Uncertainty Seminars:

Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz screening
“Our works often revisit recent and past material, a score, a piece of music, a film, a photograph or a performance, wondering about and excavating unrepresented or illegible moments of utopia.” Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz produce installations that choreograph the tension between visibility and opacity. These works show embodiments, which are able to cross different times, but also draw relations between times to reveal possibilities for a queer futurity. During Uncertainty Seminars: Not Getting It three short films by Boudry & Lorenz will be screened: Silent, I Want and Opaque. Courtesey the artists and Ellen de Bruijne Projects.

Silent (7 min, 2016)
starts with an interpretation of John Cage‘s score 4'33" from 1952. The score is conceived for any instrument and instructs its performer(s) not to play their instrument(s). The musician Aérea Negrot performs the score on a rotating stage, placed on Oranienplatz, a public square in Berlin where a refugee protest camp took place between 2012 and 2014. In the second part of the film she performs a song, which has been composed for the film. Silence has been described either as a violent experience, as in being silenced, or as a powerful performative act of resistance, as it has been carried out by various disobedience movements around the world. Silent asks how both moments are intertwined. It focuses on the performance of a silent act, which might allow for agency, strength and even pleasure without erasing the traces of violence and vulnerability.

Opaque (10 min, 2014)
A curtain, two performers, inside the remnants of an old public swimming pool. The performers claim to be representatives of an underground organization. The curtain is set up for their anonymity. The public is long gone, the place seems abandoned. Once the curtain is removed, another one appears. This one, pink zebra, fuses the war technique of camouflage with the stylishness of homo-outfits and becomes a showcase for the entrance of large amounts of smoke. The dense smoke perhaps stems from bombings, or it is set off as a signal during a political demonstration? Later a speech is delivered, based on a text by Jean Genet. Its topic? The desire for a proper faultless enemy. It opens up the question of how to move forward in a war or a fight for resistance without any declared and ‘visible’ enemy. Do the curtains and fumes grant the “right to opacity” (Édouard Glissant) to the bodies that they mask and disguise? Or do they blur the dividing lines between same and other, between accomplices and enemies?

I Want (16 min, 2015)
stages a meeting between punk poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), artist Sharon Hayes, and transgender and prison-abolitionist activist Chelsea Manning, who, in 2010, channeled classified information about the war in Irak to WikiLeaks. Acker‘s poetic strategies of appropriating and recombining text fragments, as well as switching identities, provoke a rereading of Manning‘s public disclosures. Both, revealing important sensitive military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks and exposing transgender identity is enacted in the performance as a strong resistance against imperial war and a transgression of the ways in which gender and sexuality are deployed in the service of the military. The film’s “I” seems to dwell in a time and place of post-identity while at the same time juggling the violent burden of not only one but multiple defiant identities from different times and places.

Simon Dogger presentation
Simon Dogger is a non-visual designer who takes in information differently and is determined in exploring more inclusive forms of communication. His concepts and designs combine visual, auditory and sensory means to improve the quality of life. Not only for the visually impaired, but for all people who could benefit from self-empowering, intuitive tools that help them connect with others and their surroundings.
Simon Dogger presents an experience of his world in which uncertainty holds a beauty that does not meet the eye. A presentation that deals with the changes in perception after losing his vision, and what he has gained in the ability to listen and feel, as well as his drive for independence.

Tony Cokes screening
Tony Cokes makes video and installation projects that reframe appropriated texts to reflect upon capitalism, subjectivity, knowledge and pleasure. Sound always functions in his practice as a crucial, intertextual element, complicating minimal visuals. Tony Cokes is a Professor in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University (Providence, USA).

Evil.27.Selma (9 min, 2011)
Cokes discusses the under-documentation of the Montgomery bus boycott against racial segregation in the 1950s, arguing that the lack of an iconic image and the non-visibility of the protests, strengthened political imagination, leading up to social change beyond what is already known or seen. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.

Dr. Tina Rahimy lecture
Fragile empowerment of coming communities

Dr. Tina Rahimy is a political philosopher. She studied at the Erasmus School of Philosophy. Her PhD research focused on different forms of political action in regard to inclusion and exclusion. She has been concerned with research and the development of education at different layers of educational systems. She’s been active in the field of urban development, arts and culture. She published her book Verborgen verhalen (Hidden Stories) earlier this year, about the impact of teachers in education, through the lens of true empathic engagement between people. Her lecture will look at the role uncertainty might play through the different perspectives within our societies on political understanding of communities, borders, and inclusion.

Arif Kornweitz lecture-performance
Sleepwalking in the haze

Arif Kornweitz works with sound and is a researcher on regimes of representation, in relation to structures of injustice. He investigates possible strategies to subvert the technologies of control deployed by these regimes. He holds an MSc in Conflict Resolution & Governance and is the co-founder of Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, an online radio platform about contemporary art and design that hosts live shows with artists and institutions. Arif’s lecture-performance addresses uncertainty by means of invisibility features in military technology, and confronts their effects with the impact of strategies that use imagelessness as a form of power.
Arif contributed the Bonus Track B-2 that came with your online purchased ticket to Uncertainty Seminars: Not Getting It. It is available at stroomdenhaag.bandcamp.com.

Davide Sanvee, Francisca Khamis and Tina Reden performance
Remember her voice

In their performances Davide Sanvee, Francisca Khamis and Tina Reden create various collective imaginaries based on memories and experiences of displacement. Following traditions of oral storytelling, they think of different ways to tell and share stories and to remember, hold on and rewrite memories - theirs, their family members’ and other ancestral voices’. Through the crossing and mixing of their remembrance, they create a new, ever-changing narrative, new relations and a collective memory. The collaboration between Davide, Francisca and Tina started through Decolonial Futures, an extracurricular program at The Gerrit Rietveld Academie/Sandberg Institute in collaboration with Funda Art College in Soweto, SA. They developed In Transition Between Worlds, a close reading and experimental workshop on (in)visibility, decolonizing our sense of time and the task of Listening, for the program of Friday 24 May.

Davide Sanvee is a performance artist who focuses on spaces and staging. Investigating individuals in public space, she hunts for architectural, behavioural and gestural elements to create scenographies that fully surround their spectators. To activate these new spaces, Sanvee uses historical collective memory and performative actions built around political and social realities.

Francisca Khamis is an interdisciplinary designer who explores the mobility between reality and fantasy of the immigrants’ memory and how this leads to new realities around personal identities. Working on the Palestinian conflict, both politically and personally, she explores new forms of communication between those who are trapped in their own lands and those who cannot return.

Tina Reden is an Amsterdam and Zurich based interdisciplinary artist, activist and occasional DJ. She explores different forms of being together through various formats such as touching meditations, storytellings or poetic soundscapes. Trying to unsettle ongoing patterns of power, she uses bodies, sounds and voices as important and ever returning components to listen to relational ways of being in the world.

Femke Herregraven presentation
In her practice, artist Femke Herregraven draws from a systematic meta-narrative that accompanies her research and production at all times. It concerns financial and geological self-organizing systems, in which flows of energy have creative and destructive consequences that change the course of history. The underpinning research provides input for developing new calculations, speculations, and conversations that
inform her drawings, writings, scripts, videos and installations. Femke is part of Stroom’s current experimental longterm program “Close Companions” and is shortlisted for the Prix de Rome 2019.