Feb 25, 2020

Talk with curator Berit Fischer

Date: Feb 25, 2020, 17:00 Uhr

Duration:

Location: Akademie Schloss Solitude / Guibal Saal

Radical Empathy Lab at Making Futures School 2019, Photo: Gary Hurst

Radical Empathy Lab at Making Futures School 2019, Photo: Gary Hurst

The Akademie Schloss Solitude invites interested persons to the presentation and subsequent talk with the curator Berit Fischer from Berlin/Germany. In her current work, she questions the curatorial possibilities of representation and display, and seeks new ways of actively involving protagonist in this process.

The event will be held in English.

Admission is free.

Where: Akademie Schloss Solitude, Guiba Hall
Solitude 3, 70197 Stuttgart​
When: Tuesday, Febraury 25, 2020 at 5 pm

»Holistic and Micropolitical Making of Social Empathy; an Approach on Post-Representational Curation «

Experimenting with micropolitical and holistic transdisciplinary advances, in which the cognitive reciprocally intertwines with the non-semiotic, Berit Fischer reconsiders in her recent work what an »ex-hibition« can be, how else ideas can be »ex-hibited« or rather »in-habited« and made experienced beyond curatorial forms of display, representation and beyond the consumption of in particular the visual. How can the curatorial achieve a more self-determined aesthetic and discursive form of practice, that not only questions the curator’s role and the paradigm in which she ought to operate, but one that actively engages and dissolves an on-looking audience; a practice that strives to nurture agency and partaking protagonists.

Through the Radical Empathy Lab –an on-going social and research laboratory for relational, alternative and holistic knowledge production– Fischer proposes what she calls »intra-« and »affective transformative curation«, that embraces what Brazilian theorist Suely Rolnik defines as »the knowing body«. A curation that emphasises the sensual and experiential and that sharpens our senses for an »active micropolitics«. In her curatorial approach she seeks creating »conscientization« (Paulo Freire), a critical consciousness towards exploring new forms of being together that momentarily allow to reflect, to re-feel and undo a reactionary an-aesthesia (Greek: an-aesthēsis: without sensation). The Radical Empathy Lab investigates the relation between micro and macro dimensions of agency. It encompasses recovering and re-learning subaltern knowledges, practices and forms of relating and of self-empowerment, that decolonise and de-subjectivate the (social) body and its relationality to the other.

Berit Fischer is a curator, spatial practitioner, researcher, and writer who has worked internationally since 1999. She holds a PhD from the Winchester School of Art at University of Southampton/UK. Her curatorial research interests lie on critical spatial practices, socially and holistically produced spaces, the specification of art as a producer of new knowledge, as a means to permeate the status quo, the creation of fields of action, and the development of spaces for critical engagement, affective encounter and relational learning. She has published articles in Afterall (London/Great Britain), Onomatopee (Eindhoven/Netherlands) and be Magazin (Berlin/Germany) amongst others, and both edited and contributed to the books New Spaces for Negotiating Art (and) Histories in Africa (co-edited with Kerstin Pinther and Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, 2015), Hlysnan: The Notion and Politics of Listening (2014), and Other Possible Worlds – Proposals on this Side of Utopia (2011). In addition, Berit Fischer is a Yoga practitioner since 1999 and received her Yoga teaching certification in 2013. She understands Yoga as a social and political practice and seeks awareness and connectivity within and around us in her practice and teachings.