The Politics of Forms and Forces
Lecture organized by the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies, studyprogram Phd-in-Practice. Welcome adress: Renate Lorenz, subsequently round table with Marina Grzinic. The lecture will be held in English.
Power relations lay at the core of normative representations. In the tuning in with the forces of a life event, one can say that form is attained only to address the formless. Reality in its social and historical dimension is not a material for artistic reflection or political commitment; it is what powerfully draws one to cinema and yet cannot be captured without dissolving itself in its fragile essence when one approaches it without subtlety and vulnerability.
Trinh T. Minh-ha is an independent filmmaker, writer, composer and feminist, post-colonial theorist. Her work, which includes numerous books, films and art installations, has received world-wide acclaim and prestigious awards. Before joining the University of California (Berkeley) as Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and of Rhetoric (Film), she taught at universities in Dakar, Tokyo and the US such as Cornell and Harvard. Her most recent book is Elsewhere, Within Here. Immigration, Refugeeism and The Boundary Event (2010) and a classic book of hers, Woman, Native, Other has just been published in German translation "Postkolonialität und Feminismus schreiben" (Turia + Kant, 2010).