Fragile Identities (2013/14)

Our identities are perpetually reinvented, (de)constructed, and narrated – yet they ultimately remain fragmentary and fragile. Specifically within our present age processes of identity formation are subjected to rapid changes and increasingly divergent challenges.

With its second yearly theme, the cx investigates the multifaceted and complex processes of identification we experience today from the perspective of different artistic and academic disciplines. A three-part symposium thematises fields and phenomena within which identities become fragile and unstable, and questions the limits of the pathological fragmentation of the self. Based on its conviction that identity issues play a significant role in reflecting their time, the cx investigates the fractures and adjacencies of contemporary identity construction with the intention of gaining insight into crises, periods of radical change, and the future potential of today’s world. The event is aimed at students and teachers at the academy, as well as the interested public.

Project class of photographer and film maker Tobias Zielony

Annual theme "Fragile Identities"

Summer term 2014

Portrait-Workshop

Tobias Zielony is a photographer and filmmaker. He lives in Berlin. He studied documentary photography at the University of Wales and at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. In his closely studied portraits Zielony engages with “incidental forms of the social,” the self-staging of his frequently adolescent protagonists and their demeanor in public space. Solo shows were dedicated to Zielony’s work, at inter alia Berlinische Galerie (2013), the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main (2011), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2011), the MAXXI Museum Rome (2010) and the Museum for Photography, Braunschweig (2010). In 2015 his works were shown in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Project class of film director uand scenarist Claire Denis

Annual theme "Fragile Identities"

Summer term 2014

In cooperation with the Department IV Documentary Film, University of Television and Film Munich (HFF)

Claire Denis (born April 21, 1948, Paris) is a Paris-based filmmaker and one of the major artistic voices of contemporary French cinema. She grew up partly in Cameron, Burkina and Djibouti as a daughter of a colonial-official. Claire Denis enrolled in the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (now École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l'Image et du Son) where she graduated in 1971. At the beginning of her film career, she worked as an assistant director to Dušan Makavejev, Costa Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders. Claire Denis made her film debut in 1988 with Chocolat, a luminous depiction of malaise of the post-colonial world. Since 2002 she has been Professor of Film at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Her work has dealt with themes of colonial and post-colonial West Africa, as well as issues in modern France.

Teaching at the cx also includes courses in English. Please find the complete course offer listed here with each seminar described in the respective teaching language.

Jahresthema „Fragile Identitäten"

„Me, myself and others". Repräsentationen des Selbst und des Anderen
(auch Kunstgeschichts-Modul D.05.09)
Dr. Susanne Witzgall

Raum E.O2.29, Akademiestr. 4
Zeit Mittwoch 14.00–16.00 Uhr, Vorbesprechung/Anmeldung: 09.04.2014,

Beginn: 23.04.2014
Kontakt This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Wir versichern uns unserer selbst und der Anderen meist über Bilder. Doch visuelle Repräsentationen enthüllen nicht einfach Identitäten, sondern scheinen sie im Zuge des Abbildungsprozesses neben der versuchten Rekonstruktion gleichsam zu dekonstruieren, zu verstellen oder neu zu produzieren. Das Seminar untersucht verschiedene gegenwärtige Strategien der künstlerischen, wissenschaftlichen und alltäglichen Repräsentationen des Selbst und der Anderen – von Ich-Beobachtungen über das Handy („Selfies") bis hin zu polizeilichen Phantombildern oder ethnographischen Repräsentationen des Fremden und deren Reflexionen in der zeitgenössischen Kunst. Der Fokus des Seminars wird dabei neben der Malerei vor allem auf den fotografischen Medien liegen, da die Fotografie nach Roland Barthes „historisch gesehen, als Kunst der Person begonnen (hat): ihrer Identität, ihres zivilen Standes ....".

Das Seminar ist als theoretische Ergänzung zur Projektklasse von Tobias Zielony gedacht, die sich dem fotografischen und filmischen Porträt widmet (siehe dort), kann aber auch als eigenständige Veranstaltung oder als Kunstgeschichtsmodul belegt werden.

Read Me: the digital Psyche / Lies Mich: die digitale Psyche
(Erasmus-Students and media theory modul philosophy E.02.09)
Prof Dr. Kerstin Stakemeier

Raum/Room E.O1.23, Akademiestr. 4
Zeit/Time Mittwoch/Wednesday 18.00–21.00 Uhr
Termine/Dates 23.04., 30.04., 14.05., 21.05., 04.06., 11.06., 25.06. und 09.07.2014
Please register with This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to be provided with material

This is a bilingual Lektüreseminar (English/German) in which we will read parts of Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's „Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia" of 1972, in which the authors offer an aesthetic, political and practical critique of psychoanalysis. Those close readings will be confronted with some more contemporary attempts to map out our states of being within today's digital economies, and trace the repercussions those digitizations have had in contemporary art, cinema, image cultures and body schemes. We will be discussing examples from film, online publishing, artistic and performance practices, art and political criticism as well as fictional writing.

Dies ist ein zweisprachiges Lektüreseminar (English/German), in dem wir Ausschnitte des von Gilles Deleuze und Felix Guattari 1972 veröffentlichten Buchs „Anti-Ödipus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie" lesen werden, in dem die Autoren eine ästhetische, politische und praktische Kritik der Psychoanalyse anbieten. Diese gemeinsame Lektüre wird ergänzt durch neuere Versuche, unsere Lebensformen innerhalb der digitalen Ökonomien der Gegenwart zu positionieren und ihren Eingang in die Gegenwartskunst, in Kino, Bildwelten und Körperbilder nachzuvollziehen. Wir werden gemeinsam exemplarische Filme, Online-Publikationen, künstlerische und performative Produktionen, Kritiken und fiktionale Textformate diskutieren.

Special Event!
in Kooperation mit dem Harry Klein Club München

Terre Thaemlitz, KünstlerInnenvortrag

Raum Historische Aula, Akademiestr. 2
Zeit 30.04.2014, 18.30 Uhr

Terre Thaemlitz, DJ Gig
Ort Harry Klein Club (Sonnenstraße 8)
Zeit 30.04.2014, ab 23.00 Uhr bzw. 01.05.2014, 1.00 Uhr

Terre Thaemlitz ist ein/e international bekannte/r US-amerikanische/r MusikerIn, EssayistIn und BetreiberIn eines eigenen Plattenlabels (Comatonse Recordings). Seine performative Praxis wird häufig im Kontext von Transgender-Aktivismus diskutiert. Thaemlitz lebt in Kawasaki Japan und tritt unter anderem auch als „Miss Take" oder „DJ Sprinkles" auf. Ihre Arbeit verbindet auf kritische Weise Themen der Identitätspolitik mit einer fortwährenden Analyse der sozioökonomischen Bedingungen kommerzieller Medienproduktion. Bislang hat Terre Thaemlitz 15 Solo-Alben sowie zahlreiche Singles und Videoarbeiten produziert.

Identität durch Design / Identität des Designs

Dr. Angelika Nollert

Raum: E.ZG.04 und E.O2.29

Termine: Dienstag, den 24. Juni, 10.30–12.30 Uhr (E.ZG.04), Freitag den 27. Juni, 10.30–12.00 und 13.00–14.30 Uhr (E.O2.29), Dienstag den 1. Juli, 10.30–12.30 Uhr (E.ZG.04)

Konsumprodukte sind durch ihre spezifische Gestaltung visuell identifizierbar, Unternehmen geben sich durch bestimmte Merkmale eine Corporate Identity und Menschen streben nach Identität, um sich von der Gemeinschaft abzuheben. Design kann Identitäten materialisieren und kommunizieren. In diesem Sinne bestimmt sich die Qualität des Designs durch den Vermittlungserfolg der Identität.

Aber wie kann Design jenseits dieser Aufgabe auch eine eigene, unabhängige und zweckfreie Identität entwickeln? In dieser Frage lohnt eine vergleichende Betrachtung zu den benachbarten Disziplinen wie Kunst und Architektur und auf ihre jeweilige Geschichte des Identitätsbegriffes. Welche Verantwortung besitzt das Design in einer Gesellschaft, die Identität zwischen den Polen von Individualität und Pluralität auslotet?

Annual theme "Fragile Identities" 

Three-part Symposium "Fragile Identities" (2013/14)

10.01.2014

Panel 6: (Dis)identifications –Digitality and Subject 

Florian Cramer, Jana Euler and James Richards

Florian Cramer

Florian Cramer is reader for new media and their impact on creative professions at the Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University and director of the school's research centre Creating 010. He is also dean of the Parallel University of WORM, Rotterdam’s venue and production space for experimental music, film and media. Prior to that, the literary scholar and art historian worked as research associate at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin (1999–2004). His most recent publication is the collection of essays entitled Anti-Media. Ephemera on Speculative Arts (nai010 publishers, 2013).

Jana Euler was born in 1982 in Friedberg, Germany. She studied from 2002 till 2008 at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. And from 2003 to 2006 at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt. In 2007 she was a gueststudent of the Masterprogram of the Glasgow School of Arts. Her work has been shown in recent solo exhibitions at Cabinet, London (2013); Galerie Neu, Berlin (2013); Cubitt, London(2012); Real Fine Arts, New York (2012) and Sotoso, Brussels (2012). She has shown in group exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art with Stewart Uoo (2013); Kunstverein München, Germany (2013) and MD72, Berlin (2012). Currently she lives and works in Brussels and Rosbach. 

James Richards is an artist living and working in London. Recent solo shows have been held at Rodeo Istanbul (2013), CCA Kitakyushu (2012) and Chisenhale Gallery (2011). Recent Group exhibitions include Otherwise Unexplained Fires, Malmö Konsthall (2013); Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York (2013); and The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Venice Biennale 2013. He is currently working in Berlin on the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin programme and was awarded the 2012 Jarman Award for film and video. 

Annual theme "Fragile Identities" 

Three-part Symposium "Fragile Identities" (2013/14)

10.01.2014

Panel 5: Identities in Transit

Christian Kravagna and Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Christian Kravagna

Christian Kravagna is art historian, critic and curator as well as Professor for Postcolonial Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He edited many books, including Privileg Blick: Kritik der visuellen Kultur (1997), Agenda: Perspektiven kritischer Kunst (2000) and Das Museum als Arena: Institutionskritische Texte von KünstlerInnen (2001), and he was co-editor of Transcultural Modernisms (2013). He also curated a number of exhibitions, among which Routes: Imaging Travel and Migration at the Grazer Kunstverein (2002), Migration: Globalisation of Cultural Space and Time at Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi (2003), together with Amit Mukhopadhyay, and Planetary Consciousness at the Kunstraum of the Leuphana University of Lüneburg (2008) and Living Across: Spaces of Migration at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2010). Together with Hedwig Saxenhuber he runs the Kunstraum Lakeside in Klagenfurt.

Emine Sevgi Özdamar moved in 1965 from Turkey to West Berlin. From 1967 to 1970 she attended drama school in Istanbul. In 1976 she secured a position as director’s assistant at the Volksbühne theatre in East Berlin, and after that performed as an actress on various theatre stages and in films, while at the same time directing several plays by Bertolt Brecht. From 1979 to 1984 Özdamar worked as an actress at the Bochumer Ensemble in West Germany. Her first play, Karagöz in Alamania (Blackeye in Germany), was commissioned by this theatre (1982) and premiered in 1986 at Schauspielhaus Frankfurt under her direction. In addition to playing various stage roles, she writes poems,short stories and novels, some of which have been translated into 17 different languages, among which are Life is a Caravanserai (Middlesex University Press, 2000), The Bridge of the Golden Horn (Serpent’s Tail, 2007), Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde. Wedding – Pankow 1976/77 (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003). Her first Turkish novel appeared in 2007, Kendi Kendinin Terzisi Bir Kambur – Ece Ayhan’lı anılar, 1974 Zürih günlüğü, Ece Ayhan’ın mektupları (Yapı Kredi Yayınları). Since 1986 Emine Sevgi Özdamar lives and works as a freelance writer in Berlin und Istanbul. In 1991 she was the first foreign writer to receive the renowned Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. Other awards include the Female Artists’ Prize of North-Rhine Westphalia (2001), the Kleist Prize (2004) and the Fontane Prize (2009). In May 2007 she was invited to join the German Academy for Language and Literature. Her book Life is a Caravanserai figures on the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (Universe, 2006).

Annual theme "Fragile Identities" 

Three-part Symposium "Fragile Identities" (2013/14)

13.12.13

Panel 4: Identities in Urban Conflict

Teddy Cruz, Gareth Jones, Miguel Robles-Durán and Andres Lepik

in cooperation with the Museum for Architecture (Architekturmuseum TU Munich)

Miguel Robles-Durán

The urbanist Miguel Robles-Durán is Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Ecologies at The New School/Parsons in New York, cofounder of Cohabitation Strategies, an international non-profit cooperative for socio-spatial development based in New York and Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and since September 2013 co-directs with David Harvey the new National Center for Advanced Research in Socio-Spatial Justice in Quito, Ecuador. He currently is in the advisory board of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) Right to Housing Program and research advisor for The Right to the City Alliance. Robles-Durán has wide international experience in the strategic definition and coordination of trans-disciplinary urban projects, as well as in the development of tactical design strategies and civic engagement platforms that confront the contradictions of neoliberal urbanization. His design, research and theory work has been commissioned, exhibited and published in Europe, Asia, North/South America and he recently co-edited/authored the book Urban Asymmetries: Studies and Projects on Neoliberal Urbanization (2013). 

Teddy Cruz

Teddy Cruz has been recognized internationally for his urban research of the Tijuana-San Diego border, advancing border immigrant neighbourhoods as sites of cultural production, from which to rethink urban policy, affordable housing and civic infrastructure. In 1991 he received the prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture and in 2005 he was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize, by the Canadian Center of Architecture and the London School of Economics. In 2008 he was selected to represent the US in the Venice Architecture Biennial and in 2011 he was a recipient of the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award. Teddy Cruz is currently a professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego, where he founded the Center for Urban Ecologies. 

Gareth A. Jones 

Gareth A. Jones is Reader in Urban Geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was educated at universities of London and Cambridge, and has held tenure and visiting positions at University of Wales, University of Texas at Austin and the Universidad IberoAmericana, Mexico City. His initial research considered how the urban poor gained access to land, housing and finance, before becoming interested in how urban space is contested physically and representationally. His recent ethnographic work has been with street youth in Mexico, and has resulted in a co-edited volume Youth Violence in Latin America (Palgrave, 2009) and a forthcoming monograph on street lives, identity and social practice. His present research covers three projects: elite identity and architecture in South Africa; empathy and ‘the slum’ as spectacle; and, violence and security in the contemporary city.

Andres Lepik professor at the department for Architectural History and Curatorial Practice at the Technical University Munich (TUM) and director of the Architecture Museum of the TUM. He studied art history, modern German literature and linguistics in Augsburg and Munich. After completing his PhD about Renaissance Architectural Models at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome he took up his scientific and curatorial work at the National Museums in Berlin and the New National Gallery in 1994. After various assignments at the National Museums in Berlin he headed the 20^th- and 21^st -century architecture collection at the Kunstbibliothek. Among the exhibitions he conceived are Renzo Piano (2000), Content/Rem Koolhaas and AMO/OMA (2004) and Oswald Mathias Ungers. Cosmos of Architecture (2006). In 2007 he became curator at the Architecture and Design Department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York where he curated the exhibition Small Scale – Big Change. New Architectures of Social Engagement (2010). As Loeb Fellow of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University he is at present investigating the history and theory of social engagement in 20^th century architecture. His most recent project is the current exhibition Afritecture – Building Social Change at the Architecture Museum of the Technical University Munich (running until February 2014).

Annual theme "Fragile Identities" 

Three-part Symposium "Fragile Identities" (2013/14)

13.12.13

Panel 3: Identities in the Context of Radical Social Changes

mit Claire Denis, Okwui Enwezor and Sarah Rifky

Claire Denis (born April 21, 1948, Paris) is a Paris-based filmmaker and one of the major artistic voices of contemporary French cinema. She grew up partly in Cameron, Burkina and Djibouti as a daughter of a colonial-official. Claire Denis enrolled in the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (now École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l'Image et du Son) where she graduated in 1971. At the beginning of her film career, she worked as an assistant director to Dušan Makavejev, Costa Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders. Claire Denis made her film debut in 1988 withChocolat, a luminous depiction of malaise of the post-colonial world. Since 2002 she has been Professor of Film at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Her work has dealt with themes of colonial and post-colonial West Africa, as well as issues in modern France.

Okwui Enwezor

Okwui Enwezor (Nigeria, 1963) is an international curator, the Director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. He has curated many exhibitions and festivals all over the world including the Johannesburg Biennale in South Africa (1997), the Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo de Sevilla, in Spain, the Gwang-ju Biennale in South Korea (2008). He was the artistic director of Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, in 2002, and was Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President of San Francisco Art Institute (2005–2009).

Sarah Rifky is a writer and curator based in Cairo where she co-founded Beirut, an art space that thinks about institution building as a curatorial act. She is founder of CIRCA (Cairo International Resource Center for Art) and was Curator at Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art in Cairo 2009–2011. She was a Curatorial Agent of dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany. In 2010 she was Adjunct Professor of Art History and Theory at the American University in Cairo and co-manages MASS Alexandria, an independent study program for young artists in Egypt, with Wael Shawky. Rifky is author of The Going Insurrection (2011) and Delusions of Reference: In Defense of Art (forthcoming). She is co-editor of the artist book Damascus: Tourists, Artists and Secret Agents (2009). 

Annual theme "Fragile Identities" 

Three-part Symposium "Fragile Identities" (2013/14)

22.11.2013

Panel 2: Critical Subjects of Capitalism?

Maurizio Lazzarato

Maurizio Lazzarato is a Paris-based sociologist and philosopher. During the 1970s Lazzarato studied in Padua. His involvement in the workerist movement and his politically enforced move to Paris remained crucial for his theoretical work as well as for his film co-operations with the artist Angela Melitopolous. During the 1990s Lazzarato was a founding protagonist of the post-workerist discourse concerning the change towards ‘immaterial’ and ‘cognitive’ labour as a paradigm of post-Fordist Western society. His essays have been included in numerous anthologies relating to post-structuralist philosophy as well as to political and economic theory of the present. In the early 2000s he published Videophilosophie, a book that, following Félix Guattari, explicitly engages with a contemporary media theory (b_books, 2002). This work was followed by his books The Making of the Indebted Man (Semiotext(e), 2012), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Semiotext(e), 2014), and Governing by Debt (Semiotext(e), 2015).

Annual theme "Fragile Identities" 

Three-part Symposium "Fragile Identities" (2013/14)

22.11.13

Panel 1: The Self between Normality and Pathology

Paul Broks, Stephen Frosh and Emily Wardill

Paul Broks

Paul Broks is a freelance writer with a background in clinical neuropsychology and neuroscience. He gained recognition with his first book, Into the Silent Land, which mixed neurological case stories, fiction and memoir in an extended meditation on selfhood and the brain. A short story from the collection, To Be Two or Not to Be, is currently being adapted for the cinema (To Be Two, starring Casey Affleck; director David Lowery). Paul Broks has also written for the theatre including collaborations with the director Mick Gordon on two plays, On Ego and On Emotion, which premiered at the Soho Theatre, London, and which have gone on to successful productions worldwide. He co-wrote and narrated Martino Unstrung, Ian Knox’s feature documentary about the recovered-amnesic jazz guitar virtuoso, Pat Martino, and recently collaborated with Hugh Hudson and Maryam d’Abo on a film about stroke survivors – Rupture: Living with a broken brain. Paul Broks is also a regular contributor to WNYC’s Radiolab show. His next book will be published by Penguin and includes excursions into Greek mythology, madness and magic as well as brain science.

Stephen Frosh

Stephen Frosh is Pro-Vice-Master and Professor in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of many books and papers on psychosocial studies and on psychoanalysis, including Feelings (Routledge, 2011), Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic (Palgrave, 2010), Hate and the Jewish Science: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis (Palgrave, 2005), For and Against Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2006), After Words (Palgrave, 2002) and The Politics of Psychoanalysis (Palgrave, 1999). His most recent books are A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory (Palgrave, 2012) and Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions. He also co-authored, with Ann Phoenix and Rob Pattman, Young Masculinities (Palgrave, 2002) and with Peter Emerson, Critical Narrative Analysis in Psychology (Palgrave, 2009).

Emily Wardill lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. The artist’s works blur truth and fiction, symbolism and reality, rationality and emotion. Through this they unlock the hierarchical structures of knowledge and rearrange them. Wardill’s work was exhibited, among others, at the Serpentine Gallery London (2012), the Showroom Gallery London (2010), the Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow (2011), the Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe (2011), the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge,MA (2010) and the ICA, London (2008). In 2004 she realized the performance The Feast Against Nature in Grizedale (Lake District) at the New York PS1 Contemporary Art Center. In 2011 she took part in the Venice Biennale. Her work was awarded the Jarman Award in 2010 and the Leverhulme Award in 2011. Recently her films were shown in the context of solo shows in, for instance, the ARTES – Fundação Manuel António da Mota in Porto (2012) and in La Loge, Brussels (2014).