Organisers
Christiane Heibach, Linda Hentschel, Angela Krewani, Irene Schütze
Participation
Online via Zoom; please register by 11.11.2021
Online workshop, 12-13 November 2021
Der Workshop befasst sich mit Ambivalenzen sozial engagierter Kunst (socially engaged art), die politische und/oder aktivistische Ziele verfolgt.
Today, socially engaged art is booming at biennials and other major exhibitions in the face of global economic inequalities, heteronormative and ethnic discrimination, climate change, ecological grievances, natural disasters and migration movements.
Over the past 20 years, a variety of platforms have emerged that enable the exchange of knowledge, promotion and visibility of socially engaged art and combine it with political activism. However, as early as the 1960s, Theodor W. Adorno identified a conflict between artistic autonomy and commitment (Adorno 1965): Committed art harbours the danger of making itself common with society's preferences and thus losing its power; only autonomous art can ultimately be politically effective. Just as supposedly autonomous art is relieved of immediate functions, projects of engaged art have often been measured by their functionality and thus scrutinised for their effectiveness for society.
This extrapolation and hierarchisation between "free" and "applied" arts will be questioned in our workshop. We will focus on antagonisms of supposed autonomy and use project examples and theoretical texts to stimulate discussion about the aesthetics, medialities, structures and ambivalences of engagement.
The following aspects will be discussed: socially engaged art from a postcolonial perspective; political correctness, constructions of victimhood; community concepts of alternative ways of life and their processes of inclusion and exclusion; the question of the authority of utopian thinking (are there utopias in which their dystopias are not inscribed?); the dissolution of inequalities without reproducing new asymmetries; perspectives on engaged art as fields of projection of societal ambivalences.
Programme
12.–13. November 2021
FRIDAY, 12 NOVEMBER
BLOCK 1: AESTHETIC AMBIVALENCES
14.00
Welcome and introduction
14.20
Video Art Activism. Guerrilla television as socially engaged art
Barbara Filser, KIT Karlsruhe
14.40
Committed Advertising: Julius Pinschewer, the Advertising Film and the Founding of the State of Israel
John Hoffmann, University of Marburg
15.00
Discussion
15.45
Break
BLOCK 2: AMBIVALENCES OF ACTION
16.20
From participation to collaboration: An ecology of practices against success?
Thari Jungen (Berlin/Hamburg) and Frieda Nastold (Kunsthochschule Halle)
16.40
JARDIN GLOCAL
Daniel Fetzner (Offenburg University of Applied Sciences) and Martin Dornberg (University of Freiburg)
17.00-18.30
Discussion
SATURDAY, 13 NOVEMBER
BLOCK 3: AMBIVALENT STRUCTURES
9.00
Between inclusive education and exclusion - theatre makers as role models and troublemakers: in neoliberal labour economies
Yana Prinsloo, University of Mainz
9.20
Between pacification and empowerment. The double bind in socially engaged art
Leila Haghighat, Berlin
9.40
"It's all covered by artistic freedom" - Activist calculations between autonomy and the legal system.
Grischka Petri, NFDI4Culture, Karlsruhe/Bonn
10.00
Discussion
10.45
Break
BLOCK 4: FUNCTIONALITY VERSUS FREEDOM IN THE ARTS?
11.15
Nature-friendly. An artistic concept of socially and ecologically committed contemporary art?
Barbara Stoltz, Marburg/Florence
11.35
Art in the service of art
Thorsten Schöbel, FH Potsdam
11.55- 13.00
Final discussion