Exhibition / 52-Hour-Lab
Bernhardt Herbordt, Melanie Mohren
Promise, Practice, Protocol—
Performing Future Presences

Are You Meaning Company
The Ten People No. 3

Matthias Böttger
Garden Without Us

Corinne May Botz
Haunted Houses

Marcelo Cardoso Gama
Unvisible Singing III: A Souvenir

Jonathan Garfinkel
Manufactured Soundscapes

Javier Hinojosa
Emphemeral Traps

Eunjung Hwang
Creature Feature Animation

Alicja Karska, Aleksandra Went
From the Cycle

Daniel Kötter, Begum Erciyas
5 Falsche Versprechen

Pei-Wen Liu, Tobias Hoffmann
syzygy

Marcell Mars
What Is Smart? What Is Stupid?

Matthias Aron Megyeri
Contribuere

Kaiwan Mehta
Species of Traces
An Archaeology of Journeys
of Exact Portraits of Identifiable
Existing Originals

Kerstin Meyer
What Am I Doing Here?
An Exchange Between Artists
and Professionals
of International Development

Damir Očko
Steps over the Frozen Lake

Mike Osborne
Near Monochromes

Bernardo Oyarzún
Reality Set

Dubravka Sekulić
Future Presences

Alexander Sigman
detritus | reconstructions

Katarzyna Sowula
Where Is the Truth
about the Past?

José Carlos Teixeira
Between Clarity & Fog

The New Schicksalsgemeinschaft
(Jan Altmann/Zoran Terzic/Daragh Reeves)
ZEN & SPLATTER (Laundry Chinoise)



Photo Gallery

Kerstin Meyer
What Am I Doing Here?
An Exchange Between Artists and Professionals of International Development

 

Kerstin Meyer, What Am I Doing Here?, An Exchange Between Artists and Professionals of International Development


Kerstin Meyer, What Am I Doing Here?, An Exchange Between Artists and Professionals of International Development


“What am I doing here?” asks travel writer Bruce Chatwin when he finds himself being arrested upon arriving at the airport in Cotonou, Benin. He had coincidentally happened to arrive shortly after the landing of a plane full of mercenaries intending to topple the government. Wearing camouflage trousers had made his situation even more complicated.

When you work as an international development practitioner, endowed with some operational power, your work is inherently ambivalent. On the one hand, you are bound to specific definitions of problems and solutions that are predefined by a system of thought, of a discourse and of institutions which have their main constituency elsewhere. But in practice, and using eyes, ears and one’s political or social sensibility, professionals “on mission” will continuously perceive that the actual conditions and circumstances in the country concerned and in which their work is set have their own acute presence, like a parallel world. This perception is irritating and destabilizing.

What am I doing here? One can face the dilemma by calming oneself with the idea that contradictions are caused by “others.” Alternatively, instances of doubt and self-reflection and a choice of attitude can be part of the practitioner’s work, albeit little acknowledged in official language.

Aesthetic practice, however, can successfully contain moments of instability and changing perspectives. Are artists therefore better off, politically, when treating social realities at a distance? The actual impact of aesthetic practice is within the imaginary, it is not in the social reality. It does not have to face consequences other than aesthetic judgement, yet there is hopefully some potential, emancipatory or other, that a spectator could appropriate.

What happens, then, when members of the two professional fields, the artistic and the political, approach each other’s practice?

Workshop on May 23, 2009
11 am–2 pm/part 1:
On mission/on stage with Hans Werner Kroesinger
4 pm–7 pm/part 2:
Perspectives on circumstances with Achim Lengerer, Laura Horelli
Shedding Details, video by Gerhard Friedl and Laura Horelli

Guests: Wolf Dio, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ); Regine Dura, filmmaker; Jörg Freiberg-Strauss, GTZ; Martin Fröhlich, artist; Claudia Gottmann, GTZ; Christian Hanussek, artist; Laura Horelli, artist; Ulla Hoyer, architect; Daniel Kötter, filmmaker and director; Hans-Werner Kroesinger, theater director; Elisabeth Leiner, international development expert; Achim Lengerer, artist; Matthias Aron Megyeri, artist; Judith Raum, artist; Andrea Warner, international development expert


Kerstin Meyer, What Am I Doing Here?, An Exchange Between Artists and Professionals of International Development


Kerstin Meyer, What Am I Doing Here?, An Exchange Between Artists and Professionals of International Development

 



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