on 17 January 2018, 18:15-21:15
Room A08-0-001, University of Oldenburg

With Thomas Tode, (Hamburg)
Guest at the seminar Claudia Reiche: Repetition, repetition, repetition.
On a basic media concept in art

18:15 - 20:00 Film screening: DREAMS REWIRED. A History of Media Utopia
Where do our (multi-) media past and its future meet? It is only a few steps
from the punch card to mass storage and from the optical telegraph to the fibre optic network. But
what spirit animates these devices, what hopes were and are attached to them? What
do they have to do with us and what perspectives do they open up? The essay film Dreams Rewired is dedicated to these questions and uses numerous film clips from the early days of the media to trace the supposedly new desires and fears back to the birth of the telephone, cinema and television. The journey through time begins with the first media boom of the late 19th century and reveals, piece by piece, how the social upheavals of today's networked world were already mapped out in an age in which the telegraph and punch card were considered revolutionary to the same extent that we see social media and big data today.

The utopia of a better world was immediately ignited by the new technical possibilities of the time. Based on a borderless communication technology that would connect people, prosperity and peace would be promoted and war and social exclusion would be eliminated once it was available to everyone. According to the optimistic assumption, a fairer
place for all would almost inevitably emerge as a result of the media moving closer together.

However, what the media age initially promised and what ultimately became of it could not be more different
. The original openness soon gave way to rules, regulations and
laws of a state monopoly on communication. Today, the new media are insidiously
contributing to the loss of privacy and omnipresent surveillance, thus realising fears
that have always accompanied the hopeful utopias.

20:00 - 21:15 Thomas Tode Lecture / Talk
The eternal return of the same: Technical media and our fears of
privacy screening
Since the end of the 19th century, we have been inventing technical media to serve our
communication: Telephone, phonograph, film, record, radio, television. With each
of these inventions, our fears that these media will be misused
and that our privacy will be scrutinised are repeated. These fears are reflected in
feature films in which we are bugged, spied on and screened. Is
history repeating itself? Are we reproducing established fears again and again? Repetition as
variation of the same old thing or the return of the repressed? Lecture with
film examples.

Flyer PDF

Bent desire. The male nude in 20th century photography

on 12 June 2014 at 18:00
Room A 8-1-110, University of Oldenburg

The painting "Young Man on the Seashore" (1837) by the French painter Jean Hippolyte Flandrin is an icon of the male nude. The pose of the seated man leaning his head on his bent knees has gone down in art history as /Flandrin Pose/. The motif has also been taken up and reinterpreted countless times in photography, including by Fred Holland Day, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Rudolf Koppitz, Robert Mapplethorpe and Pierre & Gilles. What is the fascination of this pose, which simultaneously conceals and exposes the young man's body? The lecture explores this question with a view to the history of the discourse on male homosexuality.
The lecture is part of the public research colloquium of the Centre for Gender Studies in Cultural Studies in co-operation with the Helene-Lange-Kolleg: Queer Studies and Intermediality: Art - Music - Media Culture.

Flyer PDF

Lampedusa - Image Politics and Representations of Migration

On Wednesday, 22 January 2014
Start 19.00 h | Film starts 21.00 h
Admission free
Cine K, Bahnhofstraße 11
26122 Oldenburg

Reports and images of the Lampedusa refugee drama are circulating around the world. Photographs, film images, headlines and voices remain in our memories. They illustrate and reproduce our perception of migration as a border crossing. In a panel discussion, we want to look at questions of image politics and representations. What reality of migration is created by images? What do they show? What borders are marked by images? What significance do images have in reporting on migration?

In a panel discussion, different positions on the topic will be put into dialogue with each other. After the discussion, we will show the film Lampedusa auf St. Pauli (D 2013; 83 min; director: Rasmus Gerlach), which documents the activism of the Lampedusa group in Hamburg.

Maja Figge, media scientist, University of Oldenburg

Nissar Gardi, educational scientist

Lena Kaiser, journalist at TAZ

Natascha Zaun, social scientist, University of Bremen

Moderation:

Luisa Jansen
Thea Buchholz

Flyer PDF

A confrontation with the institutional conditions
of racism in the field of tension between art and politics.

A lecture by Farida Heuck, visual artist from Berlin

In my site- and context-related installations, I try to show the institutional preconditions of racism in the medium of art. My focus is on the attribution of migrant as a constructed identity that points to inequality in terms of civil rights and discrimination in the relations of the nation state. In my presentation, I will present examples of my projects that use different artistic strategies to reveal these inequalities, which contradict the understanding of democracy in a society characterised by migration: The "Global Immigration Service" visualises a utopia with which I want to point to real contexts that illustrate the different ways in which migration is dealt with between migrants* who are "useful" to us and those who are seen as "not useful". In the video "Guided Tour", as well as in the action "a worthwhile challenge", I stage realities that illustrate the power relations that determine the view of migration. In doing so, I want to expose the newly created border regulations, which are increasingly losing their physical manifestation, and put up for discussion the connection to the dictate of integration, which serves as an instrument of political power. And why link art with politics? What function does art fulfil when concrete manifestations of government practice, which in turn can be found in everyday racism, are brought under attack in the field of art? Can this serve as an aesthetic form of protest?

Organiser:

Prof. Dr Eva Sturm, Fak. III Institute of Art and Visual Culture
Prof. Dr Paul Mecheril, Fak. I Center for Migration, Education and
Cultural Studies (CMC)

Time: 17 June 2013, 18:00 - 20:00
Venue: A06 0-001, University of Oldenburg

Programme PDF

Lecture by our current Teaching Artist Christine Biehler

Monday, 21.1.2013, 18 s.t., Room A8 0-001

Christine Biehler is a spatial artist. In her installations and interventions, she uses calculated interventions in spatial situations to develop poetic three-dimensional images that have a lasting influence on or question the perception of the places where they take place.

The works are conceived from the outset as "temporary pieces". Sculpture gains a temporal dimension, which is particularly evident in the use of ephemeral and liquid materials such as wind, ice, reflections, foam and vapour or performative elements. At a certain point, the work takes on a life of its own and becomes an event that engages several senses.

Differences in temperature and odour, interventions in the architecture such as drill holes and breakthroughs, model-like installations or traces of a fictitious event such as the destruction of a gallery space awaken an associative court of personal narratives and memories. In this way, the exhibition space or presentation venue sometimes becomes a building site, a landscape or a place of worship.

In her lecture, Christine Biehler will use many examples from her artistic practice to reflect on her sculptural approach, processual sculptures and sculptural processes.

Christine Biehler (born 1964, currently lives in Hanau) is an artist, art mediator and 2013 Teaching Artist at the University of Oldenburg.
Key concepts in her art and teaching are process-orientation, performativity and contextualisation. She taught as a professor at the universities of Hildesheim and Dortmund and at the Kunsthochschule Kassel until 2009.

Supported by Die junge ÖFFENTLICHE Landesbrandkasse Versicherungen Oldenburg

Lecture with film examples by Florian Wüst
Wednesday, 13 June, 2012, 7 p.m.

Room A8 0-001

Documentary and artistic practices have repeatedly overlapped and influenced each other in the history of film. This encounter of different demands on the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity often results in the critical questioning of the image-generating processes themselves. The image itself and the degree of its fictionality seem less important than the process of appropriating the real and the associated role of the "author". Using selected historical and contemporary film examples, Florian Wüst describes the transformation of cinematic practices and explores the question of to what extent and when they can be considered political per se.

With film excerpts from Harun Farocki, Georges Franju, Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, Isaac Julien, Renzo Martens, Leonore Mau & Hubert Fichte, among others.

Florian Wüst is an artist and film curator in Berlin. http://www.fwuest.com/

Lecture-performance by Marco Olbrich
Tue 17.1.12, 7 pm Sculpture studio