TRANSFORMATIONS #3: FORUM ON ARTISTIC PRACTICE & THEORY

Our societies and cultures are encountering political, social, material, and epistemic complexities that we have never experienced before. In this all-encompassing transformation, formerly fixed categories and dynamics of power, such as bios and geos (life and nonlife) or the analogue and the digital, are at once defied and suddenly open onto their own beyond. Simultaneously, processes of economization are taking place in all areas of society –especially in academic and social fields – limiting our thoughts, imaginations, and actions. How can we engage, from our situated positions as art school members of the global north, with questions of power, cultural politics, and community, to matters of knowledge production and representation, the anthropogenic climate change, decolonialism and microsociology as well as subjects of antinormativity and sustainability?

What roles do visual narratives, constructions, and political imaginaries in art and design play in order to form and to rethink the relationships between society and the world we experience? How can artistic practices develop a dynamic not merely for the representation of the social but for its generation? What are its possibilities, limitations and traps? And how can we shape multiplicity and knowledge as agents of possible transformations? What kind of skills, critical mindsets, intuitions, practices, and speculations do we need to be active in this transformation?

This series of conversations, talks and responses aims to look beyond both singular explanations of causation and effect and the strict separation of theory and practice. Equally, it is not about solutionism but rather about the introduction of possible other avenues of progress. Against the backdrop of artistic research’s transdisciplinarity, it is structured as an open, inclusive dialogue between a diversity of disciplines, angles, approaches, and topics.

Download the full event information and program here. 

Organisation/Conception
Prof. Dr. Annette Geiger, Dr. Kathrin Gollwitzer-Oh, Prof. Dr. Martin Schulz, Prof. Dr. Asli Serbest

Presenters
International referents: Anke Coumans (Hanze University of Groningen), Nils Olsson (HDK-Valand/University of Gothenburg), Mick Wilson (HDK-Valand/University of Gothenburg)
HfK Bremen PhD candidates: Julia C. Ahrend, Mitra Bostani Nasrabadi, Harm Coordes, Luisa Eugeni, Lucas Kalmus, Jin Liang, Nora Mesaros, Anna zur Nieden

https://artisticphd-hfkbremen.net/events/transformations-3.0