Spring programme 2018

In 2018 the Academy enters a new chapter in its programming. In this phase we aim to integrate the concerns of our previous Pluriversale programs firmly into the local context. We hope to enjoy the same support and affection from the people of Cologne that the Academy has received in past years and to expand our base even wider.

The program is structured along four thematic axes that characterize and connect cultures: sites, archives, transactions, and originals, fakes and copies. Each axis will be attended by multidisciplinary events and productions. We look forward to your interest in the Academy of the Arts of the World / Cologne.
 

The season starts on April 6 with the opening event Akademie x Ebertplatz. Cologne’s Ebertplatz is an urban development “problemzone,” but at the same time it functions as an open artistic space—one that was almost destroyed at the end of 2017 in a near coup. In their performances international artists pick up on the distinctive character of this place. As we kick off the new season, the Academy stands in solidarity with the threatened art spaces and wants to return the support that Cologne’s independent art scene gave us after the massive budget cuts of the past year. Co-curated by Meryem Erkus, GOLD + BETON.

The season continues on April 19 opening of the exhibition Global Positioning System Not Working. The Global Positioning System, better known by its abbreviation GPS, was originally developed by the United States Department of Defense, but has long become an integral part of everyday life. Our positions in space are also invariably markers of our disappearance. Whether kidnapped activists in Mexico, bombing victims in Afghanistan or families devastated by right-wing terror in Germany, what remains are stories of isolation and loss, of disembodied love and memory, salvaged and also transformed in the artistic process. With Shahidul Alam, Agha Shahid Ali, Ahmad Ghossein, Rafael Lozana-Hemmer, Rajkamal Kahlon, "Tribunal NSU-Komplex auflösen" and Ulf Amide / Mahnmal Keupstraße.

On April 26 at Academyspace, with a panel discussion the three artists of the exhibition Global Positioning System Not Working, Shahidul Alam, Ahmad Ghossein and Rajkamal Kahlon present themselves and their work to the Cologne public. Forgotten places, missing film footage, broken objects, and useless documents: the remains and residue of the past are rearranged in contemporary art, enabling a new understanding of our own history. Artists, in this way, turn into historians. Can we also possibly learn something about our future? The evening is moderated by Madhusree Dutta.

The season continues on May 5 with the screening of Filipa César's Spell Reel at Academyspace. In 2011 an audiovisual archive resurfaced in the West African city of Bissau. What is left of the material, which was almost completely destroyed, bears witness to the beginnings of Guinean cinema that saw itself as a part of the political struggle for liberation. Filipa César has resurrected the remnants of the archive and created a mobile transnational cinema project between Guinean villages and European metropolises. The archive becomes a visionary space, in which people seek alternative concepts to a world in a state of emergency.

On May 17 Diana McCarty will hold a lecture for Youth Academy at Academyspace: "Archive of Ambience: Sound in Community." In the last few years radio has again gained significance as a medium in the art world as well as in activist groups. This year’s Youth Academy project is dedicated to defiant and challenging sound practices and their capacity for transmitting alternative narratives that have not previously been heard. Who in our society has the right to speak, and what does one have to do to be heard? The workshop participants explore aural strategies of self-empowerment and seek out collective utopian spaces. The lecture is the part of the workshop that is open to the public.

In the era of globalization the spheres of near and far blend together continuously, resulting in complex cultural and economic processes. On May 23 and May 24 the event "Rethinking Locality" examines how the global and the local permeate each other, and how the engagement of internationally active artists and institutions with other cultural actors working locally can be advantageous for all sides. With a performance by Sarah van Lamsweerde with Esther Mugambi (May 24–25).

The wondrous archive, over which Avery F. Gordon presides and which she describes in her latest book The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (2017), is not an archive in the usual sense, but rather a haven for all who fight against slavery, racism, exploitation, and authoritarian rule. Gordon, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describes state terror using the vocabulary of the horror genre. On June 10 she delivers the introductory lecture of the Academy’s new program axis "found:erased:palimpsest."

Original Sin. A Concert will took place on June 10. The true story of Luise Brand: in a village in Thuringia in the early 1960s, she built a house where she lived with her husband and her lover, her two daughters and two dogs. Immoral circumstances, not only according to socialist standards. Later the wall fell, Luise Brand died, and the GDR failed. But the house still lives on. Out of her grandmother’s story, and with help from the band Xiu Xiu, the actor Susanne Sachsse creates an eerie concert / performance and with it a glamorous, mysterious memorial: sexy, queer, and dark!

How does an archive go from a mere repository to a living resource with a creative energy that extends into the present? On June 21 Nicole Wolf, curator and anthropologist, explores this question by means of the collection of the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin. Madhusree Dutta, Artistic Director of the Academy, introduces her extensive Project Cinema City, which centers on the act of watching from a female perspective and the archiving of Bollywood cinema culture. A discussion between the two presenters follows the lectures.

Spring 2018 participants:
MP GOLD, Inder Salim, Melissa Logan, Latoya Manly-Spain, Leila Akinyi, Shahidul Alam, Agha Shahid Ali, Ahmad Ghossein, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Rajkamal Kahlon, "Tribunal NSU-Komplex auflösen," Ulf Aminde / Mahnmal Keupstraße, Madhusree Dutta, Filipa César, Sana Na N'Hada, Diana McCarty, Boris Groys, Mikołaj Iwański, Alexander Koch, Maria Lind, Cecylia Malik, Suhail Malik, Olivier Marboeuf, Britta Peters, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Viola Vahrson, Avery F. Gordon, Vaginal Davis, Susanne Sachsse, Angela Seo, Marc Siegel, Jamie Stewart, Xiu Xiu, Nicole Wolf

Press Contact
Sarah Bolz, bolz@academycologne.org

A full program will appear shortly on academycologne.org.