“Burnout Feminism? (Post)Feminism and Embodied Capitalism” Curated by Claudia Reiche In cooperation with and supported by the Gesellschaft zur Förderung von Medienkunst e.V.
May 28, 2016, 10:30 a.m. – May 28, 2016, 7:30 p.m.
Program
10:30 Helene von Oldenburg
Greeting for the Society for the Promotion of Media Art e.V.
Bio Helene von Oldenburg
Dr. agr. and Diploma in Fine Arts from the HfbK Hamburg; works as an artist and curator. Her works – installations, performances, lectures, etc. – focus on border areas between art, science and media.
www.helene-oldenburg.de
10:45 Claudia Reiche
Introduction to the symposium: Burnout Feminism? (Post)Feminism and verk örpered capitalism
Concentration disorders and reduced performance of once motivated but permanently overworked employees coined the term burnout syndrome. Since the acceleration of society, burnout has become a metaphor for frenzied standstill and exhaustion. One might ask: is the same currently true of feminism?
The test comparison with a state of exhaustion and illusion gains relevance when external opposition to feminism corresponds to an internal critique that asks in particular whether Western (post-)feminism has gone astray by allowing itself to be implemented in the wrong way, namely neoliberally?
Instead of falling into a depressive fantasy of self-criticism from the feminist side, it is important to ask questions and articulate the paradoxes of the female situation. In contrast to equality politics and feminism, there is room for analyzing feminist and capitalist conditions in order to experiment with concepts from art and media theories.
Bio Claudia Reiche
Claudia Reiche is an artist and media scientist. She researches and teaches about media and their epistemological, aesthetic and political effects and is involved in several female and queer projects that trace the boundaries between art and science, in particular thealit Frauen.Kultur.Labor, Bremen. One of her books emerged from a dissertation at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne: Digitale Körper, geschlechtlicher Raum, Das medizinisch Imaginäre des “Visible Human Project”, Bielefeld, 2011..She is currently working on a project about Hijras in South India, based on a study visit to the Goethe Institute Bangalore in 2014.
11:15 Edit Molnár
Women at Work – Seduced Feminism
(in English language)
The talk that borrowed its title from Hester Eisenstein, is an introduction to the international group exhibition Women at Work, which aims to contribute to discussions surrounding the relationship between feminist ideas and the current situation of women in the workforce in an era of globalized economics and rapidly changing societies. Through a reading of the works by Olga Chernysheva, Im Heung-Soon, Wendelien van Oldenborgh and Anette Rose, it would ruminate on important questions of women’s emancipation, collaboration, solidarity, and equality during times of “seduced” and commercialized feminisms.
Bio Edit Molnár
Edit Molnár is the co-director of the Edith-Russ-Haus. She earned an MA in Art History in 1998 and an MA in Aesthetics and Theory of Art in 2005 from Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest. In 2002 she participated in De Appel curatorial training program in Amsterdam. From 1999-2004 she was the director of the non-for-profit Studio Gallery Budapest.she worked as a curator of the Műcsarnok/Kunsthalle, Budapest from 2005 to 2007. she had been the director of the Cairo based independent non for profit art institution, the Contemporary Image Collective between 2007-2009.
12:00 Angela Koch
Occupational de|formation: gender relations and sexual work
Orders of desire have long since been transformed into orders of production and the market, even if romantic relationships of desire, voyeuristic constellations of the gaze or heteronormative gender constellations still characterize the connection between sexuality and work in commercial feature films. The film Top Girl oder la déformation professionnelle (D 2014) paints a different picture of sexual work: work that is both a commodity and a relationship of production in that it produces both sex and desire as well as gender relations. Sex work in the film is also a successful adaptation to the deregulated market and its release of labor. As affective labor, it supports and reproduces social relations. The book Top Girls by Angela McRobbie (2010/2008) is also a critical reflection on post-feminist gender and labor relations. In my lecture, I will relate the statements of the film and the book to each other and expand the concept of sexual labor.
Bio Angela Koch
Angela Koch is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Art and Design Linz. Head of the Master’s program in Media Culture and Art Theories (MKKT).
Habilitation: Ir/reversible images. On the visualization and medialization of sexual violence, Berlin 2015: Vorwerk 8.
Research assistant at the University of Art and Design Linz, the Ruhr University Bochum, the University of Dortmund and head of a DFG research project.
Doctorate in Cultural Studies at Humboldt University Berlin: DruckBilder, Cologne 2002: Böhlau.
Main areas of research: the politics of media, gender studies, sexual violence, memory culture, media|labor, postcolonial theory and alterity/racism.
blog.mkkt.ufg.ac.at/angelakoch
14:00 Tanja Ostojić:
On “Naked Life” and my artistic strategies of reinventing feminism today
Who’s feminism? Do we talk of feminist activists from Bolivia who engage locally against rape of children, and pregnancies of 9 and 13 year-olds, or do we talk of Pakistani and Indian activists who engage against children marriages in their region and are rescuing girls and are sending them back to school? Or do we talk about equal rights movement in Belgrade where Roma Women, queer women, anarchist women, anti-war activists and feminists of all genders engage together against human rights atrocities, for minority rights, for Roma Rights, for working Women Rights and against discrimination… ? Or do we talk about women politicians who showed how neoliberal and severe they could be, like Margaret Thatcher or Hillary Clinton, arranging capitalist wars and trying to get voters on the “feminist card”…?
With the “Naked Life” project 2004-2016 I practice feminist solidarity with Roma, Sinti and Travellers Europe wide. I research and make public how severe and how deeply routed is the 700 years long historical and contemporary racism and anticiganism against the biggest minority in Europe. Expressions of profound solidarity come along with colonial wounds, strong feelings of sorrow, processes of initiation and healing.
Organic Tanja Ostojić
Tanja Ostojić (*1972 Yugoslavia) is a Berlin based independent performance and interdisciplinary artist and cultural activist. She includes herself as a character in performances and uses diverse media in her artistic researches, thereby examining social configurations and relations of power. She works predominantly from the migrant woman ‘s perspective, while political positioning and integration of the recipient define approaches in her work. Since 1994 she presented her work in numerous exhibitions, festivals and venues around the world. Her work is part of important museum collections. She has given talks, lectures, seminars and workshops at academic conferences and at art universities around Europe and in the Americas.
15:00 Rahel Puffert
“Among women. Art and pedagogy without soil.”
Women at work. I’ll start with a job description. The title of my article already alludes to this: Women are in the majority at the university’s ‘Institute for Art and Visual Culture’. Parallel to the academic study of gender theory and feminism, intergenerational observations about roles and self-perceptions take place here. This sideshow forms the starting point for looking at art education and its relationship to the feminist project from a genealogical perspective. Can feminism currently be described as “homeless” (Frigga Haug) or what place, what function could be ascribed to it today? Because generalizations are difficult to make, a self-critical relationship to one’s own work ethic could perhaps be a start. Guaranteed without wellness.
Organic Rahel Puffert
Dr. Rahel Puffert, Hamburg, is currently a substitute professor at the Institute for Art and Visual Culture (Art – Mediation – Education) at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. Since 2013, she has been part of the artistic direction of the “Werkhaus Münzviertel. Modellprojekt zur Verschränkung von Pädagogik, Kunst & Quartiersarbeit” in Hamburg. She prefers to work in collectives such as the artist groups “target: autonopop”, Archiv “Kultur & Soziale Bewegung”, FRONTBILDUNG and was co-founder and editor of THE THING Hamburg. Platform for Art & Criticism 2006-09.
15:45 Screening:
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
CHARMING FOR THE REVOLUTION
16mm/DVD 11 min. loop , 2009
“The film is charming, but it is still labor. The labor to engage in demanding what should already be ours.”
With a wink to Jack Smith, the New York underground performer and filmmaker from the 60’s to the 80’s, as well as to the history of queer and feminist calls such as “wages for housework!”, the film recreates the “housewife” as an ambiguous figure with an open future. Additional references extend from Deleuze-Guattari’s becoming-animal, the Dandy of the 19th century, who out of protest against the clock pulse of the industrialization walked turtles on leashes, as Walther Benjamin described him, to Pasolini’s ironic-capitalism critical film “The Hawks and the Sparrows”
Performance: Werner Hirsch
Camera: Bernadette Paassen
Sound: Karin Michalski
Sound design: Rashad Becker
Set Photography: Andrea Thal
16:45 Verena Kuni
Time Out Feminism,
or: Do Cyborgs Dream of Circadian Clocks?
When the past was still the future, overcoming the biological clock was considered an achievement. In the radiant light that the Fée Electricité had ignited, the cyborg and her sisters celebrated the end of the night, the inexhaustible energy, the truth of work: production, not reproduction. Advantage through technology. No pause for breath. History is being made. Things are moving forward!
But the story is not a fairy tale. The fairy tale is told by people for machines and for people who are supposed to work like machines. If they hadn’t died, they would still be working today. The radiant future is a time loop, a loop with an infinite half-life, an animated gif that spreads virally and can no longer be deleted from the hard disk, which also no longer exists. Because there is the cloud. The simulacrum of an atmospheric phenomenon in a cycle of eternal recurrence: of fairy tales told by the few for the many.
The cyborg and her sisters have grown tired of this science fiction. Because they are wide awake. They are not asleep. They do not dream. But if they were dreaming, would they be dreaming of a biological clock?
Bio Verena Kuni
Verena Kuni is an art, media and cultural scientist and Professor of Visual Culture at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. She has been researching and teaching at universities and art academies since 1996. As a curator, she prefers to develop interdisciplinary projects and programs at the interface of theory and practice. From 1995 to 1999 she was co-curator of the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, where she has directed the annual interfiction – Conference for Art, Media and Net Cultures in Kassel since 1999. Her research interests include transfers between material and media cultures; media of imagination; technologies of transformation; DIY cultures; toys and/or as tools; visual epistemology, information design and (con)figurations of knowledge; urban biotopes and techno-nature cultures; alternate realities and other times. Numerous publications (print & online) on arts and media in their present, past and future formations.
www.kuniver.se – www.under-construction.cc – www.visuelle-kultur.info
17:45 Screening:
Lene Berg
Head cinema
Video 75 min, 2012
Kopfkino (mindfuck) features a discussion between eight women sitting at a long table in a theatrical space. The women are in the S&M business: five work as dominatrixes, three as slaves. While they exchange stories from their professional lives the camera remains in constant motion, shifting perspective without warning. In the course of the film we learn a lot about S&M and most of it contradicts almost everything we’ve been led to believe. But Kopfkino (mindfuck) is neither documentary nor fiction. It is an accumulation of stories from a world centered around power and sexuality, an arena where grownups play for real. But Kopfkino (mindfuck) is not only about sadomasochism. It is also about the places where fantasy meets reality, where experience is turned into storytelling. Is it real or fictional? What is the relationship between the fantasies these women stage and the world around them?
75 minutes
HDV, color, stereo
German dialogue with English subtitles
Produced and Directed by Lene Berg
Commissioned by Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (HOK), Norway
Bio Lene Berg
Born in Oslo, Lene Berg studied film at Dramatiska Institutet, Stockholm. She has directed three independently produced feature films: En Kvinnas Huvud (A Woman’s Head) 1997; Kopfkino (mindfuck) 2012; GOMP: Tales of surveillance in Norway 1948-89 (Gompen og andre beretninger om overvåking i Norge 1948-89) 2014, in addition to more than fifteen medium length and short films.
Lene Berg explores relationships between contemporary images and inherited ideas; between facts and clichés to develop new forms of storytelling. She is particularly interested in what is not told and what does not fit the general picture or accepted story.
Lene Berg represented Norway at the Venice Biennial 2013 with the film Dirty Young Loose (Ung Løs Gris). She lives in Berlin and New York.