

Monday, June 22nd, 7-9 pm: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
Invited by Jackie Grassmann and Leonie Huber

The Art World, Art, and Black Study

Due to limited capacity, please register in advance until the day before: macriticalstudies@gmail.com

When we first started using the term 'black study' around fifteen years ago we were trying to make a distinction from black studies, and especially black studies as it has been sometimes unwilling incorporated in the university. By black study we meant to evoke the insurgent practices of the black radical tradition in which intellectual life was to be found inhabiting all the forms of black social life where this study both infused that life and put it on the run, fugitive from those who would contain and containerize it.  With the work of black artists being drawn into the attention and finance economy of the art world, we want to spend this seminar asking: where is black study in art-making today?

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney are the authors of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) and All Incomplete (2020) both from Minor Compositions/Autonomedia.  Fred teaches in Performance Studies at New York University.  Stefano is an Honorary Professor at the University of British Columbia.  They are both Visiting Critics at Yale University's School of Art.

Monday, June 15th, 2-4 pm: Katrin Mayer
Invited by Inga Charlotte Thiele

Please register in advance until the day before: macriticalstudies@gmail.com

For her sit(e)uation-specific work, Katrin Mayer (lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf) often researches in archives and local history in order to reflect and question the historicity of a place in the present. Gender-political or subcultural narratives are called upon and formulated as spatial-material installations in such a way that they work against the fiction of a 'neutral' space that has no intertwining with societal, ideological and time-related aesthetic connotations. Selected paths of her research are reassembled in such a way that specific readings of these places open up and an alternative story becomes visible. This results in materially transitory settings whose modes of presentation are themselves – going beyond their display function – expressions of the knowledge that is negotiated through them.

In her lecture, Katrin Mayer will give insights into her artistic practice and her current research project on female* positions that have worked on spatial-grammatical models and conditions of showing / displaying between art, architecture and design and to emerge their immanent potential for a critical, gender-political perspective.
Her current participation in the exhibition I am not a nice Girl! at Kunstsammlung NRW, K21 in Düsseldorf, curated by Isabelle Malz, will be used as one reference. The exhibition is based on archival material from the Dorothee and Konrad Fischer Archive, esp. correspondences with female conceptual artists and curators like Eleanor Antin, Agnes Denes, Lucy R. Lippard, Lee Lozano, Adrian Piper and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. As structural disposition for the archival materials Mayer has developed a display layer entitled Dotting the Voids – A liminal Pieceness . Furthermore she collaborated on a publication that accompanies the exhibition, which refers to the index cards used by Lucy R. Lippard, esp. in her exhibition c. 7,500, in which she only showed female artists.
Starting from the exhibition and the catalogue, she will ask questions about (feminist) research and display methodologies and how to create own emancipative fields of action between artistic, archival and service work within exhibiting.

Mayer has developed works for the following institutions among others: Kunstsammlung NRW, K21, Düsseldorf (2020), Lenbachhaus Munich (2020), Museum Villa Stuck Munich (2019), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2017), Kunstverein Hamburg (2017), Kunsthalle Lingen (2016), European Kunsthalle @ chambre d´amis Wien (2015), Ludlow38 MINI/Goethe-Institut New York (2014), Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2014), Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2013), Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach (2013), and KUB Arena Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011).

* female is not used in an essentialistic way. I want to point towards the role of feminism in questioning hegemonic masculinity, while at the same time including all other positions whose interventions were or would have been able to interrupt dominant spatial dispositives.

Monday, June 8th, 2-4 pm: Luiza Prado
Invited by Guilherme Maggessi

Dr. Luiza de Prado de O. Martins is a brazilian artist and researcher, currently based in Berlin (DE).

Her work engages with material and visual culture through the lenses of decolonial and queer theories. In her doctoral dissertation, she examined technologies and practices of birth control and their entanglements with colonial hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality, offering the idea of ‘technoecologies of birth control’ as a framework for observing and intervening in biopolitical articulations emerging around practices of birth control.

As the first lecturer in our series, she will talk about one of her latest projects The Councils of the Pluriversal: Affective Temporalities of Reproduction and Climate Change , which consisted of a series of meetings with activists, artists, elders, and thinkers hailing from marginalized groups in Northern nations and the Global South, to discuss the entanglements of climate change, reproduction, ancestral and future histories, land and belonging, and radical forms of care.

Luiza de Prado de O. Martins holds an MA from the Hochschule der Künste in Bremen and a PhD from the Universität der Künste Berlin. In 2019, she was selected as the recipient of the Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research and also, in 2019, the recipient of the first Dieter Rückhaberle Förderpreis, awarded by the Künstlerhof Frohnau.