Performing Recalcitrance

Alexander Kluge

Film screening: 27.3, 16.00–18.00
Moderna Museet, Biografen/The Cinema

The filmmaker, author, philosopher, cultural theorist, and media politician Alexander Kluge is one of the most idiosyncratic and prolific figures in German cinema and television. Alongside his work as a director of such influential films as “The Power of Emotion”, “Germany in Autumn” and “Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed“, he has been a singular force in the debate around public and private Television in Germany for the past 20 years. Since 1988, he has produced more than 1500 hours of radically independent cultural programming for private broadcasting companies, thus keeping television open to what happens outside the commercial markets. Conducive digression and discourse are characteristic of his interview technique. In his dialogues about books, films and art the author’s voice is foregrounded, resulting in legendary conversations with interlocutors such as Heiner Mueller, Einar Schleef or H.M. Enzensberger. In his magazine without words, in his city and music reports, and in formats such as “Facts & Fakes,” Kluge explores, stubbornly and without any concern for rating figures, what television can possibly communicate. For Performing Recalcitrance, a selection of Kluge’s productions for television will be introduced and discussed by Diana Baldon, director of Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation . The program has been organized in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Stockholm.

Alexander Kluge was born in 1932 in Halberstadt and received his doctor’s degree in Law in 1956. He became juridical adviser of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and a confidant to T.W. Adorno. Since the 1960s, Kluge became well known as author and filmmaker. In 1962, he published the “Oberhausen Manifesto” together with 25 young filmmakers, which became the forerunner of New German Cinema. Since 1988, Kluge has been active in German private television as reaction to the termination of funds for independent filmmaking by the government. With the foundation of his dctp (Development Company for Television Programme), he created a platform for an independent programme within private German television in order to assert uncommercial screenings and a pluralistic broadness.

Diana Baldon is an Italian curator and critic, and the director of Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm. She is currently co-curating the group exhibition “Counter-Production” for the Generali Foundation, Vienna, which takes inspiration from a strategy developed and implemented by Alexander Kluge in the 1970s that, over the past ten years, has been revisited by a number of contemporary artists.

Michael Smith

Artist Talk
28.3, 16.00–17.30
Moderna Museet, Biografen/The Cinema

Michael Smith is a video/performance/installation artist known for his eponymous performance persona named Mike, the central figure in an ongoing series of large-scale narrative based projects. Mike, an innocent who continually falls victim to trends and fashions in an imperfect landscape, allows Smith to create an unsettling mixture of humor and pathos as he comments on discrepancies and absurdities in our culture. Smith has shown his work extensively around the US and Europe at a variety of venues including museums, galleries, universities, festivals, night clubs, on television and in the streets. In New York City he has had solo shows and screenings at The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, The Leo Castelli Gallery, The Christine Burgin Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art. His retrospective “Mike’s World: Solo and Collaborative Works by Michael Smith and Joshua White (& other collaborators)” was exhibited at the Blanton Museum in Austin and at The ICA in Philadelphia in 2007/8. He was also included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and the Pictures Generation Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009. “A Voyage of Growth and Discovery”, produced in collaboration with Mike Kelley was shown at the Sculpture Center in New York, West of Rome in Los Angeles and Fall 2011 at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle, UK.

Michael Smith received his Bachelor of Arts from The Colorado College and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He has taught in the Master of Fine Arts programs at Yale, UCLA, Art Center, Columbia, CalArts, The Royal Danish Academy and is currently an Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has received numerous awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.

Khaled Hourani

Picasso in Palestine
Artist talk: 29.3, 16.00–17.30
Moderna Museet, Biografen/The Cinema

In 2010, Hourani conceptualized and organized the project Picasso in Palestine, with which an original work by Pablo Picasso was for the very first time on show in Ramallah. On the basis of the loan request for Buste de Femme (1943), owned by the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the work traveled to Palestine in June 2011 where it was shown for one month and under the protection of armed guards.

Khaled Hourani is an artist, writer and curator. Currently Artistic Director of the International Academy of Art in Palestine, Hourani’s work has been exhibited across the Middle East, Europe and the US and he has participated in and coordinated several international artists’ workshops. In 1997, he founded Al Matal Gallery in Ramallah. He was the designer of Al Karmel Magazine, which was founded and directed by Mahmoud Darwish (1998 to 2009) and was General Director of the Fine Arts Department of the Palestinian Ministry of Culture (2004–06). Recently, he conceived and curated Picasso in Palestine (2011).

Valeria Graziano

ProcrastiNation, or the feeling of what happens
Lecture: 30.3, 16.00–17.30
Moderna Museet, Biografen/The Cinema

As indebted students, precarious workers, quasi-illegal migrants, creative subjects, we are constantly on call, environmentally enticed to produce value and values, even or perhaps especially when we are not at work. In this mashed time of ours, procrastination is being recast as a social disease, as the ultimate sin to combat through a variety of techniques of puritan flavour. Task-avoidance strategies and self-regulatory failures express a kind of executive suffering, given that the master clock is on our wrist. But in the wild safari of practices for loosing time, what is our unaware shrewdness really trying to disband?

Valeria Graziano is a researcher, educator and organiser. Currently, she is completing a PhD at Queen Mary University in London, with the School of Business and Management and the Drama Department. Her research traces practices and ambiences of radical sociability within histories of self-organization, institutional analysis and militant research. She has a penchant for collective configurations and she has been indulging in participatory organizational experiments in the company of the Micropolitics Research Group and various other fine collaborators over the years. Some outcomes of such conspiracies have been hosted by cultural organisations such as In-Presentable Festival, Madrid; Intermediae Matadero Madrid; LASA, L’Havana; Arteleku, San Sebastian; Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz; Summer Drafts, Bolzano; Chelsea Space, London; Gasworks Gallery, London; Plymouth Arts Centre; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Curator: Catrin Lundqvist

Concept and coordination: Olav Westphalen and Stefanie Hessler