Co-Curation program series at Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe
at Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe, 2020
A programme series on the politicisation of bodies and alternative concepts of care taking. With Sepake Angiama, Staci Bu Shea, Alice Chauchat, Cola Taxi Okay, Feministische Gesundheitsrecherchegruppe, Formate Des Dialogs, Vanessa Grasse, Internationales Begegnungszentrum Karlsruhe, Thomas Kampe, Anton Kats, Roni Katz, Chantal Küng, Sandra Noeth, Power Makes Us Sick, Sickness Affinity Group, The School of Narrative Dance
Starting in October 2020, the Badischer Kunstverein was organizing a wide-ranging performance, workshop, lecture, and discussion series. The program asked about the fragility and the resistance of bodies during times of pandemic and investigates alternative and radical possibilities for care taking and aid. Artists, performers, dancers, feminist collectives and initiatives, activist health care alliances, community centers, cultural theoreticians, and somatic practitioners are invited to share new spaces as well as (medial/digital) formats based on their own forms of praxis, in order to make them accessible for collective action. A central reference is the historical and current impact of women in relation to creative, experimental, and radical spaces of assistance and negotiation.
We were taking current cultural and sociopolitical realities as an impetus to open up one exhibition level of the Kunstverein as a space of negotiation. Together with the local and international participants, we collectively explored how forms of artistic, social, and political action can be empowered, and what role the body plays as a site of engagement. Alternative concepts of education, bodywork, and health care were linked with performative practices that have been used to develop various strategies for opening up new pathways toward active engagement and autonomy. Exhibited – and made available beyond the events themselves – were research materials, podcasts, video documentaries, and printed materials produced by the protagonists and other alliances. The integrative aspect for all participants was the politicization of the body for a critical interrogation of normative restrictions and categorizations, always in an awareness of the current pandemic, during which new forms of containment and exclusion are being debated through the body in particular – in the politics of healthcare, education, and migration.
Concept by Mira Hirtz and Anja Casser
Installation View, credits Stephan Baumann
