It is 17:30 on Friday the nineteenth of July 2024, the Opening Day of the annual Rundgang of the Universität der Künste Berlin. While the official opening ceremony is still in full swing at Straße des 17. Juni, the first visitors are lining up in front of Hardenbergstraße 33 to be granted entrance to the exhibitions of the Fine Arts, Architecture, and Media & Design Faculties.
Although the crowd is still small, metal barrier fences and door staff indicate the large number of spectators that are expected, and the measures taken in response.
The annual Rundgang is a moment of representation, a platform for students to share their work with the public, but also a celebration and a spectacle that, every year, attracts a huge audience. Visitors come for several reasons, to get a glimpse behind the doors into the workshops and studios, to discover new talents, or just for the cheap beer and fun parties. Or, most likely, a combination of all the preceding.
Entering the building I am immersed in a soundscape of chatter, clattering shoes on stone floors, and distant audio sequences from (as yet) unlocatable artworks. As I make my way through groups of students involved in final preparations and crowds of early visitors, I ruminate about an approach to this text that pays tribute to the multitude of efforts, ideas, voices, and media that are assembled in this exhibition. The attempt to capture a show like this can neither be one of completeness nor one that lives up to the individual depths of engagement that are on display. So where to start? What to highlight?
With more than 30 courses divided into the four departments of Fine Arts, Design, Music, and Theatre and around 4.000 students, UdK is one of the largest art schools in Europe. For the Rundgang weekend, every student gets the opportunity to share an insight into their practice with a wider public at one of the nine locations of the university spread throughout the city. While this approach offers visitors a great opportunity to get an overview of the learning environment of UdK and the students’s doings, it also comes with limitations, for example, a deficiency of presentation space, and the necessity to condense one’s practice into a single artwork. It might make sense to consider students’ works more as symbolic representations through which one can only grasp a partial, superficial impression, signifying a deeper engagement that lies beneath but can’t be shown. Beyond this individualizing tendency of presenting artistic positions, a compelling subplot emerged from seeing how multiple works and actions during the Rundgang reacted to the limitations, with collaborative art practices and collective actions invested in reforming the school’s infrastructure and connecting their works to an outside, beyond the walls of the institution. A symbolic act in the context of the school’s exhibition might, therefore, also gain another connotation. One that preconditions transformation and demands change.
Fig.1
Under the title “Algorithmic Cultural Vandalism” Pietro Lugaro & Alessandro McNelly developed a collaborative project engaging with the technological deconstruction of symbols as a perpetuation of colonial logics of cultural extractivism. As part of the newly founded department Design & Computation, shared between TU and UdK, their project consists of a database of hundreds of different cultural, spiritual, and ethnic symbols drawn together from the internet and detached from their contexts. Asking how colonial tools of categorization and measuring are perpetuated and multiplied under the guise of technological progress, their work stretches a catalog of cuts to the point where the bare line becomes the starting point for new symbolic prototypes. A programmed robot arm translates shapes of the database’s symbols into new drawings that are co-created with visitors of the show. Equipped with a brush and ink, both the robot’s and visitor’s arms take turns assembling lines and forms on a piece of paper.
As my hand draws a wobbly line across the sheet, I wonder which archive of symbolism impacts my creation, and which capacities my line contains to transmit the symbol’s initial meaning, even as it becomes detached and deconstructed. Rather than considering the confrontation of algorithmically (robot) and improvisationally (human) produced shapes as binaries, this co-creation links the different symbolic orders in which both “hands” are embedded, opening our communal drawing towards each order’s respective visual, cultural, and historical codes.
If, following Jacques Lacan, we argue that everything we produce and express is understood to happen within a symbolic order, which is structured like a language, and is bound to all the codes and meanings that sediment in it, then the question arises of how these orders resonate in the process of detachment and de-linking and how they come to form new meanings. From which symbolism do we draw in developing our own (visual) languages? How is the development of an artistic expression impacted by those symbolic orders that condition our imaginations?
How resilient is a symbol?
And how is resilience carried by symbols?
Fig.2
Daria Kozlova’s graduation film “What we lost in the water” uses symbolism through digital renderings against historical erasure. Not by reconstructing the facts, but by creating a new form of remembrance through a fictional narrative. A body floating on the water, a half sunken cross, two figures rising like the eagle from the ashes, the water itself as an agent.
The animated film, (produced in collaboration with Anna Ivchenko, Wren Bisley, Oleksii Voitikh, Annkathrin Kluss, Arvin Afsharnejad, Daria Maier, Oleksandr Sirous), is anchored in the history of the Ukrainian village Kherson, which was flooded in 2023 as a consequence of the Russian blow-up of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant dam. The water stored in the Kakhovka Reservoir then flooded the settlements downstream, endangering the cooling of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant units. Kherson had been part of the USSR regime’s enforcement of a cotton-growing industry in the South Ukrainian area, which for decades dominated the region’s agriculture and ecosystem.
Daria Kozlova’s film agitates against what has been systematically rendered invisible by opening a tale around the water as an entity that carries the curse of contamination as much as it floods an infrastructure of repression and control. “What we lost in the water” urges us to consider which images, narratives, and visual languages to lean on and how to animate them to keep memories alive and in constant motion rather than conceptualizing them as a closed chapter, framed and concealed.
“This artist stands in solidarity with the students in Gaza, who no longer have a place to study. All universities in Gaza have been destroyed by Israel” is written on an A5-sized card, which I find placed next to multiple artworks in the exhibition. Understanding these cards as symbols of solidarity reveals symbolism’s potential as a disruption that might resonate in the perception of the viewer. What does this symbolic gesture achieve? It forms a crack in the widespread presumption of the Western Art School as an ivory tower of aesthetic production otherwise disconnected from the struggles of students elsewhere. Instead of being read as ending in the gesture itself, these cards refuse the perception of a homogenous student body. They contain the potential to precondition action and demand the acknowledgment of the students’ societal roles as artists affected by, and opposing, the systems surrounding them. Forming a unity in rejection, by using their platform to disobey a state of denial, finds resonance with Anne Boyer’s Essay “No”: “Some days my only certain we are this certain we that didn’t, that wouldn’t, whose bodies or spirits wouldn’t go along.” (1)
At which point is refusal considered an act of disobedience and when is it considered as artistic practice? Can it be both?
Fig.3
In their collectively produced video essay, “I don’t even know where to begin” the students of Professor Josephine Pryde take on the task of exploring the generative capacity of refusal by enacting it as a mode of artistic production. Collected found footage - some of it taken from films, circulating online videos, as well as deeply personal material - is arranged in a 4-channel video installation intersecting with questions, such as:
Where is the harmony in the dissonance?
As artists, what are we responsible for?
Have you lost friends due to your opinion?
Is the university a free forum?
How often do we think of the killed? (2)
These questions were posed by members of the class in a group meeting in April 2024. Questions that were neither intended to be answered nor to be posed as statements but to hold a space for the speechlessness resulting from the urgencies of the present. Building upon the continuing conversation that emerged from this meeting, their collective work refuses the framing of individual artistic creation by assembling material that reflects the complexities in which the students are embedded. “Oh weep. I am resourceful. Never fear, I am resourceful. I am an artist and inventive. Behold, I am resourceful. The semester was shredded by the logic of war. The corridor meanwhile cleared.” (3) This is written in the accompanying text entitled “Then the Professor a Poem” by the class's professor Josephine Pryde. Approaching refusal not as a passive withdrawal but as a generative force links with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s conceptualization of a refusal that enables possibilities for sociality and communal acts outside of the hegemonic constraints of existing (institutional) power. In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) refusal can be understood as both a practice of critique and the development of other forms of knowledge transmission and relationality. The student’s decision to share the transit space of a corridor as a site for exercising their disagreement with things as they are, for me, contains both critique as a practice and an opening towards the Otherwise, which leads me back to Anne Boyer:
But even the greatest refusialists of the poets might be somewhat ironic deployers of that refusal, for what is refused often amplifies what is not. The no of a poet is so often a yes in the carapace of no. The no of a poet is sometimes but rarely a no to a poem itself, but more usually a no to all dismal aggregations and landscapes outside of the poem. It’s a no to chemical banalities and wars, a no to employment and legalisms, a no to the wretched arrangements of history and the tattered and Bannon-laminated earth. (4)
Fig.4
A similar approach could be seen in the screenings curated by the lens-based class of Professor Hito Steyerl. Here the students’s No to displaying their own work contains a Yes to dedicating their platform to films that capture voices and realities otherwise rendered invisible in public discourse. The three documentaries “This rain will never stop” (2020) by Alina Horlowa, “Gaza Calling” (2012) by Nahed Awwad, and “Of Land and Bread” are screened daily in the darkened space of the classroom.
I enter the space on Saturday afternoon, halfway into “Of Land and Bread”. The documentary captures the “Camera Project,'' initiated by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem in 2007. The organization distributed video cameras and provided training for Palestinian volunteers in the West Bank, to document their life under the Israeli occupation. The video footage offers visual evidence of B'Tselem’s reporting on human rights violations in the occupied territories. Capturing scenes including nightly military raids of private domestic spaces, and everyday settler provocations, along with conversations and interviews, the film is a selection of the Camera Project’s archive edited by the filmmaker Ehab Tarabieh. “Of Land and Bread” accounts for the unmediated perspective of those whose everyday life is conditioned by oppression and violence and for the subversive potential of the camera as an instrument for self-determination.
The decision to show a film like “Of Land and Bread” in the context of an art school environment sheds light on the students's reflections on the tools and skills they acquire through their artistic training. Understanding how these tools might not only serve to master an aesthetic discipline but can be taken outside of the institution, shared, and made productive in support of forms of resistance and direct action is where critical aesthetic education becomes applied and emancipatory.
Fig.5
On a wall, I found a poster reading “ACCESS NOW!”, the same poster a group of students was holding up at the opening celebration, lined up on the side of the ceremony, to whom it seemed like only passing attention was paid. The group Quip* the system! ACCESS NOW criticizes the ableism and audism anchored in the institutional structures of UdK. Their demands for a structural change regarding sustainable accessibility measures include the creation of permanent full-time positions for accessibility, external mentoring, accessibility training for lectures and staff, more diversity in higher education policy areas, and the active involvement of those affected by discrimination in remediation processes.
Reminiscing about the action groups I was part of during my art school studies, where it often felt as if you were hammering in vain with blunt chisels against the rock-hard structures of the institution, I find an even greater appreciation for the relentless effort this group appears to put into demanding reform of the ableist constraints inherent in educational structures. ACCESS NOW does not simply address the many points of exclusion that the academic system and art school structures perpetuate but proposes strategies of change, which seems like an extremely generous act: offering their own knowledge and investment to their institution to adapt.
Through my whole tour around Hardenbergstraße one painting has continued to remain with me, and so I find myself ending up in front of it again. The painting “Umzug” by Media Esfarjani shows three persons carrying an uprooted tree trunk on which a half-hidden figure with branch-like limbs is clinging tightly. The red of the trunk matches their hair and the rooftops of houses in the hilly green landscape in the background. Their blue half-heeled shoes step on the lower edge of the painting as if the canvas itself were the ground on which they walk. Resembling the formal languages of Socialist, Christian, and Surrealist paintings, Esfarjani’s work constructs itself by drawing from a symbolism loaded with historical baggage, obscuring and actualizing it. Placed within a system of signifiers, codes, and meanings, her work takes on the task of carrying the baggage of historicity just as her protagonists carry the tree trunk. A baggage that is neither refused nor fully obeyed in this image. But rather taken on with a clear direction – like the resoluteness found in the eyes of the tree carriers. While I sit on the church bench positioned on the left side of the picture and follow the figure’s gaze which points straight out of the painting towards a destination remaining unknown to the viewer, I wonder if this destination is shared by the painter herself.
When the bands start playing in the courtyard, my engagement with the exhibition tails off with crowds filling the space. I leave the building while the spectacle is at its peak with an empty stomach and a full mind wondering about the artists's creations of signifier chains and about ways to confront the dominating symbolic orders of the current state.
Answers to how to deal with the symbolism that shapes one’s position within a system of images and (visual) languages, might not so much be found in a binary of refusal and acceptance, destruction or reproduction, but rather in the ways to lean onto or against them to make them speak for one’s cause, or against the way they’ve been determined in support of hegemonic power. Taking on the task of using the resilience of symbols as a new formulation of willfulness mirrors the Yes contained in Anne Boyer’s No (and vice versa):
“Transpositions and upendings refuse and then reorder the world. And so, too, poetry manages a transposition of vocabulary: a refusalist poet’s ‘against’ is an agile and capacious ‘for,’ expanding the negative to genius and the opposite of to unforeseen collapses and inclusions.”(5)
//
- Image Captions:
Cover: Media Esfarjani, Umzug, 2024, 260 cm x 120 cm, Oil on Canvas © Media Esfarjani.
Fig.1 Pietro Lugaro & Alessandro McNelly, Algorithmic Cultural Vandalism, 2024, Installation View © Theresa Zwerschke.
Fig.2 Daria Kozlova, What we lost in the Water, 2024, Installation View © Daria Kozlova.
Fig.3 © Theresa Zwerschke.
Fig.4 Class J. Pryde, I don’t even know where to begin, 4-Channel Video Installation, Corridor, 2024 © Class J. Pryde.
Fig.5 Quip* the system. ACCESS NOW! Action Group, ACCESS NOW! Poster, 2024, © Theresa Zwerschke.
Footnotes:
(1) Anne Boyer, No, in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), p. 10.
(2) Transcript from Class J. Pryde, “I don’t even know where to begin.”, 4-channel video installation, UdK Rundgang 2024.
(3) Josephine Pryde, “And then the Professor a Poem”, Posterprint, UDK Rundgang 2024.
(4) Anne Boyer, No, in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), p. 13.
(5) Anne Boyer, No, in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) p.16.
