On(going) Trauma #3 – Emanzipationen und kollektive Resilienz: Körperlichkeit und Trauma

Welche Art der Auseinandersetzung mit Gewalt können die Künste schaffen? Wie lassen sich Traumata erfahrbar machen, wenn Worte scheitern?
Die Reihe „On(going) Trauma“ öffnet gemeinsam mit Ko-Kurator*innen, Gäst*innen und den anwesenden Teilnehmer*innen einen Raum, um aus pluralen Perspektiven über künstlerische Forschungspraktiken im Umgang mit Trauma zu sprechen und von ihnen zu lernen. Wie ist ein Miteinander trotz unterschiedlicher Voraussetzungen, Betroffenheit und Involviertheit möglich? Vorgestellt werden diverse künstlerische und kuratorische Praktiken, in denen situiertes Wissen und Hintergründe systematischer Macht- und Gewaltstrukturen diskutiert, aktivistische und marginalisierte Perspektiven beleuchtet werden. In sechs Gesprächsrunden werden Diskurse aufgegriffen, die sich mit verschiedenen Schwerpunkten auseinandersetzen. Die Veranstaltungen sind als solidarische Netzwerktreffen, als offene Runden konzipiert, bei denen alle Teilnehmenden dazu eingeladen sind, mit zusprechen.

Weitere Informationen zur Gesamtreihe: LINK ZUR ÜBERBLICKSEITE

#3 Emanzipationen und kollektive Resilienz: Körperlichkeit und Trauma

Der Körper speichert Erfahrungen und Wissen – er ist eine physische Erinnerung sowohl an die viszerale Verletzlichkeit, als auch an mehr-als menschliche, kollektive Resilienz. Er wird instrumentalisiert, um hegemoniale Narrative, hierarchische Systeme und Gewalt gegen Gruppen fortzuführen.
Für die dritte Veranstaltung der diskursiven Reihe „On(going) Trauma“ in der Vierten Welt Berlin sind Künstler*innen und das anwesende Publikum eingeladen, Strategien zu vermitteln, zu teilen und sich durch ihre individuellen Praktiken mit den Verflechtungen von Körper, Erinnerungen und Traumata auseinanderzusetzen.
Methoden der Entkörperung und Desidentifikation, fiktionale oder ritualisierte Körperlichkeiten, sowie Anpassungen verschiedener (auch kollektiver) Persönlichkeiten werden kritisch als Möglichkeiten diskutiert, historische und politische Wahrheiten, Rechte und Narrative zurückzugewinnen.

Sprache: englisch, Übersetzung für Zuschauer*innen ins Deutsche bei Bedarf

Mit Isaac Chong Wai, İz Öztat, Natis, Jenny Mahla
Moderiert und kuratiert von Anna-Lena Werner & Alper Turan

Photo: After, İz Öztat, 2016–ongoing
Marking tape, dimensions variable
Installation view from “Transit”, Zilberman Berlin
Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman

Die sechsteilige Kunst- und Diskursreihe On(going) Trauma ist initiiert vom Institut für Widerstand/Elisa Müller im Postfordismus und Anna-Lena Werner in Kooperation mit Vierte Welt in Berlin, gefördert durch Hauptstadtkulturfonds.

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On(going) Trauma

Initiated by Anna-Lena Werner & Elisa Müller / Institut für Widerstand im Postfordismus

more informationen on the complete series: LINK

#3  Emancipations and Collective Resilience: On the Body and Trauma

Storing experiences and knowledges, the body is a physical reminder of both visceral vulnerability and more-than-human (collective) resilience. It is being instrumentalized to continue hegemonic narratives, hierarchical systems and violence against groups.
For the third iteration of the discursive series “On(going) Trauma” at Vierte Welt Berlin, artists and the audience present are invited to share their strategies, engaging in the entanglements of the body, memory and trauma through their distinctive practices. Methods of dis-embodiment and dis-identification, fictional or ritualized bodies, as well as adaptions of different personas and collectivized selves will be critically discussed as possibilities to reclaim historical and political truths, rights and narratives.

With Isaac Chong Wai, İz Öztat, Natis, Jenny Mahla
Hosted and curated by Anna-Lena Werner & Alper Turan

Isaac Chong Wai is a Berlin-based artist from Hong Kong, using performance, video, installation, photography, and drawing as mediators to investigate contemporary global phenomena. His work transforms the emotions, tensions, and memories from human interactions into performative materiality and immersive experiences. Treading the line between the individual and the collective, he examines the vulnerability of the body and the inherent violence within social systems and historical traumas and imagines alternative microcosms of human relationality.

İz Öztat: in her collective and individual artistic practice spanning diverse media defined by her research, İz Öztat explores the persistence of violent histories through forms, materials, space, and language. She responds to absences in official historiography through spectral, intergenerational, and speculative fictions. İz Öztat fabricates the (auto)biography of Zişan (1894-1970), who appears to her as a historical figure, a ghost, and an alter ego. She takes on Zişan’s archives and interprets them through her practice to construct a complex temporality of action that enables the suppressed past to intervene in the increasingly authoritarian present. Öztat participated in artist residency programs in Amman, Berlin, Dublin, London, Istanbul, Madrid, Mexico City, Oslo, Paris and Yerevan. Öztat is a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Programme (2024-25). Selected exhibitions include Self-determination: A Global Perspective, IMMA, Dublin (2023); The Colony, Schwules Museum, Berlin (2018); Tamawuj, Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); Land without Land, Heidelberger Kunstverein, (2016); Salt Water: A Theory on Thought Forms, 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015).

Natis‘ conceptually-driven painterly practice embodies and instrumentalizes artist personas like Hasan Aksaygın, Hank Yan Agassi, and Hasso Weiss Ehrenwerth, challenges conventional notions of artist identity and interrogates the socio-political constructs that shape them and the reception of their works. Through the adoption of different personas Natis undertakes a deliberate process of de-identification. Each persona serves as a strategic departure from fixed identities imposed by societal norms and historical narratives. With Hasan, Natis explores (post-)memory through the queer-feminist/postcolonial perspectives, and examines the Cyprus dispute and the myths around homosexual “oriental” bodies. A post-human mutation of himself, Hank (pronoun: it, its) occasionally visits our time on Earth, and practices earthly materialities with a perspective that perceives (non-)human. Hasso Weiss Ehrenwerth is a British-German abstract expressionist who, as a historical white male artist, haunts the present.

Jenny Mahla (they/them) is a dramaturg, researcher and facilitator based in Berlin. They collaborate with various dance artists and have a strong focus on intersectionality within arts and academia. Their undergraduate paper about historically grown images of masculinity in ballet has contributed significantly to the world premiere of Iván Pérez’s “The Male Dancer”, a creation for the Paris Opera Ballet at Palais Garnier in 2018. After this successful first collaboration, they worked with Pérez as a dramaturg for Dance Theatre Heidelberg from 2018 to 2021 at Theater und Orchester Heidelberg. Since 2021 they are based in Berlin and are freelancing in dance dramaturgy and writing as well as being a facilitator for various encounter and exchange formats. Currently finishing their master’s degree at FU Berlin in Critical Dance Studies, they are researching and working at the intersection of Queer Theory, Critical Race Studies and Disability Studies. In the winter semester 2023/24, they taught the seminar “Intersectionally Queer: Decolonial Readings of Dance” together with Prof. Dr. Lucia Ruprecht for the master’s program of Critical Dance Studies.

Alper Turan, born in Turkey, is a curator and writer currently based in New York, Berlin, and Istanbul. His ongoing practice and research draw from transnational and transtemporal queer strategies, abstractions, archives, and fiction. Turan is a 2023–24 curatorial fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and was awarded a 2023–24 General Idea fellowship from the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. He is co-founder of STRÜKTÜR, a Berlin-based association dedicated to forming and expanding the support structures for arts & artists from the geography of Turkey. In response to escalating anti-queer rhetorics in Turkey and beyond, he experiments with undetectable, uncensorable queer aesthetics.

Anna-Lena Werner is a Berlin-based researcher and curator. Since 2019 she is member of the staff at the Institute for Theatre Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, seminar for Culture and Media, where she completed her Ph.D. with the study “Let Them Haunt Us. How Contemporary Aesthetics Challenge Trauma as the Unrepresentable.“ She (co-)conducted several inter-institutional research projects i.e. with Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and HKW Berlin and runs the online magazine artfridge.de since 2011. In her current post doc research, she focuses on historical and current artistic deconstructions of the (media) image politics of war and zones of conflict.

foto: After, İz Öztat, 2016–ongoing
Marking tape, dimensions variable
Installation view from “Transit”, Zilberman Berlin
Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman