• Fri 17 – Sun 19 10 2014 •
Reports to an Academy
A non-academic symposium, performative or otherwise
With HAIG AIVAZIAN, YOCHAI AVRAHAMI, CHRISTIAN VON BORRIES, KETI CHUKHROV, GABRIEL DHARMOO, HU FANG, FELIX KLOPOTEK, URIEL ORLOW, MANUEL PELMUȘ & ALEXANDRA PIRICI, MILO RAU, NAOMI RINCÓN GALLARDO, STEFAN WEIDNER and others
Reports to an Academy is a non-academic and emphatically theatrical three-day symposium of performative talks, visionary presentations, stand-up dialogues, musical pieces, and special “conference choreographies.” It challenges academic formats of representation, their showcasing of identity, and their framing of “global conditions.” Its title refers to a short story by Franz Kafka (performed at the symposium by Uriel Orlow) about an ape, who delivers a report on his own humanization to an academic commission. Artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, and dancers today find themselves often in a similar position to Kafka’s ape, faced with a choice between the cage of a zoo and satisfying the expectations of an audience in a music hall. Like Kafka’s character, they tend towards the performative option, and their “reports” on the complexity of human circumstance in a contemporary planetary world tell a story of their own post-identitarian condition, as well as holding promise for a very different, pluralistic, and non-oppressive Academy which creates a space of debate with the audience.
Over the course of the symposium, we will explore the phenomenon of the human zoo from the nineteenth century to the present. Fictitious and documentary narratives transport us from the formerly Jewish Lviv to the formerly Palestinian East Jerusalem and back again; from the New York hotel room where Dominique Strauss-Kahn had his grotesque episode to a much smaller room in Hong Kong where Edward Snowden, or someone who looks very much like him, was hiding. We might meet “not even” refugees who try to survive in a war zone, or even find ourselves in the middle of a dictionary of lies.
Venue: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Hahnenstrasse 6, 50667 Cologne and other locations
In German and English, partly with German translation
