Assembly School of the Transcultural Academy: “Futurities”

The Transcultural Academy “Futurities” 2023 of the cross-collections Research Department of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) invites the public to participate in open formats of the Assembly School. It also welcomes its attendees to visit the exhibition We Show What We (Don’t) Know: Images as Research as part of the Academy at the Japanese Palais in Dresden.

Using transversal pedagogies, conversational care, artistic experimentations, mutual listening, taking note(s), collections-based analysis and situated practices, the Transcultural Academy aims to unsettle the chrononormativity of museum-time. It builds on knowledge that emerges from a spectrum of encounters, for example, when art-historians, conservators, assistants and museum guards of SKD are in dialogue with artists, curators, designers, students and researchers of various educational backgrounds. The concept of “futurity“ operates as an analytical-pedagogical tool that is singular for each participant. It activates images, documents, displays or situations of the collections as portals to enter narratives of the past as intertemporal constellations in which claims for justice are real and possible in the present. Neither future nor past appear as monolithic blocks but compose an ongoing process in the making. The future is neither completely reinvented nor is the past conclusively closed. Rather, futures are nourished by the rhythms of the past: inventories, material science and archive studies are just as much a part of this process as losses, violence, absence, the undocumented, the repressed, and the excluded. The Academy is, thus, a set of exercises that does not seek final answers, but proposes scenarios that practise an “ethics of relations” (Bénédicte Savoy) in a future museum.

Assembly School

Wednesday, November 8
6pm CET: Introduction Doreen Mende

6:30pm CET: Stannaki Forum “Knotted and Armed,” Art and Research in Conversation, with Christine Müller-Radloff, restorer and textile-conservator at the Dresden Ethnographic Museum of SKD since 1982 speaks with the artist Mahshid Mahboubifar; the art historian Stefano Rinaldi of the Armoury of SKD speaks with the artist Natalia Zaitseva, moderated by the filmmaker, artist and educator Mareike Bernien of the department of Expanded Cinema at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. The Stannaki Forum responds to the exhibition We Show What We (Don’t) Know as part of the Academy at the Japanese Palais.

Thursday, November 9
4:30pm CET: Research presentations by the curator Zohreh Deldadeh, and the artist Barbara Marcel, Fellows of the Transcultural Academy.

7pm CET: Public seminar “Portals to Futurities” with the artist, theorist, filmmaker and writer Kodwo Eshun, moderated by the philosopher and architect Lama el Khatib.

Friday, November 10
4:30pm CET: A research performance by the choreographer Robert Ssempijja, Fellow of the Transcultural Academy.

7pm CET: Public seminar “An Academy in the Museum: Why?” with the educator and author Beatrice von Bismarck and the curator and scholar Clémentine Deliss, responded by Thomas A. Geisler, director of the Museum of Decorative Arts and founder of the Design Campus at SKD, moderated by Doreen Mende.

In the morning, there will be non-public study groups that are held by the mentors Lama el Khatib, the architect Simona Malvezzi and the philosopher Christopher A. Nixon with about 30 invited students-participants of the Transcultural Academy. The participants of the Transcultural Academy were nominated in conversation with Marwa Arsanios of the Dutch Art Institute, Beatrice von Bismarck of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Susan Philipsz of the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden, Nikita Dhawan and Kerstin Schankweiler of the Technical University of Dresden, and Bénédicte Savoy of Technical University of Berlin. The results of the study groups will constitute a collective publication, realised through a seminar collaboration with the class of System Design, led by Maureen Mooren and Malin Gewinner, of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.

Registration: forschung [​at​] skd.museum / Zoom

Exhibition
We Show What We (Don’t) Know: Images as Research as part of the Transcultural Academy is open to the public at the Japanese Palais till November 23:

What does knowledge as a process look like? Through a set of visual research practices, the exhibition renders visible the encounters with the collections of SKD as a network of perspectives. A dialogue of the artists with the museum’s researchers led to the making of 16 new artistic productions, including video installations, textiles, an imagined computer game, transformed angels and an interview with a gun. They visualise the connections between actors of cognitive museum labour that stretches behind images and objects by the means of artistic means: research becomes palpable in images, sounds and space as a creative and multi-part process. The focus shifts from an object as a closed entity to an open plane of knowledge.

With 16 new artworks by Anna Sopova, snc, Ingmar Stange, Johann Bärenklau, Katharina Bayer, Ksenia Sova, Leila Brinkmann, Lucia-Charlotte Ott, Mahshid Mahboubifar, Marta Sundmann, Natalia Zaitseva, Sijo Choi Kim, Simón Jaramillo Vallejo, Valério de Araújo Silva, Su Yu Hsin, Yunseon Jeong. Curated by Anna-Lisa Reith of SKD. The exhibition is a collaboration between Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, class for expanded cinema, led by Clemens von Wedemeyer and Mareike Bernien, with the Research Department of SKD.

The Transcultural Academy “Futurities” consists of an assembly school with a cross-collections curriculum, an exhibition, art-research residencies and a film programme. Overall concept: Doreen Mende and Anna-Lisa Reith of the Research Department in conversation with colleagues of the the Dresden Ethnographic Museum, the Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig, the Cabinet of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, Museum of Saxonian Folk Art, Albertinum, Porcelain Collection, Old Masters Picture Gallery and Sculpture Collection up to 1800, Armoury Collection, Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon, Museum of Decorative Arts, the team of the Provenance Research and the cross-sectional departments of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Thank you! Graphic design: Sören Sandbothe and So Hyeon Lee, students of the class of System Design at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig.

Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media of Germany.