Iron Curtains. Selected Works on Old and New Borders
Sven Johne (DE)

Artist talk and screening

As a child I yearned for a place named Trelleborg. That’s just an efficient seaport in southern Sweden with a clean and decent city centre and a faceless pedestrian zone, all in all a bit boring. But – of course– I did not know that in the 1980s.
I grew up in Sassnitz on Rügen Island, East Germany, where a ferry boat took off every day to a trip across the Baltic Sea, to Trelleborg. Sweden in the north was a part of the political West, which means: home of “exploitation and destruction”, as we have learned at school (but have thought in secret: bullshit!). The port of Sassnitz was strictly guarded. It was behind the Iron Curtain.
I remember that I often stood at the border fence and stared at the ferry. We all wanted to go north – just for a couple of hours – to see this magic place, where all these well-dressed and good-humoured people came from. They sometimes gave us yummy chewing gums. Tragically, my own father was one of the border guards. He was standing there too and watching that no one was trying to reach the ferry. (Luckily, he did not notice the chewing gum thing.)
Starting from these early “borderline experiences” the topic of “border” and “escape” has always occupied me in my artistic work – as a biography work on the coming to terms with the past of the East Germans (and of my family in particular) – and so on later when new Iron Curtains were established in the Mediterranean. I did several projects on Lampedusa. There, Frontex shields the European “greenhouse” from the aftermaths of western geo- and economic politics. (Ironically, these old communist teachers were probably right about the West.) And I am also concerned with the imminent renaissance of inner-European borders, those within the Schengen area and those of Vladimir Putin’s restorative interests.

Selected works for Nida screening:

1. Trelleborg (photo, text, 2014)
2. Vinta (photo, text, 2003/2004)
3. Kleistners Archiv (photo, text, 2005)
4. Elmenhorst (video, 2006)
5. Cliffs of Wissow (video, 2007)
6. Lampedusa: Bathers (photo, 2009)
7. Lampedusa: Hotels (photo, publication, 2012)
8. Areas of Natural (photo, text, 2016)
9. Europa (photo, upcoming new project, 2017)
10. A Sense of Warmth (video, 2015)

Sven Johne (b. 1976, Bergen on Rügen Island, Germany) studied German Literature, Journalism and Onomatology at the University of Leipzig from 1996 to 1998, and Photography at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig (HGB) from 1998 to 2004 (with Timm Rautert). He also took pat in Meisterschüler at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig in 2006 (with Timm Rautert) and International Studio & Curatorial Program (ICSP) in New York City in 2008.

Over the last 15 years Sven Johne has been awarded various grants and awards for his work, including the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung Grant for Contemporary German Photography, the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Grant and the Kunstpreis of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Sven Johne’s works have been shown in numerous institutions, including the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Witte de With Rotterdam, Mudam Luxembourg, Sprengel Museum Hannover, MOCA Taiwan, Camera Austria, Graz, and the KW Institute Berlin.

Drawing between the Lines: Towards Embodied Diagrammatics
Nikolaus Gansterer (AT)

Performative talk

How to understand one reality through another?
Nikolaus Gansterer is an artist researching in how far the act of drawing can become a tool of communication, a score, and an instruction for taking action. In the last years he developed a series of works called Translectures – an inter-subjective form of notation (per-)forming a new vocabulary between the lines of drawing, writing and choreo-graphy. Here Gansterer is interested – often in collaboration with others (philosophers, writers, dancers) – how cognition processes could be extended into autopoietic embodied diagrams: so to speak, a line of thought could become a line on paper, or could turn into a line in space, or a line verbalized, and then again a line articulated with the whole body or transforming into an object. The performative lecture is concerned with the fundamental enquiry for a specific language of the materiality of perception developing performative models where live inscription is fusing live-drawing, staging the unfolding of research through presentation rather than re-presentation.

Nikolaus Gansterer is an artist, performer and researcher deeply interested in the links between drawing, thinking and action. His practice is grounded in a trans-medial approach, underpinned by conceptual discourse in the context of performative visualisation and cartographic representations. He is internationally active in performances, exhibitions and lecturing.
Gansterer studied Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and completed his studies at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. He is co-founder of the Institute for Transacoustic Research. Currently he is Guest Professor at the Centre Focus Research at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Gansterer’s fascination with the complex character of diagrammatic figures led to two books: Drawing a Hypothesis – Figures of Thought, 2011, on the ontology of shapes of visualisations and the development of the diagrammatic perspective; and Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017, on new forms of embodied diagrammatics by developing an interdisciplinary notation system between choreography, drawing and writing.
www.gansterer.org

An Introduction to Atlas of Movements: A Practice, Some Examples, a Position
Christoph Fink (BE)

Performative talk and screening

Christoph Fink has been working on his magnum opus, Atlas of Movements, for many years. Taking the limitations of the individual body and its environment as a starting point, intense travelogues or observations develop in the form of highly detailed chronographic annotations, photographic and sound recordings and collections of collateral material (maps, documentation, tickets...).
The processing of these data, indications of time and space, often result in experimental exhibition forms: space-filling cartographic and acousmatic constructions (drawings, diagrams, sculptures, tables, layers of sound, etc.), in other words, alternative images of the world or experiences. At the heart of this work is the idea of the world and ‘reality’ as a poetic structure, more precisely: modeling forms or images of contextualization (the connectivity/binding off all things and events) in which the coherence of the various elements that surround us is questioned. Thus, Atlas of Movements acts as a fertile base, a platform, or an observation post – the basis for a larger story whose contours gradually become visible: the place of his work in the larger scale of world events and the constructions of our so called ‘modernity’ alongside the longing for a resourced and new form of Humanism.
Christoph Fink (b. 1963) at this moment centralizes his activities in Brussels, Belgium. Among many other exhibitions, lectures, performances and publications his work has been on view in Venice, São Paulo and Istanbul Biennials, Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt and in renowned institutions as Witte de With (Rotterdam), S.M.A.K. (Ghent) and The Drawing Center (New York). Last year a large sound ‘wander’ work (pre-recorded and edited soundscapes and live interventions for electric guitar, percussion, electronics and soundscape editing) in collaboration with Valentijn Goethals for the theater production (lecture/opera) by Joëlle Tuerlinckx THAT’S IT!» (+3 Free Minutes) was scheduled at Tate Modern in London, Veemtheater in Amsterdam, Stuk in Leuven and Kaaitheater in Brussels. A new version will be on view at Dia Beacon, New York in 2018. An extensive catalogue of his work is coming out later this year.

Lines Made by Walking (or) Lines Producing Spaces
Karen O’Rourke (FR)

Talk

Space doesn’t just exist; it has been produced from a primary matter, nature, argues Henri Lefebvre. It is the result of activity – political products and strategic spaces – that implies economics and technique but goes beyond them. There is not one social space but many.

As GPS technology came of age in the mid-1990s, artists turned to walking as a “symbolic form”, a way of pursuing architectural concerns or of exploring spatial perception. By the early twenty-first century, the convergence of global networks, online databases and new tools for location-based mapping coincided with the renewal of interest in walking as an art form. Imagining the city (and the world) as a set of criss-crossing paths, practitioners of locative media embedded stories and sounds in the landscape. Instead of “colonizing space” as mapmakers are wont to do, by eliminating the traces of the practices that produced their maps, they developed techniques of spatial annotation to retrieve lost layers of meaning.
“Remaking the world” is often done in smoke-filled cafés. A more effective tactic might be called “applied pedestrianism”: the use of walking, the lines it makes and the experiences it offers, to produce new spaces.
Karen O’Rourke’s work explores the relationship between art and networks, archives and territories. Her networking projects include City Portraits (1989–1992), Paris Réseau / Paris Network (1993–2000), Archiving as Art (1997–2000), A Map Larger Than the Territory (2002–2004), Eavesdroplets (2006), Partially Buried University (2008-2010) and The Gift (After Lewis Hyde and Marcel Mauss). Artist and professor at Jean Monnet University in Saint-Etienne, she is the author of Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers (MIT Press, 2013).

Maciunas, Mapping, and Meaning
Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt (DE)

Talk

In the 1920s and early 1930s, ordinary maps and street plans were part of the general effort to raise Soviet citizens’ awareness and to help them form a more accurate picture of the vast swathes of land that were now in revolutionary hands. Huge maps of Russia, an expanse so great as to defy any physical attempts to dominate it, were displayed on railway station walls or sold in handbill format by peddlers on the street. They became part of the Soviet regime’s armory and were as much a public institution as were theaters. The nationalist sentiment that Bolshevism had rekindled in its citizens made the omnipresent map a symbol with which they could identify. The general obsession with maps in the early days of the USSR, however, ended abruptly in 1936. The sudden disappearance of maps from the public domain caused the shape of the USSR to pale in the collective memory. While the author of the map ban, Joseph Stalin, was being borne to his grave with a great show of pomp and glory in Moscow, on the other side of the globe, George Maciunas in Pittsburgh was busy working on his Atlas of Russian History, a graphic account of the USSR’s prehistory. The images that flash by when leafing through the Atlas are made up of a constantly expanding borderline; but this territorial outline is an utterly abstract line and as such a diagrammatic rendering of a national entity.

Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt is a historian of images. She teaches post-enlightenment visual studies and art history as an adjunct professor at the Freie Universität Berlin. She also works as an appraiser, curator, and editor. She researches and publishes on the avant-garde and the diagrammatic, on the eye and the pseudonym. Book publications: Stammbäume der Kunst zur Genealogie der Avantgarde (Berlin, 2005); Maciunas’ Learning Machines: From Art History to a Chronology of Fluxus, the second revised and enlarged edition (Vienna, New York, 2011); Die Kunst der Diagrammatik. Perspektiven eines neuen bildwissenschaftlichen Paradigmas, the second revised and enlarged edition (Bielefeld, forthcoming 2017).

Diagrammatic Thinking
Marcus Steinweg (DE)

Talk

The diagram stands between order and chaos – just like the human subject. It is mistaken to believe that the subject does nothing else than opposes chaos. Providing we define chaos as incommensurability that, instead of describing a crackpot world, indicates the world in its truth value, which is our divided world without an exterior, it is not an external somewhere. It is a world without a world behind it, a world without guaranties, a world without God. A world as a non-homogenous universe of explosive heterogeneities and implosive intensities. A world collapsing into itself and expanding without finite borders.

Marcus Steinweg (b. 1971, lives and works in Berlin) teaches at UdK (University of the Arts) Berlin and is a Visiting Professor at the Art Academy Karlsruhe. His recent books include: Behauptungsphilosophie (Berlin: Merve 2006), Duras (with Rosemarie Trockel, Berlin: Merve 2008), Politik des Subjekts (Zürich/Berlin: Diaphanes 2009), Aporien der Liebe (Berlin: Merve 2010), Kunst und Philosophie / Art and Philosophy (Cologne: Walter König: 2012), Philosophie der Überstürzung (Berlin: Merve 2013), Inkonsistenzen (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2015), Evidenzterror (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2015), Gramsci Theater (Berlin: Merve 2016) and Splitter (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2016). Some of his books are published in English by The MIT Press.

Contingent Propositions
Zbynek Baladrán (CZ)

Talk and screening

Atlas of Transformation as an attempt to articulate and understand transitional socio-economic situations. A visualisation of the invisible axes of power from the position of the colonised and within the framework of self-induced colonisation by neoliberal capitalism. An interface between encyclopaedia, atlas and object as an open source of information and hypertext. How to portray the process of change so that the hidden is revealed?

Atlas of Transformation works with the image used by Franz Kafka in Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa is transformed into a beetle. His ability to think rationally is unaffected, but he has turned into a creature that nobody can understand. His family is unable to accept his new form. The first and fundamental question that Samsa asks himself has become our motto and the starting point of our considerations: “What has happened to us?” Artistic practice as a lesson in diagrammatic reasoning. An attempt to see and think things, phenomena and relationships diagonally and nonlinearly in a way that neither text nor image is capable of communicating on its own. The practice of work in time in which there is no fixed point and everything is changing.

Zbynek Baladrán (b. 1973, Prague, Czechoslovakia) is an author, artist, curator and exhibition architect. He studied art history in the Philosophy Department of the Charles University and in the studios for Visual Communication, Painting and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts, both in Prague. In 2001 he co-founded Display, a space for contemporary art, which in 2007 was transformed into Tranzitdisplay where he is responsible for the exhibitions program. Together with Vit Havránek he curated Monument to Transformation, a three-year long research project on the social and political transformations. He was a member of the curatorial team (through tranzit.org) of Manifesta 8 in Murcia, Spain (2010). He took part in the 11th Lyon Biennial, in Manifesta 5 in Donostia / San Sebastian (2004), in the 56th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (2013) and in MoMA (2015).