Category Archives: Exhibition

Event, Exhibition, Project, Research

„BINDING BODIES. Perspectives on Bound Feet“

Starting in 2021, the Tieranatomisches Theater will launch the three-year research and exhibition project “Binding Bodies. Perspectives on Bound Feet” in cooperation with MARKK – Museum am Rothenbaum in Hamburg and the Kunstuniversität Linz.

This is made possible by generous funding from the German Federal Cultural Foundation (project description Binding Bodies), the Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung and the Alfred Töpfer Stiftung.

From 2021 to 2023, an interdisciplinary team will conduct research at the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik / Tieranatomisches Theater, MARKK and the Kunstuniversität Linz in cooperation with other international scientists and artists. The project will conclude with exhibitions that will be shown at MARKK Hamburg (2022) and the Tieranatomisches Theater (2023), among others.

Numerous ethnographic and anatomical collections in Europe contain preparations, casts, X-ray images and photos of so-called “lotus feet”, the bound feet of women in China. The research and exhibition project BINDING BODIES takes these collections as the starting point for research into the discourse history of female body modifications. Already Hans Virchow (1852-1940) and his colleagues draw comparisons to lace dancing, high heels and corsets in their publications. The project attempts an “entangled history” of female body deformations between Europe and China. It examines the complex interactions of self-perceptions and perceptions of others, reconstructs exemplary object biographies and contextualises them against the background of colonial, gender, social and scientific history. Thus, the project is also part of the current controversy about the handling of ethnographic objects and especially human remains in scientific collections.

Curators: Prof. Dr. Jasmin Mersmann (project leader), Dr. Evke Rulffes, Felix Sattler
Project Management Organisation: Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Partners: Museum am Rothenbaum. Cultures and Arts of the World (MARKK), Prof. Dr Barbara Plankensteiner, Dr Susanne Knödel, Gabriel Schimmeroth

X-ray of the lotus foot of a 32-year-old woman, taken through the shoe, 1905 © Charité, Centrum für Anatomie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Photography: Barbara Herrenkind
Event, Exhibition

Digital opening of the Humboldt Labor at the Humboldt Forum

The construction work has been completed and the Humboldt Forum will be offering first glimpses of the building and the future cultural programme from 16.12.2020.
Due to the pandemic, a personal visit to the opening exhibition „After Nature“ in the Humboldt Labor is not yet possible.

First digital insights of the Humboldt Forum are available here:

Recording of the opening event (YouTube)
Insights into the Humboldt Laboratory from the 28th minute.

360 degree tour of the Humboldt Forum (Website Humboldt Forum)

Tour with the Berlin comedian Stefan Danziger (YouTube)

Event, Exhibition

Return to Sender: Utopias and the Limits of Circulating Images

Symposium Live-Stream
via https://www.co-berlin.org/

31.8.-1.9.2020

A joint event organized by C/O Berlin and the research center Das Technische Bild at the Institute of Art and Image History of the Humboldt University/Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Technology to mark the 20th anniversary of both institutions

Concept: Felix Hoffmann/Katja Müller-Helle/Kathrin Schönegg

At the latest since the first picture postcards of the 1880s, picture motifs have been used for the transmission of news, stamped, framed with framing writing and infiltrated into the distribution channels of the postal service. But the greater the promise of personalized picture greetings became, the more sensitive the institutions reacted to their containment. Even during the First World War, field postcards with caricatures, abusive or salacious depictions came under the scrutiny of the Prussian censorship authority in Berlin, which had been established specifically for this purpose. The beginnings of circulating images, their potentials and their limits are to be traced in this symposium up to the social media: Today, digital image circulation creates utopias of participation and dissemination on the part of the user, which are contained by practices of algorithmic image deletion and regulatory mechanisms. Despite image censorship and curated content, the platforms’ rhetoric is based on the myth of net neutrality. Accordingly, the question of the mass divisibility of images is to be examined in a double perspective of potential and regulation, of freedom and censorship in a historical perspective.

With Friedrich Balke, Estelle Blaschke, Matthias Bruhn, Eva Ehninger, Felix Hoffmann, Christian Kassung, Roland Meyer, Katja Müller-Helle, Margarete Pratschke, Simon Rothöler, Kerstin Schankweiler, Kathrin Schönegg, Friedrich Tietjen und Wolfgang Ullrich.

Picture credits:
Berlin, 2006, from the series Photo Opportunities (2005 – present), © Corinne Vionnet