Karin Michalski
“BOYCOTT?!” … Artists as Activists
Online block seminar, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Saturdays/Sundays, 23.4./24.4. and 7.5./8.5.2022, each 10-17 h

Art production, exhibitions and cultural events are taking place in a politically tense world. Boycotts are sometimes initiated to protest against the influence, political abuse and grievances of governments and also of corporate money. What political standpoint is my own and what does it mean for my work as artist and cultural producer? What is the art world expecting from me because of so-called cultural markers? The seminar will try to discuss current and also past boycotts of artists including Tania Bruguera (with the actual boycott against the Havana Biennial) and Nan Goldin (and P.A.I.N., the activist group she founded to combat the opioid crisis organizing protests against major art institutions in New York, London and Paris). In a second part of the seminar, we will engage with the concepts of two upcoming International art exhibitions: the documenta 15 in Kassel and the 59th Venice Biennale. Works of some of the involved artists will be in focus: Tania Bruguera/Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt, Marwa Arsanios (both are part of the artistic lumbung concept of the documenta curated by the artist collective ruangrupa) and Naomi Rincón Gallardo (participant in the Mexican Pavilion, 59th Venice Biennale).

Literature:
José Esteban Muñoz, Performing greater Cuba: Tania Bruguera and the burden of guilt, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2000.
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications, Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Minneapolis 1999.

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credits: Short presentation, research on a boycott of an artist or on documenta 15 or the 59th Venice Biennale.

Karin Michalski works as artist and film- and video art curator. In 2016 she edited the artist edition An Unhappy Archive (together with Sabian Baumann) at Edition Fink, Zurich and in 2015 the collaborative book I is for Impasse. Affektive Queerverbindungen in Theorie_Aktivismus_Kunst which was released at bbooks, Berlin. Curatorial projects include An Unhappy Archive Part II at Kunsthaus Aargau 2021 and STILL IN TOUCH - on queer friendships & poetic forms of resistance, a clipclub event@District Berlin 2021. More information on www.karinmichalski.de.