Art as Politics: A Berlin Guest Lecture Series
What has art got to do with activism?
Where can design become direct action?
If at all, how do designers and artists living in Berlin approach political realities in their work?
This video showcases excerpts from Art as Politics, a guest lecture series curated and hosted by Anisha Gupta Müller as part of an online theory and history seminar. Each week, students had the exciting opportunity to listen to artists, designers and community organisers based in Berlin, who have all engaged with politics in their work (or indeed have been forced to). The experts invited work in a variety of creative realms – from graphic design, to artistic research, to performance art – and brought contrasting and challenging political commentaries to the class discussions. These recorded excerpts offer a glimpse into the lectures and discussions, originally presented at the weißensee khb Rundgang.
Access Info:
Some of the guest lectures took place in English, some in German, and some in both. The subtitles and the transcript have been used as a translation tool in order to include both audiences.
Guest speakers (in order of appearance):
Mudar Al-Khufash
Armeghan Taheri
Sharonda Quainoo
Pêdra Costa
Mmakgosi Kgabi
Saboura Naqshband
Luiza Prado
Maithu Bùi
Samara Daioub
Daniela Zambrano Almidón
TRANSCRIPT
Mudar Al-Khufash
For me, it’s evident art is politics because politics decide the art. Politics decide what is audible and what is inaudible. What is thinkable and what is unthinkable and what is seen, what can be said and who can say it and who has the talent also to speak. So these decisions are not spontaneous, so to say, they are based on systems determined by policies. And policies that shared in communities, are put there, to distribute time and space and what kind of activities are happening with these community spaces.
What I mean by this for example, me speaking today is political as a racialised person. Being invited into this space… my body does hold double significance. So it’s my presence here in the room, but also you know the political presence. Also having an access to this platform, to have the time to speak and being invited by Anisha is also is a political decision and political act in itself.
Pêdra Costa
A lot people ask me why I started to make performance or how I started to make performance.. and when I was reflecting about this question I realised, it was not my decision. It was the decision of the patriarchal society. The queerphobic society. When they put me in a place or space, of being a target, as a person that could not survive or could not be part of this society. And then when I had my first opportunity to make a theatre workshop and from the theatre workshop I was invited to make a theatre piece. When I was 16 years old for the first time I was stepping on a stage and the end of piece, a bunch of people, a lot of people applauded me, gave me applause. Like yessss. And I preferred this. I prefer this: to be myself on a stage, to be recognised, to be… how can I say. It’s still morning and I woke up early… I prefer to receive this kind of reaction than the violent reactions in the street every day in the schools, in my nuclear family and so on.
Mmakgosi Kgabi
Is it a performance or is it life? Because it’s happening in real time but it’s being done in front of an audience. And at the time the purpose that it served, as the artist, it was serving me with the need to come out as a queer child. So first the artist creates for themselves and that becomes ‘Oh that is a work of art’. Which then serves the public or serves the community in the politics and how its either emancipating for marginalised voices, or it’s either something enjoyable to look at, or its comical to look at, using the clown in part of the comedy of presentation or the skills of performance. But it came from a personal story. So there is always for me this blurred line between the art and politics, when does it shift. When does it stop serving the artist and start serving community?
Armeghan Taheri
I have to be honest, I sometimes have the feeling that I.. I’m a better teacher than artist, sometimes. And I have to say it honestly, because I think I know how to teach well because I know what I would have needed as someone who… or what I needed to hear, or how someone would have guided me, who would have held me, who wouldn’t have shamed me. Or who would have said to me that art doesn’t mean when you go to a museum and see something really old, which is majestic in terms of skill, but perhaps gives you nothing in terms of feeling. Rather, art means nothing other than what we already do on a daily basis; whether you cook, whether you dress, whether you speak, whether you invent new words with your friends, as you did at school – keeping up the whole culture of your school by somehow throwing new outfits, new styles, new ways of speaking into the school. Which me and my friends didn’t see as art at all back then, or which we were simply denied back then. And somehow recognising that and seeing that… I wish someone had seen that in me back then as a skill and as creativity, that someone had told me back then that it was something that mattered. Something you can get further into.
Labels… art, artist, etc. they really have to be discarded. They were created to maintain a status quo. There is no such thing as art and no art. There is no such thing as the artist and not the artist. These are all made up concepts, they don’t exist at all. When I think about who the most creative people in my life are, they are people who don’t have any time, or who would never call themselves artists, they are people who work hard for their lives and who don’t have any time to say: ‚oh, what I’ve just created here, that’s my so and so‘. Instead, they just do life, they just create life, they just create spaces. They do it automatically, they already know exactly how to creatively design a space so that it is conducive to creativity. These are people who already, they can cook a meal with just their feeling, who know what a person needs to comfort that person. They will create and make that meal with very few ingredients that they have, and they will never say about themselves ‚ah I made something‘. Or they sew, they sew a dress out of something from very few fabrics and they have created that without calling themselves art or artist in any way. And that’s why it’s always a bit funny to talk about it, about art and culture, when I don’t actually believe that these binaries exist.
Luiza Prado
I think I use my artistic practice to understand these things and to try to understand how these really broad, wide infrastructures, these political infrastructures, how they end up manifesting in really significant ways in our lives in our psyches and in our family histories. Let me show you a couple of works where I look at this a little bit. When I finished my Phd I had looked into all of these really horrible form so violence inflicted on people, mostly people with uteruses, and particularly people belonging to the global majority who are often used as test subjects for technologies that are not even meant to benefit them, in the first place. Which is the case for instance for the birth control pill, which was tested on people in Puerto Rico, people who were living in slums, in prisons, in mental hospitals, it’s so Foucauldian the whole thing. Its insane. All of the disciplinary enclosures they were testing on people. And ultimately that medication was not meant for them. Yes it was important, I’m not denying that. But it was a medication that was developed for people in the West for, as Paul Preciado says in his book Testojunkie, for white middle class liberal housewife in the west. So it was really harsh to look into all these histories of really profound forms of violence. Really horrible forms of violence. So when I finished I decided that I would look into plants. Because that is something that I felt, it felt like a way out of this cycle of horror. And I wanted to find that, I wanted to find that hope, I wanted to find those forms of making worlds together, I guess.
Saboura Naqshband
So here you see some of the photographs of the Sirkhane Darkroom that Serbest did with his kids. Basically what I wanted to do before, in this lecture/ seminar, is that I would like to go through some of the questions that I worked on with the children through the photographs and also give you a chance to think about those questions. Those questions are broadly around borders, identity and the notion of home. The first question that we thought of working with in the school and in the classroom was just to simply ask what are borders? What do border signify for you? What do they mean for you? Let me just give you one minute, so you can jot down some thoughts or maybe a sentence of what do borders signify for you? What does the border mean to you personally? Maybe just write down 3-5 words that come up spontaneously as an association to what borders signify for you and in your life. I will just give you half a minute to do that.
So borders could be either physical borders or symbolic borders. It was interesting in the classroom because one of the other questions has to do with, that we asked the children, had to do with what are differences, what are communalities, what are things that separate or divide us. So that really brought us close to also touching upon the question of gender, question of class, questions of race within the classroom and differences amongst us and how do we deal with those differences intersectional. The metaphor for the border really helps us really to understand what could be boundaries maybe and in a positive sense. To look at capacities that we have and also things that we want to protect. So that was something that we were playing with, something that I haven’t really gone into too much, because I do focus on the political side of what borders mean. But it’s something to further reflect on and it’s still a work in process. So, I stumbled upon ‘border as a method’ by Sandro Mezzadra, it’s a book from 2013 and I found it very helping to understand how the border functions epistemically. According to Mezzadra borders not only exclude they also include, how is life organised in and around and criss-crossing dangerous borders, militarised zones and no mans lands. So in and of itself you can say the border is not just a symbol but also can act as an epistemic framework. As many Latinx people who live on the US-borderlands say: we did not cross the border, the border crossed us. So this is also something quite interesting, that it is not self-evident it is something that has been socially constructed and can also change with time, even though it looks as if it were impossible in some of the contemporary debates.
Maithu Bùi
We got the funding as a research collective and it basically spells out ‘Curating through Conflict with Care. And I think because we are an all non-white and, how you say, female-read collective, we also experienced and encountered a lot of occasions in which the institution and other people approached us in a way that they hoped, you know, that we would give them a solution pill or a solution potion to their conflicts within the institutions. And so we learned, basically we also grew frustrated with that idea of care spreading all over institutional spaces like mushrooms, and being exploited and appropriated in a way that completely shifts the focus, and the conversation on that topic. And it is a way to make the institution appear more caring but it does not do in effect a lot of care work. Its not sustainable it is a performative act, it is sometimes an exhibition that just stays for three months. Maybe there is, in preparation, there are some months that, you know, that is invested ahead of time, but then in my experience most of these times within production time it is quite stressful. A lot of things are rushed, there is not much care being taken into consideration. So we thought about what are the ground works that you need to have in order to enter these spaces beforehand, before you enter these spaces. So we thought about what you could include in those contracts what should you demand to also practice to demand more care work, actual care work.
Samara Daioub
What interests do I have? What identities do I have? How do I move in this space versus other spaces? How do I approach work that comes out of myself, and how do I approach work that I do for others in terms of services? It’s also extremely important to approach my learning differently. I think what also happens when you come out of university is that you are drilled to put everything and every hour and every minute into your independent work, and to do it with all your heart and soul. And maybe you only know this way of working, and then you go into a company and you go about it in exactly the same way, for example, if you’re doing graphic design in an office, you go about designing a flyer with the same passion. And I think it’s important to differentiate for yourself – where do I put my energy and how, what is a service? How do I protect my own creative capital? And, unfortunately, also to learn to separate that a little in order to somehow separate the energies that you have and not get too lost in what is demanded of you in a commercial area. And I think that’s the conclusion for me for this little talk.
It is always helpful to look at yourself before you deal with a topic that is perhaps a little removed from you. And it’s always good to be true to yourself, even if you have to earn money and even if you do a job that you like. Nevertheless, it is always important to keep a certain distance somehow. And not to allow yourself to be reduced to one thing from the outside, and to make yourself more digestible.
Daniela Zambrano Almidón
I am now at a time when I am still thinking about how we can think strategically in such a difficult political situation. It’s not that we should only focus on our own issues, because we are human beings and we connect with everyone and with nature. We have to take this context very seriously. When we think in terms of politics, we have to think: what is our position? What privileges do we have? Also in art, although we might not get that kind of money… but our work is our ideas and our artwork. Art could also be quite political, and art could bypass other sensibilities when people have no idea about something, so we can use our art as a message. For me it was very important to give all these messages from my neighbourhood, from my brother or sister in the press or other places. I didn’t have that many opportunities myself, but nevertheless in art an image remains for eternity. We have to take art very seriously and always remain in solidarity. At all levels. It’s not a recipe, but with the heart. I learnt a lot of things at university, but I learnt a lot of things from my grandmother, and we have to be serious and work with our hearts.
Sharonda Quainoo
The topic of representation of Black art, and when I look down I have my little notes here. My questions are actually: Do we need representation? How do Black artists express themselves in the visual arts or in visual art in general? And then the question of what notion of art there is and in what context are the artists, but also their art in particular. I mean, there are always boundaries of, where is it representation, where is it exploitation? Especially when you consider where art is exhibited, which people are behind it, all these questions. And then the question is it an actual celebration of these artists and their art or is it something you jump on because it’s a supposed trend.
Now we come to the definition of art and context. It was important to me to show artists who firstly work in different contexts but who also deal with the notion of art. Because first and foremost, the definition of art: what is it? Who determines the framework? Where do we move towards and perhaps away from it? And it’s clear when we look at it, and I mean I can only talk about an „African context“, that this concept of art that we have adopted and that we also contribute to is very westernised. The question is also what it would look like if that wasn’t the case. But you have to go back a lot further, what is called ancient African art are mainly things that we can see in ethnological museums. And that’s where it starts with the themes of theft, robbery… Putting that in context too, especially because when I think of African art, ancient African art, I never think of works of art, I always think of works of art but never works of art that are hanging on a wall somewhere. That was displayed somewhere, somehow, so that people could come and look at it, but it was always something lived. It was always something we lived with, it was integrated into our rituals, it was integrated into our traditions.