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• Artistic narratives on collective and individual wounds
• A discursive series in 6 parts
• May-Dec 2024

• Sa., 21.09.2024, 15:00

Artistic narratives on collective and individual wounds: 'Emancipations and collective resilience: On the Body and Trauma' in the frame of 'On(going) Trauma'

How do artistic practices address current and past violence, wars and humanitarian crises? Which readings, which methods of communication and which future scenarios do they develop? How to talk about trauma when words fail; How to inform about violence without repeating violence? In joint efforts with curators, guests and participants, the 6-part discursive series On(going) Trauma provides a forum to talk about and learn from artistic and curatorial research practices in dealing with trauma from plural perspectives.

• 1Bild © After, İz Öztat, 2016–ongoing. Marking tape, dimensions variable. Installation view from "Transit", Zilberman Berlin. Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman.
• 2 Anna Lena Werner, Kunstwissenschaftlerin, Autorin, Kuratorin und wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin

Various practices are presented, in which situated knowledges and backgrounds of systematic power and violence structures are discussed, as well as activist and marginalized perspectives are illuminated. The focus of the encounters is directed to the question of how coexistence and discourse is possible despite different situatedness, concerns and involvement? What could be ways to overcome the difficulty of speaking about violence and to find new languages for communicating it? The series of events seeks to critically examine and reposition the concept of trauma in the context of the arts, by focusing on the humanitarian and socio-political consequences of crises, war and violence. Central to each encounter is an exploration on whether and how the arts can create a potentially emancipating forum for the perspectives of victims and witnesses. In view of current crisis situations and the growing international shifts to the right, experiences of violence are corroding our societies, but at the same time, talking about these experiences from differentiated perspectives and finding lines of solidarity is difficult.

About the venue

VIERTE WELT KOLLABORATIONEN

In 2010, the actors group Lubricat initiated the founding of Vierte Welt at Kottbusser Tor, located in the Neues Zentrum Kreuzberg. Vierte Welt is a production platform organised by the artists themselves, as a performative space of thinking, as a cutting edge between discourse & art and as a location for events. The central aim is the development of new collaborative work situations. Vierte Welt tries to develop a production practice that is based on exchange with other artists and formations out of which “programmes” can emerge. Performances, political plenums, philosopher talks and exhibitions are filled up by the task to learn a new culture of negotiation, questions and an open exchange are enabled.

http://www.viertewelt.de 

About the series

Emancipations and Collective Resilience: On the Body and Trauma

Storing experiences and knowledges, the body is a physical reminder of both visceral vulnerability and more-than-human (collective) resilience. It is being instrumentalized to continue hegemonic narratives, hierarchical systems and violence against groups. For the third iteration of the discursive series "On(going) Trauma" at Vierte Welt Berlin, artists and the audience present are invited to share their strategies, engaging in the entanglements of the body, memory and trauma through their distinctive practices. Methods of dis-embodiment and dis-identification, fictional or ritualized bodies, as well as adaptions of different personas and collectivized selves will be critically discussed as possibilities to reclaim historical and political truths, rights and narratives."On(going) Trauma" therefore acts as an experimental format of exchange and encounter, created with and for artists, curators, activists, journalists and theorists. It is designed as an open conversation format, as a space of solidarity and humanitarian perspectives. At each event, excerpts from the artistic works of the invited guests are shown in the form of screenings, readings or performances.

About people

Team & Guests

İz Öztat is a Berlin-based artist from Turkey whose research-driven work often explores themes of mourning and trauma through historical and personal narratives. In her ongoing project, she engages in a collaboration with the Zişan (1894-1970), who appears to her as a historical figure, a ghost, and an alter ego; to construct alternative histories and challenge authoritarian narratives, thereby addressing collective and personal traumas. Through her works that always test an ethical positionality, Öztat interrogates the power dynamics and bodily experiences of pain, guilt, punishment, and agency in response to political repressions in the Turkish nation-state from the politics of denialism regarding the unrecognized Armenian Genocide or near-Apartheid violence against Kurds.

Natis aka Hasan Aksaygın, Hank Yan Agassi, and Hasso Weiss Ehrenwerth is a Berlin based artist from Cyprus. Natis' conceptually-driven painterly practice embodying artist personas like Hasan Aksaygın, Hank Yan Agassi, and Hasso Weiss Ehrenwerth, challenges conventional notions of artist identity and interrogates the socio-political constructs that shape them and the reception of their works. This approach not only blurs boundaries between personal and collective histories but also investigates how these histories are remembered, forgotten, and reconstructed. Through the adoption of different personas Natis undertakes a deliberate process of de-orientalization and de-identification. Each persona serves as a strategic departure from fixed identities imposed by societal norms and historical narratives.

Isaac Chong Wai is a Berlin-based artist from Hong Kong, using performance, video, installation, photography, and drawing as mediators to investigate contemporary global phenomena. His work transforms the emotions, tensions, and memories from human interactions into performative materiality and immersive experiences. Treading the line between the individual and the collective, he examines the vulnerability of the body and the inherent violence within social systems and historical traumas and imagines alternative microcosms of human relationality.

Alper Turan, born in Turkey, is a curator and writer currently based in New York, Berlin, and Istanbul. His ongoing practice and research draw from transnational and transtemporal queer strategies, abstractions, archives, and fiction. Turan is a 2023–24 curatorial fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and was awarded a 2023–24 General Idea fellowship from the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. He is co-founder of STRÜKTÜR, a Berlin-based association dedicated to forming and expanding the support structures for arts & artists from the geography of Turkey. In response to escalating anti-queer rhetorics in Turkey and beyond, he experiments with undetectable, uncensorable queer aesthetics.

Anna-Lena Werner is a Berlin-based researcher and curator. Since 2019 she is member of the staff at the Institute for Theatre Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, seminar for Culture and Media, where she completed her Ph.D. with the study "Let Them Haunt Us. How Contemporary Aesthetics Challenge Trauma as the Unrepresentable.“ She (co-)conducted several inter-institutional research projects i.e. with Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and HKW Berlin and runs the online magazine artfridge.de since 2011. In her current post doc research, she focuses on historical and current artistic deconstructions of the (media) image politics of war and zones of conflict.