History is often treated as a single, official narrative. In his works, the artist IM Heung-soon looks beneath the surface of such monolithic narratives and searches for the personal histories and unique experiences of the many individuals that lie at its basis. He speaks with Miki Kanai on the importance of interviews for his work, on stories that cannot be told with words, and the meaning of respect. To article...
Neurons living in a Petri dish perform duets with human musicians: Australian-based artist Guy Ben-Ary had his cells extracted and grown into a culture of 100,000 living neurons. Lined with electrodes, these neurons form output via an analog synthesizer, cellF, allowing them to “jam” with human musicians. Ben-Ary talks about the blending of art and science, joint ventures, and non-human consciousness. To article...
The historian Cemil Aydin about the effects of breaking up multi-ethnic societies and the Ottoman Caliphate as a symbol for Cosmopolitanism. To article...
Class, race, and Pop: How a marketing professional in the USA invented the racial division between “black” and “white” music. The musician Dom Flemons, himself affected by this pigeonhole thinking, speaks about a little known aspect of American Folk music. To article...
The Film And-Ek Ghes… documents the arrival of the Roma Velcu family in Berlin. The filmmaker Philip Scheffner and co-director Colorado Velcu develop perspectives on the arrival in Germany and the self-determination of migrants and refugees in an aesthetic production. On the surface, the second installment of the three-part project series Soundtracks, curated by Nanna Heidenreich, shows the everyday life of the Velcu family who emigrated from Romania. The documentary, which was nominated for the Grimme Award 2017, addresses various ideas of (self-) presentation and offers an unusual contribution to critical revisions of the representation of migrants and refugees in film and the arts. To article in German...
How should today’s European societies deal with the damage of the colonial era? With the consequences of the destruction of places, bodies, and identities? And what forms of “reparation” for contemporary injustices would be appropriate? Within the framework of the event Body the artist Kader Attia and the philosopher Françoise Vergès addressed old and new collective wounds, amputations and their associated phantom pain. Hannah Gregory attended the film and discussion evening for the journal and discusses here their complementary positions. To article...
The Ethnological Museum’s time in Dahlem is coming to an end, its move into the Humboldt Forum is imminent. A theme evening organized by HKW with lectures and a concluding discussion in the museum addressed one of the core questions of museology: The complexity of the term thing. Museal things are removed from their original context, their “migration history” takes them to different locations, establishing new relationships. The media theorist Arjun Appadurai, the cultural theorist Tony Bennett, and the museologist Sharon MacDonald went in search of alternative ideas of things. They explored the protagonists and circumstances of migration, placing migrating objects in relation to migrating people, juxtaposing the immutability of objects with the mutability of their meaning. Ana Teixeira Pinto listened in and has drawn her own conclusions. To article...
Does truth exist? And do we still need it? Taking the concept of Négritude as their point of departure Nobel laureate in literature Wole Soyinka and film theorist Manthia Diawara talked about a universal idea and it’s relevance today. A short survey of edition #3 of the Dictionary of Now. To article...
In the second edition of the Dictionary of Now Eyal Weizman, architect turned intellectual activist, meets social historian Dipesh Chakrabarty to talk about the Forum. Vague concepts of morality are useless in dealing with climate change. An efficient FORUM, as Chakrabarty maintains, needs to take up a planetary perspective. To article...
Emergency administration of the moment versus history as a space of possibility: How can our society develop new models for action instead of just continually reacting to unexpected challenges? In order to answer this question Bernd Scherer has thrown a wide net—from contemporary history to military and technological history. Capitalism, technology and acceleration have given rise to an explosive amalgam whose composition urgently requires analysis: the present. To article...
What is time? And what does acceleration on the one hand and big data on the other do to people? As early as 1989, the sociologist Helga Nowotny addressed the decisive question of how changes in society affect our sense of time: Her book Eigenzeit hit a nerve, advancing to become a classic with translations into French, English and Italian. Now she has taken up the theme again: What is our sense of (our own) time today? To article...
The so called “refugee crisis” is not a crisis of the refugee, it’s a “crisis of society.” Starting from that simple insight Andrew Herscher connects the “housing question” (Friedrich Engels) of the 19th century to the “refugee crisis” of the 21st. The “humanity-mongers” of the 19th century addressed the working class’s housing problem rather than the underlying social problem itself. Today’s humanitarian endeavors of “digital shelter,” on the other hand, provide refugees with debit cards to seek a dwelling rather than supplying housing in the form of architectural efforts. To article...
It is in the experiment that we are closest to time’s traces, and time can always, only be grasped up to a point. In Time’s Attack on the Rest of Life, a diverse palate of artists and scholars such as molecular biologist and science historian Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, composer Sandeep Bhagwati, and installation artists Evelina Domnitch and Dimitry Gelfland reflected on the constant shifting and multiplicities of the shaping of time in the context of the opening of 100 Years of Now. To article in German...
