Karin Michalski
Utopia/Dystopia revisited
Block seminar, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Saturdays/Sundays, 30.5./31.5. & 13./14.6.2026, each 10-17 Uhr, Hardenbergstr. 33, room 110

Exhibition visits:
Sunday, 31.5., 11-18 h, Hamburger Bahnhof (u.a. Rieckhallen): exhibitions Shilpa Gupta & Jeremy Shaw - Museum in Motion A Collection for the 21st Century
Saturday, 13.6., 10-17 h, Gropius Bau (u.a. im „Waiting Room“ von Rirkrit Tiravanija): exhibition Peter Hujar & Marina Abramović
Sunday, 14.6., 11-18 h, KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Vermittlungsraum), group exhibition: Kyiv Biennal - A Bird That Cannot Land

Registration in Moodle starts 9.4.2026: https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=3035
Enrolment Key: revisiting

National and international conflicts, the aftermath of disasters, and social injustices repeatedly give rise in cultural studies and artistic works to scenarios and conceptual frameworks that allow us to rethink or expand upon the potential of a given situation. This often gives rise to utopian or dystopian visions of the future, which in turn allow for insights into the analysis of current social situations and also offer suggestions for a re-examination of historical conditions.

“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of the moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” J. E. Munoz, Cruising Utopia

The seminar will examine texts in cultural studies, particularly those from the fields of postcolonial/decolonial and feminist-queer theory, and relate them to current examples of video and performance art. The seminar aims to create a space for reflection on what utopian thinking and action might mean today.

Literature:
Gordon, Avery (2018), The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins, New York: Fordham University Press.
Haschemi Yekani, Elahe (2017), Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political.

Requirements for the non-graded certificate: regular and active participation, and a 10-minute presentation on a text or a work of art.

Karin Michalski works as a lecturer, film and video art curator, and artist in Berlin. She studied journalism, political science, and education at the universities of Mainz and Berlin as well as film directing at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb). In 2016, she published the artist’s edition “An Unhappy Archive” with Edition Fink, Zurich, and in 2015, the book “I is for Impasse. Affective Queer Connections in Theory_Activism_Art” with bbooks, Berlin. She works as a lecturer (including at the University of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Braunschweig University of Art, and the University of Potsdam). From 2015 to 2018, she held the visiting professorship for Art and Media Studies at the KHM in Cologne.