On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices

Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-3-0358-0506-2
Verlag: diaphanes

Buch, Englisch, 384 Seiten, Format (B × H): 120 mm x 190 mm, Gewicht: 380 g

Reihe: Critical Stances

What forms does withdrawal—meaning either that which withdraws itself or which is being withdrawn—take in artistic and cultural practices? What movement(s) does it create or follow in specific contexts, and with what theoretical, material, and political consequences? The contributors of this book address these questions in a variety of writing practices, each focusing on specific scenes. These scenes are organized under three parts that structure the chapters: Passivity, Failure, and Refusal; Disappearance and Remembrance; Resilience and Resistance. Through interviews, artistic and literary texts, visual contributions, and academic texts, the authors explore various modalities of withdrawal ranging from a silencing of critical voices to a political and aesthetic strategy of refusal. The enforced disappearance of government opponents, for instance, may be implemented as a means of state violence, but withdrawing may also mean the decision not to participate in such violence, either through forms of passivity or refusal. Moreover, in the neoliberal logic of resilience, the relationship between subjective agency and imposition from the outside remains tense. The aim of this book is to tackle these tensions, as well as the ambiguities and complexities of withdrawal.

Autoren/Hrsg.

John, Rebecca Hanna

Schneider, Thorsten

Dávila, Sebastián Eduardo

Jordan, Ulrike

Sieber, Judith

Wulff, Nele

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

0				(Lauren Berlant)
7	-	28	On Withdrawal—Introduction	(Sebastián Eduardo Dávila, Rebecca Hanna John, Ulrike Jordan, Thorsten Schneider, Judith Sieber, Nele Wulff)
31	-	46	Self-Loss as a Form of Knowledge	(Kathrin Busch)
47	-	70	They Call It Idlewild Extended II	(Helen Cammock)
71	-	92	“Germany Must Detox, Germany Has To Go on Withdrawal”	(Mutlu Ergün-Hamaz, Rebecca Hanna John)
93	-	114	War in the Head: Meditating with Bataille	(Knut Ebeling)
115	-	136	“Very little resistance from the Orient’s part”? On Moments of Failure in Hermann Goetz’s and Robert Lachmann’s Orientalist Journeys	(Arnika Ahldag, Rebecca Hanna John)
137	-	156	“It takes a lot longer to build a city than it does to strike a target.” Reversing Partition as an Art Practice	(Rebecca Hanna John, Akram Zaatari)
159	-	176	In the Aftermath of Violence. On Being Present and Calling Into Presence	(Sebastián Eduardo Dávila, Ulrike Jordan, Diana Taylor)
177	-	194	Feeling Presences: Regina José Galindo’s Acts of Becoming Someone Else, Something Else	(Marivi Véliz)
195	-	208	Purple Panic: 43	(Pinar Ögrenci)
209	-	236	A Psychiatric Clinic, a Monastery, a City and a River. On the (Artistic) Legibility of Disappearance in Topography	(Sebastián Eduardo Dávila, Ulrike Jordan)
237	-	256	On Behalf of Grief and Anger. Against an Economy of Remembrance	(Deniz Utlu)
261	-	278	The Discreet Charm of Catastrophe. Vulnerability, Resilience, and Critique in the Era of Multiple Crises	(Stefanie Graefe)
279	-	296	Artists in Resilience, or: How to Organize Yourself?	(Thorsten Schneider)
297	-	316	The Desire of the Exhausted. Notes on Resilience, Resistance and Adraneia	(Sofia Bempeza)
317	-	338	“Let us be a gear in the machinery and at the same time the obstacle of its operation.” Some Thoughts on House of Tupamaras’ Manifesto El fracaso es mi estilo	(Nele Wulff)
339	-	358	Refusal of Form: The Critical Potential of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Charts for the Paris World’s Fair, 1900	(Judith Sieber)
359	-	376	Unlearning the Common	(Lauren Berlant)
377	-	378	List of Illustrations
379	-	384	Contributors

Über Autor(innen)

John, Rebecca Hanna
Rebecca Hanna John is an art historian and author invested in transnational perspectives on art. She studied art history, literature and media studies at the University of Konstanz, Paris University Diderot, Humboldt University of Berlin, as well as at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. In 2019, she joined the DFG graduate program “Cultures of Critique” at Leuphana University Lu¨neburg, with a PhD project on archival critique and transnational narratives in contemporary art practices.

Jordan, Ulrike
Ulrike Jordan is an art historian and cultural producer. Prior to joining the DFG graduate program “Cultures of Critique” at Leuphana University Lu¨neburg in 2019, she was working in various cultural institutions in Berlin like Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien and Maxim Gorki Theater. She is an active member of neue Gesellschaft fu¨r bildende Kunst (nGbK), where she collaboratively realized the projects Im Dissens (2019) and 50 Jahre neue Gesellschaft (2019). Together with Naomi Hennig she curated the exhibition Context is Half the Work. A Partial History of the Artist Placement Group (Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, 2015 / Summerhall Edinburgh, 2016).

Wulff, Nele
Nele Wulff is an arts scholar and cultural producer and is pursuing her PhD in the DFG graduate program “Cultures of Critique” at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Her work focuses on artistic institutional critiques as well as queer-feminist critique. She has worked for various art projects and institutions, including dOCUMENTA (13), the Venice Biennale, and the Hamburg- based exhibition project Krankheit als Metapher. She has published articles in the journal feministische studien and the magazine Kultur und Gespenster.

Dávila, Sebastián Eduardo
Sebastián Eduardo Dávila Sebastián Eduardo Dávila’s PhD project deals with materiality in art practices from postwar Guatemala. He forms part of the DFG graduate program “Cultures of Critique” at Leuphana University Lu¨neburg. His articles and reviews have been published in journals such as Miradas, Re:Visions, Revista Poiésis and insurgencias.net, in the anthology Museums, Transculturality and the Nation State (ed. Susanne Leeb and Nina Samuel, 2022), and in the context of art exhibitions. He has spoken at conferences like “Worldviews: Latin American Art and the Decolonial Turn” (London/online, 2021) and “Seeing more Queerly in the 21st Century” (Miami, 2020), and is part of the collective VOCES de Guatemala en Berlín.

Sieber, Judith
Judith Sieber lives and works in Berlin. She was a member of the DFG graduate program “Cultures of Critique” at Leuphana University Lüneburg, from 2017 until 2022. Her dissertation, titled Kritik linearer Zeit, formulates a critique of the universalistic concept of the directed and linear timeline established via diagrams in eighteenth century England. Together with Marius Hanft and Lotte Warnholdt she edited the volume Weiterschreiben. Anschlu¨sse an Rebecca Ardners “Affirmation und Negation als Figuren der Kritik” (2020). Her texts and exhibition reviews have been published in, among others, AQNB, Arts of the Working Class and Rundbrief Fotografie. From 2015 to 2016 she was a Global Humanities Junior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Schneider, Thorsten
Thorsten Schneider is an author and art historian with a transdisciplinary background, who also teaches at several universities. Since 2019 he is part of the DFG graduate program “Cultures of Critique” at Leuphana University Lüneburg, where he is researching on ideology in the context of German art history since 1968 and its potential for a contemporary art critique. In 2018 he was curator in residence of the German state North Rhine Westphalia at Schloss Ringenberg. In 2019 he was honored by the Austrian artmagazine for his art critique. He is a member of the German section of AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art).