On(going) Trauma #5 – Timeliness: Fragments Between Past and Future

For the fifth encounter of the discursive series On(going) Trauma at Vierte Welt Berlin guests and audience present are invited to collectively address questions regarding trauma’s complex effects on temporality and how these are being explored, transformed or conveyed in artistic (and research) practices. Together, we will be focusing on the repetitive and sudden presence (– the timeliness –) of traumata between past experiences and possible future scenarios, on non-linear fragmentation of individual and collective memories, and on its transgenerational traces inscribed throughout personal histories. Trauma will be discussed as holes and portals for temporalities and voices, as un-healing wounds in poetry, texts, and language as such (Katharina Ludwig), as vocal echos of past violences shifting in time within the streets of Ukraine’s city Kharkiv (Mykola Ridnyi) and as a poetic excavation of identity, displacement and the collective scars of conflict, exploring how trauma reshapes language, with poetry bearing witness to the unspeakable effects of ongoing crises (Ghayath Almadhoun).

With  Ghayath Almadhoun, Katharina Ludwig, Mykola Ridnyi

Screening  Mykola Ridnyi “Regular Places” (film, 30 minutes)

Awareness  Mine Pleasure Bouvar

Co-hosted/curated by Anna-Lena Werner & Katharina Ludwig

Foto  Katharina Ludwig “Woundlickers’ Gloves” (ongoing work cycle), photo: Katharina Ludwig

English language

Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian poet born in Damascus in 1979 and moved to Sweden in 2008. Almadhoun has published five volumes of poetry in Arabic, the latest being “I Brought You a Severed Hand” in 2024, and his poetry has been translated into nearly 30 languages. He has created several poetry films, collaborated extensively with artists and scholars, and curated numerous events, readings, and literary anthologies. In February 2025, his new book “I Have Brought You a Severed Hand” will be published in the U.S. in English translation by Action Books and in Germany in German translation “Ich habe Dir eine abgetrennte Hand mitgebracht” by Karl Rauch Verlag. Almadhoun currently divides his time between Berlin and Stockholm.

Katharina Ludwig is a writer, researcher, artist, and sometimes poet based in Berlin and London. Her/their work is concerned with narrative holes and the insurrectionary poetics of the ‘wounded text’. Katharina’s work has been published, shown, performed, and read internationally, by a.o. 3am Magazine, Zeno Press, Tripwire Journal, Strings Magazine, antiphony journal, Ma Bibliothèque and Nightboat Books (forthcoming). Her/their book ‘The Hole: An Insurrectionary Poetics’ will be published next year through a collaboration between Ma Bibliothèque and Cutt Press. In addition to her/their own practice Katharina works on editorial, curatorial, and educational projects and is the co-editor of Vortext, a poetry mail subscription magazine.

Mykola Ridnyi is an artist and curator born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Currently he lives and works in Berlin where he holds a guest professorship for multimedia art at Berlin University of the Arts. Ridnyi works across media ranging from collective actions in public space, film, photography, to site-specific installations. In recent works he experiments with nonlinear montage and the collage of documentary and fiction, drawing on the contrast between fragility and resilience of individual stories and collective histories. Ridnyi co-founded SOSka group, an art collective, and SOSka gallery-lab, an artist-run-space in Kharkiv. Since realising his curatorial project Armed and Dangerous (2017 – 2021), Ridnyi developed a platform for collaboration between Ukrainian moving image artists and filmmakers. Since 2022 he curated several screening programs of Ukrainian film and video art in DAAD gallery in Berlin, MAXXI Rome, Museum Folkwang Essen, National Gallery in Sofia, amongst others.

Anna-Lena Werner is a Berlin-based researcher and curator. Since 2019 she is member of staff at the Institute for Theatre Studies at FU Berlin, where she completed her Ph.D. with a study on how contemporary aesthetics challenge trauma as the unrepresentable, published with transcript, Bielefeld. She worked on research projects with Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, HKW Berlin amongst others and runs the online magazine artfridge.de since 2011. She is co-initiator of On(going) Trauma at Vierte Welt Berlin and currently focuses on artistic deconstructions of the image politics of violence.

On(going) Trauma offers a forum to talk about and learn from artistic and curatorial research practices in dealing with trauma from plural perspectives, as well as repositioning its concept. Different practices are being presented, in which situated knowledges, systematic power and (state) violence structures are discussed. In six rounds of encounters, the series addresses the image politics of violence; the growth of right-wing presence; bodily collectiveness and multiple personas as strategies of resistance; fictional counter-narratives and irritations; the fragmentary temporality of trauma (14.12.24) as well as private conflicts and public discourses (25.01.25).

On(going) Trauma acts as an experimental format of exchange and encounter, designed as an open conversation format and a space of solidarity and humanitarian perspectives.

On(going) Trauma is a discursive series in 6 parts (May 2024 – January 2025), initiated by Anna- Lena Werner and Institut für Widerstand im Postfordismus / Elisa Müller in cooperation with Vierte Welt Berlin.

More informationen to the whole series: LINK

Team / On(going) Trauma

With  Anujah Fernando, Alper Turan, Dominique Haensell, Ghayath Almadhoun, Hai Anh Trieu, Jenny Mahla, Isaac Chong Wai, İz Öztat, Katharina Ludwig, Lada Nakonechna, Lene Albrecht, Lela Ahmadzai, Luce deLire, Mine Pleasure Bouvar, Minh Duc Pham, Mykola Ridnyi, Natis, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Omer Fast, Rabih Mroué, Shira Wachsmann, Zwoisy Mears-Clarke

Concept & Curation  Anna Lena Werner, Elisa Müller (Institut für Widerstand im Postfordismus)

Co-curators  Mykola Ridnyi, Hai Anh Trieu, Alper Turan, Katharina Ludwig

Awareness  Mine Pleasure Bouvar

Project Assistance  Ariadna Blanch López, Sebastian Eis

Graphic Design  Lea Kontak

Press  Nora Gores

Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds