Artist Talk with Rajkamal Kahlon und Catarina Simão

Artist Talk with Rajkamal Kahlon und Catarina Simão

On Friday, 11th of November 2016, 7pm Seminar raum |in English language

The Fevered Specters of Art is a project about the relationship between politics and aesthetics. In our time of constant crises that impact both the political and the economic sphere, the level of extreme discontent is often manifested in different forms of (non-)violent protest movements and insurgencies that overthrow governments. Nevertheless, most such actions are not even able to establish short-term structural changes. This is exactly the context in which we look back on the epoch of Cold War radicalism and anti-colonial revolution, during which ideas of and the belief in the possibility of radical social change permeated the globe. 

The Fevered Specters of Art presents a variety of approaches that, through specific events and historical contexts, survey the theories and practices of radical politics of the 1960 and ’70s.

The project also investigates the ways in which artists rethink the possibilities of new political subjects and how complex socio-historical connections can be adequately questioned and revisited in the realm of art. There is a particular focus on artistic strategies that involve a variety of narrative structures and cinematic ways of storytelling, including the use of documents and archives.

Rajkamal Kahlon

Rajkamal Kahlon is an American artist based in Germany and the U.S. Her career long work with colonial archives reflects on the violence created by The War on Terror. Kahlon’s iconic political work, which insists on the centrality of the body in the experience of violence, changes the sum of politics into a record of intimate pain. Working with conceptual strategies, Kahlon emancipates the meaning of texts and images created by regimes of power through the use of absurdist humor and critical aesthetics. Texts and images, once liberated from former narratives, offer the potential for new forms of poetic resistance. The audience is presented with a shifting moral ground where the act of viewing is both complicit with and precedes the production of violence.

Catarina Simão 

Catarina Simão (Lisbon, 1972) is an artist and researcher who lives and works between Maputo and Lisbon. With her recent project, she casts her interest on inquiring common cultural and visual heritage of violence and emancipation. Throughout a revisionist lens on the history of the Independence Movement in Mozambique, she creates what can be understood as reverse museology. Her work has been presented at Serralves Museum, Manifesta 8 Biennial, Africa.cont, New Museum, Reina Sofia Museum, School of Kyiev, Eva International 2016 and also in Mozambique and Lebanon. Simão publishes books and articles connected to her researches: Uhuru (tranzit / apart label, 2015) and 17 Introduction for the Mozambique Institute (2014).
Ntimbe Caetano is the outcome of Simão’s research on the concept of Liberated Zones (a military and social space created during the 60-70’s in Mozambique and Tanzania). Simão’s focus is on how, during the Mozambique guerrilla war, radical ideas were supported and transmitted through pedagogy and other knowledge expressions linked to oral transmission - like songs and dance - enacting the seeds for political Change.