Doreen Mende Read Bio Collapse
Doreen Mende, curator and theorist, is currently professor for Curatorial Politics and head of the CCC Research-based Master and PhD-Forum at HEAD Genève/Switzerland. Recent curatorial projects include “Hamhung’s Two Orphans” for Bauhaus Imaginista at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, 2018; “The Navigation Principle” at the Dutch Art Institute, 2017; “The Prisoner Letter” at Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Sharjah Biennial 13 Offsite in Ramallah, 2017. Since 2015 she has been a founding member of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin.
What could a practice of politicizing the image in the twenty-first century look like, considering that navigation—the computational condition of contemporary image-processing—updates, calculates, and incorporates the frame excessively and continuously into the image-making process? In order to render more palpable the beginning of a political ontology of image navigation by means of computation, we should remind ourselves of the principle of twentieth-century montage, which can offer a potent point of departure. Much has been written and produced in the name of montage. In 1967–68, film students, including Harun Farocki, announced the Dsiga Wertow Akademie, an occupation of their film school, the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, an act that paid tribute to montage as a cine-political practice. Montage was pioneered by Esfir (Esther) Schub and Dziga Vertov, emerging from the world of Soviet cinema during the period of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918. In other words, montage’s potency to mobilize the image for emancipatory processes was initially built from participation in communist world revolution.
e-flux journal and Harun Farocki Institut present: “Art After Culture: Navigation Beyond Vision” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Let us begin before the beginning—before the arrival of the “archon,” that is, the guardian of documents, the gatekeeper, the patriarch and the matriarch. When the undutiful daughter occupied the front room of the family home. The undutiful daughter, full of vibrant ideas not yet articulated fully, wants to provide shelter for Melly Shum, the undutiful daughter’s friend and loving aunt, who publicly declared in 1990 that she hates her job. It’s been everywhere. In the newspapers. Reporters in front of the house. On television in Teen Species. LinkedIn. Facebook. Flickr. Instagram. It’s gone viral. “Melly Shum hates her job.” On a billboard. For decades. Melly Shum. A woman of East Asian descent. Large white glasses. In her thirties. Working in an office. On her own. In Rotterdam. Pictured at work by Ken Lum. Another worker. In the picture Melly, it seems, is performing abstract labor, operating a machine to her right, maybe doing some calculations. Since 1990! Goodness. If only Melly’s abstract labor was recognized, even in retrospect—like the women trained in mathematics for the US Army’s ENIAC Project who, in the 1940s, were initially called “computers”—then she might speak again. She could speak of and against “the law of what can be said.”
Gema Darbo and Deniz Kirkali
Lukas Brasiskis
Geli Mademli
Paul Boyé
Jaroslava Tomanova
Samuel Barry