landings: confrontation and confession

Het Stedelijk Museum presenteert met trots het tweedaagse Public Program dat onderdeel is van het onderzoeksproject Landings (samengesteld door curatoren Natasha Ginwala en Vivian Ziherl). Het programma bestaat uit lezingen, kunstenaarspresentaties, filmvertoningen, een tijdelijke tentoonstelling en een performance, met bijdragen van onder meer Angela Melitopoulos & Angela Anderson, Otobong Nkanga, Elizabeth Provinelli en Willem de Rooij. Landings: Confrontation and Confession gaat over de rol die land, als concreet element, speelt in het bezitnemen van grondgebied, natuurlijke hulpbronnen, (de-)kolonisatie en cultureel hergebruik, maar ook over de geografische verdeling van kapitaal. 

“Op dit moment is onze taak: herintegratie - niet de veralgemeniseerde kracht van de kreet, maar een nauwgezette landmeting.” - Édouard Glissant

Het lopende interdisciplinaire programma Landings onderzoekt opvattingen over landgeschiedenissen en de constructie van landelijkheid. Terwijl de koloniale geschiedenis van West-Europa en de op de Derde Wereld gerichte projecten uit de 20^ste eeuw veelal het modernistische paradigma hebben gevoed, worden de fundamenten achter de geschiedenis van land, agrarische strijd en grondstoffenindustrie zelden genoemd als hoofdrolspelers in deze vertelling. Ook het discours van de hedendaagse kunst, dat zich inmiddels heeft uitgespreid naar uiteenlopende geografische regio's, legt deze transformatie vooral uit als mondiale hypermobiliteit en abstracties van het begrip ‘hedendaags’. Land lijkt steeds weer de gastheer voor dit soort categoriseringen en toch vormt het zelden het fundament waarop kritisch bewustzijn is gegrondvest.

In deze editie van Landings zal een breed scala van kunstenaars, antropologen, theoretici en filmdeskundigen ingaan op de instabiele correlaties tussen de noties 'confrontatie' en 'bekentenis', als sleutelbegrippen in het historische anti-imperialistische verzet en de huidige strijd om land en bodem in de wereld. De twee termen worden benaderd vanuit diverse voorbeelden, onder meer de 17de- en 18e-eeuwse voorstellingen van contact en conflict bezien vanuit de stijlfiguur van de vogelveer, de ondoorzichtige toestand van het terrein en de militaire strijd binnen de Algerijnse onafhankelijkheidsbeweging, vanuit de huidige mineralenhandel, opgevat als subjectieve ontmoeting, en vanuit de moleculaire abstracties van finance-kapitaal. In deze constellatie van termen, verkent Landings de vaak paradoxale relatie tussen moderne subjectiviteit, territoriale condities en het staatslichaam. 

Het symposium vindt plaats op zaterdag 11 en zondag 12 januari 2014. De eerste dag bestaat uit een publiek seminar, de tweede uit filmvoorstellingen en een performance. Daarnaast is er een kleinschalige tentoonstelling met werk van Waswo X Waswo (in samenwerking met Rajesh Soni) en met 19de- en 20ste-eeuwse archieffoto's van het leven op plantages, uit de collectie van het Tropenmuseum Amsterdam (als deel van het doorlopende samenwerkingsverband Approaching Absenteeism.  

Programma 

Zaterdag 11 januari, 10.30 – 18.00 uur

10.30– 13.00 uur: The burden of self-reckoning

•  Daniel C. Barber - Opacity and Intermattering
•  Willem de Rooij - In conversation regarding the long-term project: Intolerance
•  Yasmina Dekkar - The dignity of land: The question of terrain within militant Algerian cinema. 

13:00 – 14:00 uur:  Lunchpauze

14:00 – 15:45 uur: The paradox of abandonment

•  Denise Ferreira da Silva: The thing, no-bodies, and colonial expropriation: Flesh and soil confront the categories of historical materialism
•  Adrian Martin: Figuring the Land: Its memory, trace and reinvention in Australian Indigenous cinema 

15:45 – 16:00 uur: Koffie/theepauze 

16:00 - 17:45 uur: The ends of the earth and the resurvey of the land

•  Elizabeth A. Povinelli - Geontology, or Being after Death
•  Angela Melitopoulos and Angela Anderson - Unearthing Disaster: Mining for Gold in the Greek Debt Crisis

Zondag 12 januari, 12.00 – 16.00 uur

12.00 – 14.45 uur

• Screening Program:
  - Mitch Torres, Whispering In Our Hearts: The Mowla Bluff Massacre (2001), 52min
  - Camille Henrot, Cynopolis (2009), 10min
  - René Vautier, L’Algerie en Flammes (1958), 22min
  - John Akomfrah, Mnemosyne (2010), 45min

14.45 – 15.45 uur: Lunchpauze

15:45 – 16:30 uur: Performance Otobong Nkanga - Glimmer: Fragments

Landings is bedacht en opgezet door de curatoren Natasha Ginwala en Vivian Ziherl op uitnodiging van Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam) en wordt gepresenteerd in samenwerking met onder meer Studium Generale Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam), het Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam), het Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), BARBERSHOP (Lissabon), Campo Adentro (Madrid), David Roberts Art Foundation (Londen) en Iniva (Londen) in samenwerking met NGBK (Berlijn).

Artist bio's (EN)

John Akomfrah

Born in Accra, Ghana, John Akomfrah lives and works in London.  An artist, lecturer, writer and filmmaker, his twenty-year body of work is among the most distinctive in the contemporary British art world.  Akomfrah is well known for his work with the London-based media workshop Black Audio Film Collective, which he co-founded in 1982 with the objectives of addressing issues of Black British identity and developing media forms appropriate to this subject matter. Since 1998, Akomfrah has work primarily within the independent film and television production companies, Smoking Dogs Films, (London) and Creation Rebel Films (Accra). In 2008, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). In March 2012, he was awarded the European Cultural Foundation's Princess Margriet Award.

Angela Anderson

Angela Anderson has worked in the borderlands of art and film for several years, often in collaboration with other artists (including Angela Melitopoulos, Annika Larsson, Katya Sander, and Antonia Baehr). Since 2009 she has worked as the exhibition designer for the experimental program Forum Expanded at the Berlin International Film Festival. She is especially interested in the fields of economics, ecology, migration, and feminist/queer theories of power and violence, as well as the potential of audio-visual media to open up new lines of flight. She holds an MA in Media Studies from the New School and a BA in Economics and Latin Amercian Studies from the University of Minnesota, and is currently working on her first feature film script.

Angela Melitopoulos 

Angela Melitopoulos realizes video-essays, installations, documentaries and sound pieces and since 1985. She studied fine Arts with Nam June Paik. Her work focus of time, geography and collective memory in relation to electronic/digital media and documentation. Within her research projects she curates exhibitions and symposiums and publishes articles about mnemopolitics. Her experimental approach highlight the invention of new formats of multi-screen works and performance-based, expanded cinema formats. Her videos and installations were awarded and shown in many international festivals, exhibitions and museums (Generali Foundation Vienna, Berlinale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Antonin Tapies Foundation Barcelona, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, Manifesta 7, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, Whitney Museum New York, among others). She is teaching as a Professor in the Media School of the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen.  

Daniel Colucciello Barber

Daniel Colucciello Barber is a Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, where he is writing a book on conversion. He is the author of Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence (Edinburgh UP, 2014) and On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Cascade, 2011), as well as a co-author of Dark Nights of the Universe ([NAME], 2013). His writing also appears in various journals, including Angelaki, SubStance, Speculations, Symposium, and Glossator. He received his PhD from Duke University, where he worked in Religious Studies and the Program in Literature, and he has taught at New York University, Marymount Manhattan College, and The City University of New York. 

Yasmina Dekkar

Yasmina Dekkar is a researcher and cultural theorist based in Berlin and London. She was educated in film theory, islamic studies and art history in Berlin, Cairo and Paris and holds an MA in Postcolonial Studies from Goldsmiths College, London. She is a PhD candidate in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College. She has co-organized a number of events including a three day conference with Homi Bhabha as part of the festival Re-Imagining Asia (2008) at House of World Cultures, Berlin, a film program and a workshop in Algiers as part of the two year research project Matters of Collaboration (2012), House of World Cultures, Berlin. She has lectured on Algerian Cinema, amongst others at mumok, museum of modern art, Vienna as part of the project Sweet Sixties? (2013) and at Arsenal Cinema, Berlin, in the frame of the project Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice (2013).

Natasha Ginwala

Natasha Ginwala is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She is member of the artistic team of the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2014). Ginwala has participated in the de Appel Curatorial Programme (Amsterdam), after pursuing her post-graduate studies at The School of Arts & Aesthetics (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) and Asian College of Journalism (Chennai). Recent projects include: Landings, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, and partner organizations (2013-14, with Vivian Ziherl), The Museum of Rhythm, Taipei Biennale 2012, Inexactly This, Kunstvlaai: Festival of Independents, (2012, Amsterdam). She has taught on the Masters Programme (Artistic Research) at the University of Amsterdam and the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, as well as on the Studium Generale Programme at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. 
Ginwala has contributed to several publications including, Afterall Online, Art Agenda, e-flux Journal, Manifesta Journal, Mint (The Wallstreet Journal), TAKE on Art Magazine, among others. 

Camille Henrot

Camille Henrot lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include the New Orleans Museum of Art (2013); Slought Foundation, Philadelphia (2013); Kamel Mennour, Paris (2012), Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris (2010). Group exhibitions include Museum Off Museum, Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld (2013); Companionable Silences, Nouvelle Vague, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013); Inventing the World: The Artist as Citizen, Bénin Biennial 2012, (2012); A Disagreeable Object, SculptureCenter, New York (2012); Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010). Henrot was nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2010 and received the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013.

Adrian Martin

Adrian Martin is an Australian film and arts critic from Melbourne. Martin is Associate Professor, Film Culture and Theory at Monash University. In 2013/5, he is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. His work has appeared in many magazines, journals and newspapers around the world, and has been translated into over twenty languages and has regular columns in the Dutch De Filmkrant and in Caiman: Cuadernos de cine. Martin is the author of several books including Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez, published in published in English, Spanish and Portuguese editions (2012-4) by Punctum books. 

Otobong Nkanga

Otobong Nkanga’s drawings, installations, photographs and sculptures variously examine ideas around land and the value connected to natural resources. In the work of Otobong Nkanga, activities and performance permeate all kinds of media and motivate photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and video, though all the different works are thematically connected through architecture and landscape. As a human trace that testifies of ways of living and environmental issues, architecture and landscape act as a sounding board for narration and ‘the performative’. Nkanga’s recent shows include: Sharjah Biennial 11, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, (2013); Across the Board: Politics of Representation, Tate Modern, The Tanks, London, United Kingdom (2012); Inventing World: The Artist as Citizen, Biennale Benin, Cotonou, Benin (2012); Tropicomania: The Social life of Plantes, Betonsalon, Center of art and research, among others. The artist lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. 

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and faculty in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. Povinelli’s work has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. She has explored this question in four books (Labor's Lot, 1994; The Cunning of Recognition, 2002; The Empire of Love, 2006; and Economies of Abandonment, 2011), and in the short film, Karrabing, Low Tide Turning, co-directed with Liza Johnson and written with the Karrabing Indigenous Corporation. Karrabing was selected for the 2012 Berlinale International Film Festival, Shorts Competition.

Willem de Rooij

Willem de Rooij lives and works in Berlin. In his work he engages processes of selection and combination of images in a variety of different media, ranging from sculpture to photography, film and texts. De Rooij analyses conventions of presentation and representation and constructs tensions between socio-political and autonomous productions of meaning. Whilst already his earlier film installations had a sculptural character, his recent exhibitions, that often employ found materials and works of other artists, assert through the gesture of appropriation itself their specific artistic character. De Rooij studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam and at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions include Farafra at Kunsthall Bergen (2013), Untilted at Kunstverein München, Munich (2012), Crazy Repelled Firelight at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York (2011) and Intolerance at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2010). De Rooij is tutor at De Ateliers, Amsterdam and Professor of Fine Art, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main.

Denise Ferreira da Silva 

Denise Ferreira da Silva is a Professor in Ethics at Queen Mary-University London and currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at La Trobe University. She approaches Ethics and Political Theory with tools from critical legal theory, historical-materialism, feminist theory, racial and postcolonial/global studies. Her recent publications include: Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Notes Towards the End of Time (2013), No-Bodies: Law, Raciality, Violence (Griffith Law Review, 2009), Accumulation, Dispossession and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism, W/ Paula Chackravartty (American Quarterly 2012), and To be Announced: Radical Praxis (at) the Limits of Justice (Social Text, 2013).

Vivian Ziherl 

Vivian Ziherl is a curator, researcher and critic. Since 2011 she has been a Curator at If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to Be Part Of Your Revolution, Amsterdam. Recent independent projects include Landings (Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam & partner organizations) and the performance parcours series StageIt! (Part 1 & 2) (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam). Ziherl has edited books including The Lip Anthology, Macmillan Art Publishing and Kunstverein Publishing in collaboration with Grazer Kunstverein and Paper Exhibition: Selected Writings by Raimundas Malašauskas, Kunstverein Publishing and Sternberg Press. Vivian was the founding contributing editor of Discipline Magazine, and her writing has appeared in periodicals including Frieze, e-flux Journal, Pages Magazine, LEAP Magazine, Metropolis M, Eyeline and the Journal of Art (Art Association of Australia and New Zealand), among others.