Lectures and dialogues by and with Michael Annoff, Maximiliane Baumgartner, Madeleine Bernstorff, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Pary El-Qalqili, Ewa Majewska, Stephanie Marchal, Chus Martínez, Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck, Bahareh Sharifi and Brigitte Sölch

A cooperation between the Department for Art History and the Marie Jahoda Center For International Gender Studies (MaJaC), Ruhr-University Bochum and reboot: responsiveness, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf

Organized by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, Viktor Neumann and Änne Söll

It has been 100 years since women were admitted to state art academies, thus marking a milestone within the long struggle for professionalization of female artists in Germany. Femininity continues to function as one of many, often intersecting, hierarchizing and exclusionary categories that have always been established and constructed in transnational art institutions. While a continuous increase in the presence of women at German art academies can be noted from the 1950s onward, their discrimination in the art world persisted. In response, part of the 1970s women’s movement—along with its allies from other freedom movements—dedicated itself both theoretically and artistically to combating institutionalized gender inequality; from the beginning, Black women along with women of color underscored the intersectionality of structural mechanisms of exclusion. While studies show minimal changes in parity within the field of contemporary art since the 1990s, inequalities remain ubiquitous. To what extent the women’s or gender-equality officers intended in all German states can transform the art system remains an open-ended question. The persisting patriarchal, anti-social, and racist structures and resulting power imbalances only reluctantly destabilize the myth of the—white, heterosexual, cisgender, and ‘capable’—male genius in all areas of the field.The symposium will analyze causes of intersecting power structures and mechanisms of exclusion and discuss proposals to overcome them. How can the art world achieve an equality that considers factors such as migration and educational background, sexual orientation, and physical and neural difference from the very beginning?

The event will kick off on October 7, 2021, at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. The temporal and thematic framework of the symposium will be introduced by a screening of the suffragette movement at the beginning of the 20th century, compiled and commented by Madeleine Bernstorff, as well as a keynote lecture by the feminist philosopher and author Ewa Majewska. Based on the Guerilla Girls’ actions for equality in art institutions, Majewska will present current strategies of resistance as tested and practiced by art institutions in Poland. She proposes to avoid simplistic conceptions of parity in favor of urgent intersectional and decolonial perspectives.

The second part of the symposium will take place on October 8, 2021, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and will bring together lectures and dialogues between thinkers, artists, and cultural practitioners. The first block will be devoted to historical excursions on the processes, problems, and potentials of equality in the art world: Brigitte Sölch (University of Heidelberg) will shed light on the situation of female art historians around 1900 and present the DFG network “Women Art Historians before 1970.” Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck (University of Cologne) will provide insight into the holdings of the Central Archive of the International Art Trade. The artist Maximiliane Baumgartner will talk about exclusions from the canon and trans-temporal solidarizations. In a second block, Stephanie Marchal (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) uses the example of art criticism, while Chus Martínez (FHNW Basel) examines institutionalized inequalities based on artistic training, to consider art historical revisions and structural transformations. In a concluding block moderated by Gürsoy Doğtaş (University of Applied Arts Vienna), curator Michael Annoff, director Pary El-Qalqili, and Diversity Arts Culture program director Bahareh Sharifi describe how discrimination is interconnected, critically question the art system’s notion of diversity, and discuss the need for an institutional code of conduct and further structural changes.

Friday, October 8, 2021, 10 am – 5 pm, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne

10 am, Welcome
Nikola Dietrich (Director Kölnischer Kunstverein / reboot: responsiveness) and Änne Söll and Christine Peters (NRW Kunststiftung, Head of Performing Arts)

10:15 am, Lecture, in German
Wider das Image der Kunsthistorikerin? Architektur, Landschaft und Territorium als Forschungs- und Handlungsfelder
Brigitte Sölch (art and architecture historian, University Heidelberg)
“My presentation will present, on the one hand, our DFG network ‘Paths – Methods – Critiques: Women Art Historians 1880–1970’. On the other hand, based on observations of the current relationship between architecture and art research, it will consider the period of the late 19th and early 20th century. Focusing on early women art historians (in the US), whose fields of research and action included architecture, landscape, and territory, the question will be: How did they practice their work in this field and position themselves publicly: as authors, as critics, and as intellectuals? Moreover, what academic training opportunities did they have and how did they attain their ‘positions’? What social classes, what forms and ideas of diversity are we talking about?”

Lecture, in German
Parität und Solidarität im Kunstbetrieb? Ein Blick in die Archivbestände des Zentralarchiv für deutsche und internationale Kunstmarktforschung
Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck (art historian, University of Cologne, Director Central Archive of the International Art Trade – ZADIK)
“Art market studies is a field of research in the process of academic establishment. The ZADIK | Zentralarchiv für deutsche und internationale Kunstmarktforschung (Central Archive of the International Art Trade), as a scientific institute of the University of Cologne, is dedicated to the archiving, processing, critically-reflective research, and communication of the history, structures, contexts, and developments of international art systems. In the context of the lecture, statistical considerations of the composition of the more than 170 ZADIK archive holdings of gallery owners, art dealers, art critics, and curators, among others, will provide initial insights. Subsequently, selected examples will be used to explore the question of what the documentation of historical communication and activities of art market protagonists reveals about equality and solidarity in the art business of the 20th century. A particular focus will be placed on women gallery owners in the art market.”

Illustrated contribution, in German
Auf Fassaden schauen oder Die vierte Wand der dritten Pädagogin
Maximiliane Baumgartner (artist)
“In her contribution, Maximiliane Baumgartner presents her current artistic research as well as the painting series Auf Fassaden schauen oder Die vierte Wand der dritten Pädagogin (Looking at Facades or The Fourth Wall of the Third Pedagogue), which was shown in a solo exhibition from June 26 – August 20, 2021, at the Kunstverein München. In the series, she uses the format of the exhibition to highlight different, site-specific time-space levels and their intertwining: she takes up, for instance, the history of the Hof-Atelier Elvira and traces its iconic facade, as well as its patrons, who were often excluded from the canon, and their social context in the medium of painting. In 1889, women’s rights activists Anita Augspurg and Sophia Goudstikker commissioned the house and facade from August Endell. Thus, a place came into being where women were protagonists in helping shape cultural as well as informal city events in the form of urban practices of resistance—a place that today figures as an important point of reference within a queerfeminist urban history and the question of solidary spaces of action. When the ‘Great German Art Exhibition' took place in the Haus der Kunst in 1937, and in the same year the feme exhibition ‘Degenerate Art' organized by the National Socialist Party was shown in the expanded spaces of today’s Kunstverein München, the ‘city cleansing' carried out by the National Socialists in this context led to the brutal demolition of the facade. By painterly juxtaposing narratives and image politics, some of which are separated in time but interwoven, the series refers to the field of tension between historiography and the politics of memory, based on the question of a critique of representation. In doing so, Baumgartner’s contribution will also explore to what extent a solidarization with past urban spatial practices is possible, in the sense of a ‘networking across time.' Painting as a medium will be deliberately used as an extended field of action, taking into account its principle of simultaneity.”

Moderation: Änne Söll

12:15 — 12:30 pm, short break

12:30 pm, Lecture, in German
Kunstkritikerinnen oder von der Suche nach einer inklusiveren Form von Kritik
Stephanie Marchal (art historian, Ruhr University Bochum)
“It was not until ca. 1970 that the professional profile of the art critic became accessible to women and a significant number of female critics appeared on the scene—‘female’ being conceived as a subject position shaped by gendered socialization and not in any sense as an essentialist category (following Griselda Pollock 1988). Via the second-wave feminist movement, the emergence of this new social figure occurred in several Western countries at virtually the same time as the notion that art criticism was in crisis became current: it has been faulted for a loss of discernment, distance from its object, and impaired authority ever since. What has been overlooked and even actively ignored in an act of epistemic violence is that this diagnosis of a crisis mourns the decline of a hegemonic conception of art criticism primarily championed by its solitary ‘grand masters,’ from Denis Diderot to Clement Greenberg. It took female critics to point out the (assumed) outmoded gesture of power implicit in this conception of criticism and to propose a productive reinterpretation of the symptoms of crisis. How they did so, and the alternative visions of criticism with which they challenged the symbolically exclusive, male-dominated structures of the world of art and criticism: these are the concerns that this presentation aims to probe. I will also draw attention to the potentials that have been lost sight of in postmodernist, primarily feminist criticism’s sometimes sweeping repudiation of ‘modernism’. Although critics like Greenberg did not reflect on the fact that their perspectives were purely male and were operating under completely different (modern) circumstances than the women critics in question, their ‘modernist’ critique, which focuses more strongly on classism than has been seen so far, also holds potentials that are relevant for subsequent discourses struggling for parity. I will ask how modern and postmodern critical practices may illuminate and enrich each other in order to develop ways of dealing with alterity, to elaborate an inclusive notion of critique appropriate for new forms of negotiation in postmodern societies and to revolutionize the crisis-ridden concept of critique from within its practices.”

Lecture, in German
Longing For Equality
Chus Martínez (Head of Institute IAGN)
“Does art education play a role in future forms of inequality? The core liberal values of freedom and equality are at work both in conceiving art education and in the role of women in the Western art world system, but should we seriously reconsider their premises? Are the different art worlds correctly interpreting the impact of labor and the economic structures on the situation women face? How can a woman’s attention to sexuality and to the disparities of power that pervade in heterosexual relationships and in patriarchal cultures be changed? How can this go hand in hand with the radical need to reconsider the identification of sexclass
membership that happens at birth and allow for the development of an individual’s personality and preferences without the coercive influence of any socially-enacted value system? Crossing all these questions lies another: how are all these experiences of gender simultaneously informed by class, ethnicity, race, …? Mainstream feminism has historically belittled the voices of women of color, queer women, women of different classes, disabled women, and the other non-normative identities that play a fundamental role in the experiences of women in the world. We are seeing the necessary resurgence of the term 'intersectionality,' and the need to describe the ways in which oppressive institutions (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, classism, etc.) are interconnected and cannot. be examined separately. We know one thing: we must refrain from articulating one singular voice. We need new habits in all the levels that constitute life!”

Moderation: Nikola Dietrich and Viktor Neumann

2 — 3 pm, break

3 pm, Introduction, in German
Nach allen Regeln der Ausgrenzung – über die Notwendigkeit eines institutionellen Verhaltenskodex
Gürsoy Doğtas (art historian, University of Applied Arts Vienna and curator)
“By means of an institutional mission statement, museums, universities, and other public institutions commit themselves to a code of conduct through self established rules. It usually includes a commitment to equality and, more recently, diversity principles, a list of policies developed for this purpose, and a promise to observe them at all organizational levels (structures and practices). On the road to equity and justice, these publicly accessible codes are certainly an important commitment, but their polished rhetoric of conviction and accountability obscures deeply embedded structures of discrimination—whether in the institution’s
history or its present. Decades before institutions wrote their code of conduct, legal guidelines required both public research and cultural institutions to adopt anti-discrimination measures, whether via European Union (2000/43/EG) requirements or national ones such as the General Equal Treatment Act (AGG). Despite many countermeasures and strategies, structural and institutional discrimination continues. On this basis, the understanding of diversity of art institutions must be critically questioned, starting with the problem of who develops the policies of a diversitysensitive art institution and how. Among the many forms of discrimination, such as social and cultural origin and affiliation, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, mental and health impairment, as well as religion and family background, this panel focuses on racial discrimination.”

Lecture, in German
Copy & Paste Diversity
Michael Annoff (curator and faculty member, FH Potsdam)
“Increasingly, academia and the arts are attempting to institutionalize their diversity development. Critics such as Sara Ahmed focus on the experiences of Black and POC diversity workers who must resist the hegemonic insistence and tokenization attempts of white institutions. Michael Annoff takes a step back and reports on the work in institutions that, due to the lack of employees and family members affected by racism, still believe themselves to be in a white Happyland. How do white bourgeois institutions manage not to simply copy standardized equality measures, but to initiate an open unlearning process?”

Lecture, in German
Shirin spricht, aber wird nicht gehört. Performance willkommen. Selbstbestimmung abgelehnt
Pary El-Qalqili (director)
“In 1976, the film ‘Shirins Hochzeit’ by Helma Sanders- Brahms was released. The director narrates the character Shirin, who flees her marriage from Turkey to Cologne. Shirin has no voice in the film. While we see scenes of Shirin working in the factory, cleaning, and prostituting herself, we hear the filmmaker’s voice-over narrating Shirin’s fictional inner life. The film victimizes what should be an empowered character, joining a series of films that narrate immigrant women workers as mute, backward-looking, and pitiable figures. I never encountered this film in my lectures on film history and film theory at a German film school. Then, when I saw it, I felt a strong inner resistance. While the other feminist films of the 60s and 70s almost omit the figure of the guest worker, here, a violent fixating gaze unfolds. bell hooks’ ‘resurgent gaze’ and other writings of Black feminism led me not only to read the narrative of the so-called Other in German cinema against the grain, but also into feminist film politics. Shirin’s character continues to accompany me in feminist film politics to this day. At times, my impression is that Shirin is now allowed to speak but is still not heard. After all, how willing is feminist film politics to point out not only the ‘male gaze’ and the exclusion of white women in the film industry, but also the structural discrimination of women* of color and (post-) migrant women* in front of and behind the camera? How does feminist film politics become intersectional in practice and not just on paper? And when can we talk about antiracism instead of diversity concepts?”

Lecture, in German
Antidiskriminierung im Kulturbereich – eine Quadratur des Kreises?
Bahareh Sharifi (Head of Program Diversity Arts Culture)
“The current Corona pandemic, as well as global movements around Black Lives Matter and #metoo, have drastically demonstrated the effects of structural inequality, discrimination, and exclusion. In the cultural sector, too, ever more cases of abuse of power are becoming public. The still prevalent idea of genius and the resulting concentration of power in the hands of a few leads to pronounced hierarchies that foster discrimination. Existing anti-discrimination law is still insufficiently implemented in the cultural sector or does not apply in all cases. Guidelines and codes of conduct can be a tool to close existing legal gaps in dealing with discrimination, but also to make binding agreements to create transparent and good working conditions for all. This short lecture argues that goal-oriented diversity development should be tied to a practice that is critical not only of discrimination but also of power.”

Moderation: Gürsoy Doğtas

reboot: responsiveness
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices.

The first cycle, reboot: responsiveness, departs from desires, anxieties and hopes amplified by the current pandemic. Hosted in two different yet aligned sites that mutually interact with one another as much as they support, complement and challenge each other, reboot: responsiveness provides infrastructures for provisional stagings, rehearsals, processual choreographies, and encounters around notions of presence, intimacy, care, and responsibility. reboot: responsiveness develops activities together with a core collective comprised of Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia. Embracing diverse formats, and working together with further invited guests and audiences in Cologne and Düsseldorf, these artists and thinkers will explore ways to dedicate time to one another and to perform in time, to develop alternative vocabularies, archives, gestures, movements, and translations, to share and transmit resources and ideas, and to find modes of resistance and togetherness in response to the current situation we are living in.

reboot:
Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann
Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia
Graphic design by Sean Yendrys

http://reboot-responsiveness.com/

reboot: responsiveness is supported by
Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf
Stadtwerke Düsseldorf
Kunststiftung NRW
Stiftung Kunstfonds
Neustart Kultur