Events:

• Place: Kunsthaus

  Mon, 20. Jun 2016, 18 Uhr

  The Politics of Cultural Location

  The panel will discuss the obscure relationship between a cultural location (specifically Dresden) and a particular political mobilization (right-wing, anti-migrant political movement). It will ask how cultural producers and more specifically artists and art institutions can intervene into this conjuncture, reshuffle the deadlocked meanings,
  and productively challenge the politics of cultural identity.
  Annekatrin Klepsch, is a cultural scientist and politician based in Dresden. Since 2015, she is Dresden’s Deputy Mayor of Culture and Tourism.

  Prof. Dr. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg is a sociologist at the Technical University of Dresden. Since 1997, he is on the board of the research project »Institutionality and Historicity« and from 2000 Head at the European Research Training Group »Institutional Order, writing and
  symbols«. He holds the research position for sociological theory, history of theory and culture sociology at the Technical University of Dresden.

  Michal Tomaszewski is a musician and cultural activist based in Dresden. In 2011, he was co-founder of the brass formation Banda Communale, which since 2015 has expanded to become »Banda Internationale«. He was an active part of the cultural activist Movement »Neujahrsputz« against Pegida.
  Nabil Yacoub is a journalist and human rights activist based in Dresden
  since 1959 and founding member of Ausländerrat e.V. in 1990.

• Lecture, Talk

  Place: Kunsthaus

  Tue, 21. Jun 2016, 18 Uhr

  How to return to retro/ neo/avant/garde today?

  With Dr. Gal Kirn, philosopher and research fellow at Humboldt University, Berlin and Dr. Boris Buden, cultural theorist, Berlin

  The lecture shall address the legacy/logic of the avant-garde: in what way can we still (have to?) return to it, and what do other returns, neo-avantgarde and retro-avantgarde, tell us about subsequent constellation and the role of art? The lecture shall tackle three major operations – identification, dis-identification and over-identification – immanent to the ›garde‹ and show their potential use today. If avant-garde arguably hoped to sustain an open space for encountering
  between art-theory-politics in the age of possibility of the radical new world, what happened to this ›promise‹ today in the age where it seems that the ›avant-garde‹ baton of organising the change as movement – European-wide – was either taken by non-representational Occupy, or by the ›post-fascist‹ forces (Pegida and AfD in Germany, but also its ›equivalents‹ elsewhere)?
  Dr. Gal Kirn is a philosopher and currently research fellow at Humboldt University, Berlin. He was a fellow of ICI, Berlin and researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, where he organized a series of international conferences on Yugoslavia, self-management urbanism, Yugoslavian Black Wave Cinema and Althusser. Kirn’s most recent book is ›Partisan Ruptures and Market Socialism in Yugoslavia‹
  (Sophija, 2014). In his hometown Ljubljana he participates in the Workers’-Punks’ University.

• Lecture, Talk

  Place: Kunsthaus

  Wed, 22. Jun 2016, 18 Uhr

  ›Intervention / Doing / Practise‹ — The performative in the political

  The presentation will strive through different ways of conceiving the performative in the political, focusing on both interventionist art as well as an aesthetic perspective on contemporary social movements on
  the other side, while using examples of Tsomou’s artistic research and practices.
  Margarita Tsomou is a Greek publisher, cultural worker and curator based in Berlin. Currently she is finishing her book on Representation of the Many, in the context of the Greek Indignados movement
  Syntagma Square Occupation in 2011 in Athens, focusing on the performative in the political. She is the publisher of the pop-feminist magazine Missy-Magazine and writes for German newspapers and
  radio (f.ex., Die Zeit, taz, WDR, SWR). Her artistic collaborations and curatorial projects have been shown at theatres such as Volksbühne Berlin, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Kampnagel Hamburg, Onassis
  Cultural Center Athens, Goethe-Institut Athens etc. Her focuses are queer-feminism, political performance as well as theory of democracy and the transformation of the Greek society during the debt crisis.

• Lecture, Talk

  Place: Kunsthaus

  Thu, 23. Jun 2016, 18 Uhr

  BEING IDIOT – Idiocy as political agency

  ›Idiotai‹ were private citizens of ancient Athens who did not partake in the political process. Idiocy referred to social dysfunction. Curiously, Socrates, in his court defense propagates that a true political life is lived privately: Withdraw strategically and become an idiot in order to gather supporters and influence the agora. Plato’s academia, that is: we, artists & intellectuals, represent the working result.
  While today, right wing populists frequently have been called
  idiots, because their claims are either contradictory,  meaningless or tautological, yet, presented as ›firm‹ political statements, Zoran Terzić points out that there is a broader issue at stake that indirectly reflects this ancient problem of political engagement. He argues that there is a general idiotic tendency, which makes it more and more difficult to  distinguish between political and non-political positions. This gives rise to the difficulty to exactly pinpointing the neo- or post-fascist ideologies of today. This ›idiotic paradigm‹ (Matthew Poole) has nothing to do with stupidity but is rather a symptom of the inner contradictions of neoliberalism and the ›ritual of capital‹ (Jacques Camatte) that encompasses all forms of contemporary expression.
  Dr. phil. Zoran Terzić , studied Fine Arts in New York with Jessica Stockholder and Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt and later acquired his PhD from Bazon Brock at the Institute for non-normative aesthetics in Wuppertal. He has written on cultural extremism, identity, political intervention, steadily orbiting the politics-aesthetics cosmos. His book
  Art of Nationalism (Berlin 2007) deals with the cultural semiotics of war. Zoran Terzić taught for several years and participated in numerous international art festivals, conferences and research initiatives. He is touring as a founding member of the Daughters & Sons of
  Gastarbeiters project with autobiographical essays and he has made a short film as part of the project. Zoran Terzić is involved with the initiative (Post) fascist idyll that launched a conceptual installation recently at the Volksbühne Berlin. He lives in Berlin.

• Performance, Guided Tour

  Place: Treffpunkt am Kunsthaus
  Dresden

  Fri, 24. Jun 2016, 16 Uhr

  WALK OF ART - public presentation of artworks in the inner city of Dresden

  On June 24th and 25th, 2016, the resulting interventions,
  performances, and installations by the students, under the
  title TOMORROW WE WILL EXPLAIN, can be discovered on
  a group walk through Dresden’s inner city. The WALK OF ART
  invites you to explore Dresden together with the artists and gain new perspectives on well-known scenarios.
  On Friday June 24th, after the walk, everyone is invited to
  Kunsthaus Dresden for drinks and music.

• Place: Treffpunkt am Kunsthaus Dresden, dann Rundgang durch die Stadt

  Sat, 25. Jun 2016, 16 Uhr

  WALK OF ART - public presentation of artworks in the inner city of Dresden

  On June 24th and 25th, 2016, the resulting interventions,
  performances, and installations by the students, under the
  title TOMORROW WE WILL EXPLAIN, can be discovered on
  a group walk through Dresden’s inner city. The WALK OF ART
  invites you to explore Dresden together with the artists and gain new perspectives on well-known scenarios.
  On Friday June 24th, after the walk, everyone is invited to
  Kunsthaus Dresden for drinks and music.