Sada Initiative with Rijin Sahakian at Kino Toni
Screenings and discussions of Sada Initiative with Rijin Sahakian at Kino Toni.
This public event is part of the open lecture series Boundary Disputes (Modul: Aktuelle Diskurse), conceived by Dr. Ana Teixeira Pinto and Dr. Anselm Franke.
Contemporary art underwent a major transformation in recent years, which, to paraphrase Andrew Wiener, impacted not just the form and content of art, but its definition, indeed its very ontology. As Western epistemology, and the artistic canon adjacent to it, came undone, the field of contemporary art has expanded its scope to include practices that seek to intervene not only symbolically but also directly. Artists and curators began to position themselves as activists, researchers, speculative philosophers, poets or critical race theorists. At the same time, the art world has been increasingly engulfed by intense controversy with exhibitions becoming flashpoints for debates about historical trauma, cultural reparations, antisemitism or antiblackness. The present seminar proposes to look at these controversies as epiphenomena of ongoing boundary disputes, locating them within a broader debate concerning artistic autonomy vs heteronomy. Whereas artistic autonomy is difficult, if not impossible to sustain, the investments and attachments that help reproduce what is most damaging in the world, affect theorist Lauren Berlant argues, are at the same time those that hold the world together as a coherent representation. Giving up one’s attachments, however cruel or toxic, would mean giving up the world and one’s position in it. Taking a closer look at how a global cultural war is playing out site-specifically, we will examine why contemporary art hasn’t been able to think through the contradictions between what it purports to do and what inadvertently does, and whether its means and modes of ideation are ill-suited for this task.