Lecture performance

September 3, 2015, 
Hito Steyerl // Kassem MosseEYE EXPLOSION // COMBAT ZONES THAT SEE

Hito Steyerl
Eye Explosion

20:00
Venue: Bayenwerft Kunsthaus Rhenania e. V., Bayenstraße 28, 50678 Cologne
Day ticket for Hito Steyerl & Kassem Mosse: 8 €, reduced 5 €
Tickets at tixforgigs.com In English

Hito Steyerl has traveled to Kobane and Suruç repeatedly over the last two years as battles between ISIS and Kurdish militias were raging. As a witness of war and a filmmaker, she asked herself why she could not see anything – or rather, why she could not understand any of what she was seeing. Steyerl approaches these questions in the latest in a series of lecture performances, films and video installations on the optics and visuals of war – both simulated and real, fictitious and factual. Inspired by the cinematic grammars of the late Harun Farocki, Steyerl examines the blindness of her own battlefield footage to offer some speculations about the battlefield surveillance system ARGUS-IS, aerial vision, object tracking and autonomy.

Kassem Mosse
Combat Zones That See #

21:30
Venue: Bayenwerft Kunsthaus Rhenania e. V., Bayenstraße 28, 50678 Cologne
Day ticket for Hito Steyerl & Kassem Mosse: 8 €, reduced 5 € Tickets at tixforgigs.com

Kassem Mosse’s ongoing project delves into the sounds of war from an unexpected angle, that of battlefield vision. It translates and scales down militarized models for the analysis of optical data: the automated tracking, pattern analysis and sensing strategies deployed on today’s battlefields are fed into interconnected setups of outdated music technology. The performance in Cologne will present a sound environment that collages real, transmitted and fictional sounds with music. The choice of material avoids the sensational and the sounds of industrialized combat in favor of consumer technologies in war time: the soft crackle of fire, the sound of money transfers, the low whirring of hard drives filled with video footage, the tweet sound from a cell phone on the front lines, the rustle of plastic blowing in the wind, rubber soles stepping on ashes, the soft noise of camera lenses zooming in on distant shapes and figures, the digital artifacts of Skype conversations.

Exhibition

An Exhibition Against the Covert War in UkrainePHONE CALLS FROM THE CEMETERY AND OTHER STORIES

September 4 – October 3, 2015

With OLGA CHERNYSHEVA, ALEVTINA KAKHIDZE, EREDOVOE UDOGESTVO, YURI LEIDERMAN & ANDREY SILVESTROV, MELNYCHUK-BURLAKA GROUP, OLEKSIY RADYNSKI & TOMÁŠ RAFA, MYKOLA RIDNYI, ANASTASIA VEPREVA, curated by EKATERINA DEGOT and DAVID RIFF

The Exhibition Phone Calls from the Cemetery and Other Stories is held in partnership with The School of Kyiv, Kyiv Biennial 2015.

Opening hours:
Wed–Fri 14:00–18:00
Sat 12:00–18:00
Venue: ACADEMYSPACE, Herwarthstraße 3, 50672 Cologne
Free admission

Fri 4 9 2015 / 19:00
Phone Calls from the Cemetery Exhibition opening

Phone Calls from the Cemetery and Other Stories is a group exhibition by Ukrainian and Russian artists in defiance of the war raging in southeastern Ukraine. It is a hybrid war of black ops, propaganda and all-out deceit, and it involves a total onslaught of images with everything the mass media can muster. Artists offer an asymmetrical response with stories and pictures of their own. Fighting the twin rise of Russian imperialism and European triumphalism, they suggest imaginative alternatives to the flat fictions of propaganda. The exhibition takes ist name from a work by Alevtina Kakhidze, presented as a performance directed by Georg Blokus, and as a series of drawings in the ACADEMYSPACE.

Symposium

How to think (against) the war

Sa, 5 9 2015, 11:00

An all-day long marathon of lectures, readings, discussions and political discourse
Venue: ACADEMYSPACE, Herwarthstraße 3, 50672 Köln (in English), entry 3 € 

The war between Russia and Ukraine is brought home through the media daily, but still, Donbass is far away. People are all too willing to listen to propaganda, easily siding with the heroic Ukraine standing up for European values or with Putin standing up to the Americans.

11:00 Coffee

11:30 EKATERINA DEGOT, DAVID RIFF
Introductory notes

11:45–12:30 MYKOLA RIDNYI (Kharkiv), ROMAN OSMINKIN(Saint Petersburg)
Artists between the Fronts

12:30–13:15 ALEXANDER MOROZOV (Bonn), DENIS PILASH (Kyiv)
Sweeping the Minefields of Propaganda: The Militarization of Media in Russia and Ukraine

13:15–14:00 OXANA TIMOFEEVA (Saint Petersburg)
Notes from the Homefront: Fear and Loathing in Russia Today

14:00–15:00 Break

15.00–15:45 KARL SCHLÖGEL (Berlin)
Ukraine as Europe’s Blind Spot

15:45–16:30 ATALIA GUMENIUK (Kyiv), OLEG ZHURAVLEV (Moscow)
From Maidan to Donbass

16:30–16:45 Break

16:45–17:30 BORIS BUDEN (Berlin),OLEKSIY RADYNSKI (Kyiv)
Revisionism or Europeisation?

17:30–18:30 General discussion with participants and the audience

Image: Hito Steyerl, How not to be seen. Courtesy Academy of the Arts Cologne.