Artist talk with Rajkamal Kahlon and Catarina Simão
on Friday, November 11, 2016, 19:00 Seminar room ERH | in English language
The feverish ghosts of art is an exhibition about the relationship between politics and aesthetics. In these times of ongoing crises, which have political as well as economic consequences, extreme discontent often manifests itself in various forms of (non-)violent protest movements and uprisings that bring down governments. However, such actions usually fail to bring about even short-term structural change. This is the context to look back at radicalism and anti-colonial revolution in the Cold War era, when ideas and belief in the possibility of fundamental social change spread around the globe.
The exhibition focuses on contemporary artworks that reveal a new interest in the revolutionary ideas of the 1960s and 1970s. They focus primarily on actions that expressed political ideas in a violent manner in order to bring about far-reaching social change.
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 (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: