Category Archives: Event

Discussion, News

Gesa Grimme and Sarah Elena Link discuss “Afterlives of Empire”

Gesa Grimme and Sarah Elena Link, both Coordination Centre for Scientific University Collections in Germany (HZK), discuss academic collections in general and their sometimes problematic, imperial contexts of origin. The panel discussion with art historian Jo Vickery (Princeton/Berlin) and literary scholar Birgit Neumann (Düsseldorf) will take place within the framework of the research project “Afterlives of Empire – Encounters of Art and Academia”, initiated by Gesa Stedman (HU).

Art students from Oxford and Berlin habe been invited to work at Lichthof Ost, turning the room into a temporary studio, before transforming it back into an exhibition space. The students show how their interaction with several scientific collections at HU as well as with Berlin museums, among them the sound archive, the geographical collections, and the Winckelmann collection, have led to a new understanding of some of the colonial legacies at HU and in Berlin.

The panel discussion will take place on 10 September at 6:30 pm in the Lichthof Ost of the HU main building.

News, Workshop

Anthropologies of Technique / Techniques of Anthropology: Final student workshops

Ethnographers have to evolve their methods while investigating other people’s artful practices. How to make sense of other ways of making?

Contemporary multimodal ethnographic approaches are deeply rooted in fieldwork interactions with other knowing and making communities. Describing and theorizing making practices contributes to triggering new interests in material cultures. It also branches out to further studies on embodiment and on the techniques of the self. Telling better stories of making means sharpening our techniques for storytelling, experimenting with new media, and probing other ways of entering into collaboration with epistemic partners.

During the summer semester of 2023, we engaged in four collective fieldworks around technical activities: pottery, boomerang making, 3D sketching, and Iyengar yoga. We experimented with various ways to share the ethnographic experiences of “making” practices into text, drawings, workshops, and virtual installations. Students have also actively explored one technique of their choice during the course and documented their practice with a fieldwork notebook, using various techniques such as writing, sketching, 360° captures, etc.

Together on 14.07.2023, we will share our findings with the public in workshop formats, during which students will share their insights, their journals, and their newly acquired practices.

This seminar was taught by Prof. Sharon Macdonald and Dr. Maxime Le Calvé at the Helmholz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik, part of the curriculum of the Master programme “Ethnography” at the Institute für Europeäische Ethnographie (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin).

AnthroTech2023
Event, Performance

EXTENDED HOURS

EXTENDED HOURS – A performance series in three acts.

Kleine Humboldt Galerie invites three young female artists from Berlin to show their performances in the historic buildings of the Albrecht Daniel Thaer Institute and the Tieranatomisches Theater on Friday evenings during June and July 2023.

As a series, Extended Hours brings together three independent performances by the artists Lottie Sebes, Selin Davasse, and Elena Francalanci. After hours, the abandoned university buildings develop into sites for new, alternative knowledge practices. In the void, possibilities emerge: Embodied, narrative and sound-based expressions respond to the buildings in multi-sensory and exploratory ways. The artists make audible the histories embedded in the sites and invite both technical and animal voices to speak. Their interventions open up feminist narratives and explore the dimensions of silence.

Time becomes an individual sensation rather than a standardized unit, while the shared experience creates collectivity. Extended Hours provides a framework in which these potentials can reverberate and visitors can linger.

Further information and program: KHG – EXTENDED HOURS

KHG - Extended Hours
KHG – Extended Hours – Graphic © Ida Kauter
Discussion, Event

Curating as a cultural technique

Daniel Tyradellis, Vice Director of the Helmholtz Zentrum, will discuss in a panel discussion with cultural practitioners in Gera on 16 June 2023, starting at 6 pm: What can culture contribute to the cohesion of society today? What is the role of curating as a transdisciplinary cultural technique in a knowledge society?

Friday, 16.06.2023, 6.00 p.m.
Altes Wannenbad
Event space of the Kulturhaus Häselburg Gera

Concert, Event, Lecture

Keynote address of the Potsdam Sanssouci Music Festival

Daniel Tyradellis, Vice Director of the Helmholtz Zentrum, will open the Potsdam Sanssouci Music Festival 2023 on 9.6.2023 with a ceremonial keynote address: “In Friendship. Of family ties, fraternal strife and elective affinities in music”.
At the same time, a podcast on Spotify of a conversation between Tyradellis and Intendant Dorothee Oberlinger on the topic will be released.

For further information, please visit the website of the Music Festival Potsdam Sanssouci.

Photo: Accademia Bizantina, Ottavio Dantone © Giulia Papetti

Conference, Event

IASA Annual Conference 2023

This year’s IASA Annual Conference will be organised by the IASA Country Group Germany/Switzerland e.V. in cooperation with the Lautarchiv of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Berlin Phonogram Archive, Department of Music Ethnology of the Ethnological Museum.
It will be held at the Humboldt Forum on November 10-11, 2023.

Thematic focus of the IASA Annual Meeting 2023: 100 years of radio and 70 years of television in Germany.

Call for papers until June 30, 2023 by email to sekretariat@iasa-online.de

Further information can be found on the IASA website.

Event, Exhibition

Theatrum Radix – Virtual natural order between art and science by Marlene Bart

Tieranatomisches Theater
Opening May 5, 6 p.m.
Exhibition duration: May, 6 – 27, 2023
The virtual reality animation can be experienced via VR headsets every Tuesday to Saturday between 4 – 6 p.m. for the duration of the exhibition.

Is there a natural “order of things?“ To answer this question, humans have created a wide variety of visual systems that promise orientation and security. The virtual reality installation Theatrum Radix conceived by artist Marlene Bart encourages the critical examination of this security in the context of the limits of visual and spatial perception.

Bart transforms the auditorium of the historic Veterinary Anatomy Theatre into a walk-in encyclopaedia, in which glass and plastic objects created by the artist, natural history collection items and their virtual equivalents coexist and form new combinations.

The historical objects on display and their digital copies, which are scans from the CT laboratory of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Mediasphere For Nature, form an essential point of reference. They are narratively expanded and artistically linked by the virtual reality animation.
The installation allows the visitors to immerse themselves in a new, surreal world and order of nature.

Project website

TAT_MB_Theatrum_Radix_Flyer

A cooperation of Tieranatomisches Theater and Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
Artistic director: Marlene Bart
Curator: Felix Sattler (Tieranatomisches Theater) Co-curator: Katharina Otto (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)
Project management: Antonia Willisch (Tieranatomisches Theater)
Partner: Ikonospace (Founder Joris Demnard and 3D designer Manuel Farre), Daniel Benyamin (composer), INVR.SPACE GmbH, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Mediasphere For Nature

Event, Exhibition

unBinding Bodies. Lotus Shoes and Corset

Exhibition
March 24 – August 31, 2023
Opening March 23, 6 – 10 p.m.

Tieranatomisches Theater
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Campus Nord, Haus 3
Philippstr. 13
10115 Berlin

For a thousand years, Chinese girls had their feet bound to keep them as small as possible. Europeans looked at this ideal of beauty with a mixture of fascination and astonishment. In the 19th century, doctors also became interested in the so-called “lotus feet“. Many such specimens can still be found in scientific collections today.

The exhibition shows these sensitive things against the background of social, colonial and medical history. It examines foot-binding as a situated practice that not only restricted women but also had an identity-forming effect. One focus is on the interplay of self-perceptions and foreign perceptions and the intertwining of Chinese and European emancipation movements: Parallel to the initiatives for “foot liberation”, women in Europe fought against the corset. The exhibition gives women a voice.

Further information about the exhibition can be found on the TAT website.

Event, Lecture, Workshop

WARP – Werkstatt für kulturelle Ausdrucksweisen und Recherche in der Praxis

WARP – Werkstatt für kulturelle Ausdrucksweisen und Recherche in der Praxis – addresses the relations and linkages of knowledge in research on material culture, curation, technology, and art through lectures and workshops.

When: Wednesdays 4.00 – 5.30 p.m. (CET)
Where: Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik, Campus North – House 3, Philippstr. 13, 10115 Berlin and digital on
Zoom: https://hu-berlin.zoom.us/j/64719208170

WARP

SoSe 2023 Programme

26. April: 2 p.m. TAT DAOULA I sheen Exhibition tour with one of the co-curators, Laurence Douny (HU Berlin), and a talk at 4 p.m. by Patricia Alvarez Astacio (Brandeis University) – ‘Weaving Alpaca Wool, Ethics and Indigeneity in Ethical Fashions’ (in person only)

03. May: Yoonha Kim (HU Berlin) – ‘Wearing Sallim’

10. May: Lebogang Mokwena (University of the Western Cape) – ‘Material Identities: Shweshwe, Empire, and Africanity after Apartheid’ (online only)

17. May: Eliza Proszczuk (Academy of Fine Arts Warsaw) – ‘Girls from the Castle’

24. May: Annapurna Mamidipudi (TU Berlin and MPIWG Berlin) – ‘Talking Craft, Doing Science: Epistemologies of Color in India’

31. May: Gabriel Schimmeroth (MARKK Hamburg) – ‘Zwischenraum – A Space Between – Retrospect, Pandemic, Prospect (2019-2023) – Curating Repositioning and Rethinking Space at the MARKK’

07. June: Emma Tarlo (Goldsmiths) – ‚Hairy Entanglements: Writing, Exhibiting, and Crafting with Human Hair’

14. June: Lucy Norris (Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin) – ‘Regenerative Fibre Cultures: Fashioning New Threads of Connection’

21. June: Zuzanna Hertzberg (artist, Poland) – ‘Jewish Women Fighters – Herstories of Resistance as Message and Strategy for Today’

28. June: Tiara Roxanne (artist, postdoctoral fellow, Data and Society, NYC) – ‘The Grammar of Gathering’

05. July: Catalina Ortiz (UCL) – ‘Living Archive: Weaving Gender (Hi)Stories of Urban Reclamation in Moravia, Medellin’

12. July: Adela Taleb (HU Berlin) – ‘Weaving Worlds: The Power of Tales. Decolonial Potentials of Storytelling’ Kwame Aidoo (artist, Ghana) – ‘Intersection of Weaving and Storytelling: A Marginalized Community Pushes the Margins with Kpaluhi’

WARP

WARP – Werkstatt für kulturelle Ausdrucksweisen und Recherche in der Praxis is organized and coordinated by Magda Buchczyk und Dominik Biewer.

More Information
Prof. Dr. Magdalena Buchczyk (she/her)
Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology with a focus on cultural expressions
Institute for European Ethnology
Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH)
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
magdalena.buchczyk@hu-berlin.de

Flyer
WARP – Flyer (PDF)

Colloquium, Event, News

HZK-CARMAH Colloquium – The Phyletic Museum

What time: 06 February 2023, 2 p.m. right on time.
Where: The event will take place at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik (Haus 3, Gerlachbau next to the Tieranatomische Theater, Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13) and virtually (access data for the video conference will be provided on request by email to oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de).

The Phyletic Museum in Jena was founded in 1907 by Ernst Haeckel, who made Charles Darwin’s theories known in Germany. The main theme of the museum is accordingly evolution. In the museum, living and dead animals are related to people of the past and present. The film project accompanies the work of the museum educator and shows her practices in dealing with objects, her interpretation of the (biological) world and the communication of biological knowledge to the public and the student body. The focus is on the history and use of the teaching collection of the Institute of Special Zoology at the University of Jena, which the museum houses – and the small and large irritations that its objects trigger in viewers.

Wolfram Höhne is an author and filmmaker. He works at the interface of art and cultural heritage research. He is currently the academic coordinator of the research training group “Identity and Heritage” at the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Technical University Berlin.

Larissa Förster is a cultural anthropologist working on the (colonial) history of museum and university collections, provenance and restitution research, and questions of postcolonial memory culture. She is an associate member of CARMAH. Together with the historian Holger Stoecker, she wrote the book “Haut, Haar und Knochen. Koloniale Spuren in naturkundlichen Sammlungen der Universität Jena” [engl. transl. “Skin, hair and bones. Colonial Traces in Natural History Collections at the University of Jena”] (2016).

Michael Markert is a historian of science and works on natural science teaching collections and their objects – zoological wall charts, anatomical models, physical apparatus – as well as related topics such as collection ethics and digitisation. He is currently a project manager developing workflows for enriching museum metadata at the Thuringian University and State Library.

The film and lecture are in German.