Lexichaos From Understanding Misunderstanding to Misunderstanding the Understandable
Voices and alphabetic characters, wall panels, towers, and bells: over the course of ten days, Lexichaos takes over the Pierre Boulez Saal—this is the title of an expansive sound installation by American artist Stephan von Huene (1932–2000). The confusion of languages—god’s measure to scatter the peoples in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel—was written into von Huene’s biography, who was raised in California, the son of German parents, and lived in Hamburg from 1980 to his death. His installation, originally created in 1990 and today housed in the Helmholtz Center of Cultural Techniques at Berlin’s Humboldt University, reveals a very current issue: the verbal communication between people of different national and cultural backgrounds. Von Huene’s work treats language not only in terms of its symbols and sounds—it is also open to a metaphorical interpretation. In the artist’s own words: “Between languages, there is not only the meaning of words, the translation, there are entire worldviews.”
25 March – 6 April 2021 Barenboim-Said-Akademie, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33D, 10117 Berlin Event-Website
Digital launch of the book-as-exhibition zwischen körpern
On 19.03.2021 the Kleine Humboldt Galerie celebrates the launch and vernissage of zwischen körpern, the book-as-exhibition!
Via a livestream, visitors can immerse themselves in video works from 2 pm onwards, take part in guided tours by curators and graphic designers of the exhibition and publication, join a conversation with the Berliner K. Verlag, and much more.
Program 15.00 h / Q&A with the K. publishing house 16.00 h / Guided tours by curators 16.45 h / Video stream of Carolina Caycedo 17.15 h / Video stream by Marco Buetikofer and Lotte Meret 17.30 h / Video stream by Kirstin Burckhardt 18.00 h / Video stream of Theresa Schubert 18.30 h / Cocktails 🍸 19.00 h / Pub Quiz 20.30 h / Sin Maldita A/V Performance
Exhibition zwischen körpern An exhibition in the format of a book – from March 19, 2021 to April 30, 2021.
zwischen körpern negotiates the physical body as the starting and ending point into which society inscribes itself. Various mechanisms of control are examined, which affect diverse bodies in very different ways. The focus is on the impact and experienceability of control on and of the body: bodies are consciously or unconsciously modeled and also controlled by historical and social circumstances. The body is understood as a venue for political struggles, which is why emancipation strategies and self-empowerment processes take on a central role. To what extent are the carnal and new technologies interwoven and what role do intimacy and social constraints play? Eleven contemporary positions investigate these complex dynamics by means of sculpture, spatial installation, video, photography, and performance. As with the selection of artworks, corporeality is reflected and critically questioned from a decolonial and intersectional-feminist perspective.
Publication zwischen körpern / among bodies
How our bodies see, are seen, and behave with and among other bodies, is inevitably political. To move the body is also always to insist on meaning — just as meaning is always in movement.
The book-as-exhibition presents ten contemporary art positions that each explore the complex and intimate dynamics that expose our bodies to new technologies, social pressures, and desires for liberation. As curatorial experiment within the micro-architecture of the book, the project initiates singular relays from sculpture, installation, video, photography, and performance to paper that enable parallel engagements with decolonial and intersectional feminist perspectives.
Book concept by Kleine Humboldt Galerie Curatorial-editorial team: Franziska Dommers, Lotta Feibicke, Nikolas Geier, Eileen Kesseler, Patricia Kühn, Anna Latzko, Monique Machicao y Priemer Ferrufino, Sarah Marcinkowski, Katharina Ripea, Evelyn Sutter, Nicole Wittmann, and Yuanwen Zhong. With artworks by Kirstin Burckhardt, Marco Buetikofer, Carolina Caycedo, Stine Deja, Lotte Meret Effinger, Ester Fleckner, Yngve Holen, Luisa Krautien, Michael Liani, Theresa Schubert, and Zuzana Svatik; additional texts by Michaela Dudley, Felix Sattler, and others; and a glossary of terms by the curators. Design: K. Verlag with Ginny Rose Davis and Megan Ricca
German & English Wendebuch / turning book 196 pages 20 x 29.7 cm Black/white with purple Pantone spot color & full-color image section Softcover, Swiss binding ISBN 978-3-947858-22-4 https://k-verlag.org/books/zwischen-korpern-among-bodies
An exhibition is always a polyphony of things, works and media. At least as important as these are the diverse relationships they can enter into with each other. The digital dependency of the Humboldt Labor will repeatedly present new relationships of this kind. To begin with, however, the exhibition will be completed interactively in the form of a point-and-click adventure. Those who succeed in getting the exhibits to the right location can expect an unusual and exciting virtual tour of the Humboldt Labor.
The next colloquium of the HZK will take place on April 12, 2021 at 4 pm and all interested parties are cordially invited! The event will be held digitally and in English. Access data for the videoconference can be obtained on request by e-mail from oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de.
Sonja Breiding will present on her research in the field of “Natural History Investigation Methods in Cultural Heritage Research”.
Many different disciplines are involved in dealing with our cultural heritage. Each of them works on its own subfield. However, if a preservationist, an art historian and a physicist exchange ideas about terms such as ‘image’ or ‘materiality’ for the first time, ambiguities may arise. The words are used differently in the disciplines and have a different meaning. How does this happen? Where does one’s own field of research begin in an interdisciplinary collaboration? What distinguishes art-technological from natural-scientific investigations? Is an investigation scientific, even if it is conducted by non-scientists? These and other questions are posed by the different disciplines in practice, interacting together with different methods, ideas and competences. The dissertation “On the Genesis of Image Archaeometry – Natural Science Investigations and Imaging Techniques in the Arts Sciences” seeks to define the position of the field of natural science analytics in cultural heritage research. The lecture deals with the influence of natural scientific investigation methods on cultural heritage research.
The next colloquium of the HZK will take place on 08. February 2021 at 2 pm and all interested parties are cordially invited! The event will be held digitally and in English. Access data for the videoconference can be obtained on request by e-mail from oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de.
The lecture will be given by Alia Mossallam. She is a visiting scholar at the Lautarchiv as EUME fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
“They call it a ‘World War’, but it is actually their own…”
From the battle fronts of WWI to the revolutionary fronts of North African colonies. Tracing a cartography of struggle through a trail of songs.
Records of the Egyptian peasants who were taken to WWI as part of the British Military Labor corps, are as fragmented and dispersed as what is known of their experiences at war. Ranging from tens to hundreds of thousand of workers were posted in Egypt, Palestine, Greater Syria and as far as the fronts in France, leaving behind them a trail of archives that is as diverse in genre as it is in voice. In this presentation I try to trace their ‘voices’ – I trace the growth of discontent among the workers through songs, jokes, and stories that appear through military reports, village memoirs, informant records, LP discs and popular Upper Egyptian memory. The ‘trail of voices’ and one particular recurrent song, appear in the locations of different posts creating an alternative cartography of the war based on the experiences of these workers. This cartographic trail challenges imperial war cartography in documenting the workers’ association and political interaction with their North African counterparts – subalterns in the French Military – to discuss homeward longings, strikes and forms of resistance to military superiors. In tracing these voices, I reveal the experiences of war, and the political consciousness and strategy that resulted in a pivotal but little known revolt culminating in the summer of 1918 in Egypt. Methodologically, I ask, how do subaltern voices travel through time, space, technology and archive, and how can they be understood 100 years later? What of the biography of the 1918 uprising, can be traced through these cross-cutting geographies of struggle? How could the interaction between subalterns on the front in France, in prisoner of war camps in Germany, have contributed to the uprisings of 1917-1918 in Egypt, Algeria, Upper Volta and other colonies towards the end of the war? What new legacy do these forms of peasant entitlement, resistance and uprising create for the revolutionary years of 1917-1918?
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
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:
The next colloquium of the HZK will take place on 14 December 2020 at 2 pm and all interested parties are cordially invited! The event will be held digitally. Access data for the videoconference can be obtained on request by e-mail from oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de.
In her lecture, Katrin Glinka will present a working status from her dissertation “Structures of Similarity – Representation and Reference in Digital Collections”. Her work follows the hypothesis that a mere change of media (from analog systems for collection exploration and representation to software) does not lead to a transformation of the cultural technique of collecting. Katrin Glinka illustrates this with an analysis of the structures and processes of analog and digital collection techniques and their effects on the prevailing understanding of objects in museums and the forms of representation associated with them. Katrin Glinka – Culture & Digitisation
Challenging times call for new formats: The Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« cordially invites you to its first virtual Annual Conference »The Analog in the Digital Age«.
Please join us on November 11th 2020 from 9:30 AM CET onwards in discovering a variety of individually accessible virtual knowledge rooms in surprising designs and a 360° environment. Lectures from the natural sciences, the humanities and design disciplines will be presented in video format and supplemented by digital meeting opportunities in the form of live Q&As and wrap-ups.
The conference takes up the Cluster’s central vision to rediscover the analog within activities of images, spaces and materials in the age of the digital. Biology and technology, mind and material, nature and culture intertwine in a new way. »Matters of Activity« aims to create a basis for a new culture of materials: In six projects, more than 40 disciplines systematically investigate design strategies for active materials and structures that adapt to specific requirements and environments. Inspired by nature and traditional cultural techniques, objects and materials are rethought as active, changeable and recyclable building materials.
We are very much looking forward to experiencing and trying out this new format together!
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schäffner Prof. Dr. Horst Bredekamp Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Peter Fratzl Prof. Dr. Claudia Mareis
»The Analog in the Digital Age« MoA Annual Conference, 11 November 2020 (From Top to Button, Left to Right): Bacterial Curtain. Copyright: Bastian Beyer and Iva Rešetar; Visualization of the cellular network inside a compact bone. Copyright: Andreas Roschger & Richard Weinkamer, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces; Medallion commemorating Lorenzo de’ Medici: Felt hat and two daggers, after 1537. Copyright: Arthor’s Archive; E. Coli Colony Biofilm. Copyright: Michelle Mantel for »Matters of Activity«; Crochet Model of a Hyperbolic Planes. Copyright: Regine Hengge; Wax Mulages, Copyright: Michelle Mantel for »Matters of Activity«
The next colloquium of the HZK will take place on 30 November 2020 at 2 pm and all interested parties are cordially invited! The event will be held digitally. Access data for the videoconference can be obtained on request by e-mail from oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de.