 Can Lydia start, and then you can come? I think we should be on time, and we're already quite late. Okay, super, thank you. Okay, are you ready? Ah, super, okay. Hello, welcome back. We have smaller audiences now, because actually, I'm going to ask the workshop room to close the door. Okay, we are now in our seminar breakout session titled Conversations Between Arts and Heritage. So Saturday today is the first time we're doing this. It's a bit of an experimental format, but we're excited to see how it works. The goal is to have more of an engaged conversation with smaller groups. It's also a two-hour session, so sorry for starting a bit late. We're really excited about all the speakers that we have here. So basically, we're going to have two speakers. This seminar session, one, is entitled Constructs, and it's focusing mostly on, I would say, aspects of curation. And we have two lovely speakers, so I'm going to let them introduce themselves, or would you like me to say a couple words? Okay. Mudi Mahaya, I'm sorry, is an artist and curator from Nigeria who is actually an artist in residence at Zatka'u, which is the space that we're in, and he has some really interesting work. He's actually part of the visual art exhibition that was last night, so if you were here, you saw him speak a bit about his work. Lydia Rossner is going to be speaking about her work, which involves more conducting interviews with people as a part of artistic research process connected with Biennales, and Mudi will speak more about document specifically. So, yeah, so basically the format just really quickly is that each presenter will speak, give a presentation, and then hopefully be inspired and have questions for each other, and then it will turn into a group discussion so that we can use the two hours. If it runs short of the two hours, that's totally fine, and we'll see how far we get. So, thank you. I'm going to introduce Lydia as the first presenter. Yeah, if everybody could actually come closer, so we can have the dialogue part is a little bit more accessible. Great. And for those watching the livestream, I just wanted to announce that we have two other seminar sessions happening simultaneously right now, so please really come forward. Two other seminar sessions happening. One is with the theme music, which is with Highland Kim from South Korea and Debbie Withers from England who are speaking about different relationships to music, relationships to archiving, contemporary interpretation of tradition, and then downstairs in our exhibition hall we have the urbanization seminar session with Professor Zaksenmeier and members of Kunstrup Public who run the space as well, and they're speaking about aspects of different perspectives on urbanization and arts. So, now I'll introduce Lydia to present. And please move forward. Okay, great, thank you. Hello. That's kind of... Maybe I should get high heels. Oh, it didn't grow. Hi, thanks for coming. I just wanted to start by saying that my research is within the field of visual anthropology and my focus is in contemporary art and mainly I've been doing it through interviews with artists, curators, and art critics and theorists and I have been focusing on biennials as institutions and how they're organized, how they function closer. Okay. And what they do for society and heritage in general. So, globally, right now there's not a consent on number but between 150 and 200 art biennials. So, this is biennials for contemporary art because they're also architecture, design, and so forth. And the oldest one started in Venice in 1895 and probably most people know that one. It's based on national pavilions, which means each country has a representative building and they send the best artists from their country to sort of represent their country. So, it's almost like a cultural embassy and it's very much due political issue because by the architecture of the pavilions that were built at the beginning you can completely see the structure of power at the time, the political power. For example, Great Britain, the U.S., France, they have the biggest pavilions in the most prominent place. So, but to kind of a little bit define biennials what I could say to their large scale international exhibitions and their aim is to showcase the latest thoughts, expressions, and artistic research in global art production. So, on a most basic level the art biennials as institutions, some are just organizations, the new ones, their role in society is to present culture. And by presenting culture is not just showing artworks as art objects but also creating a discursive platform where they organize conferences, symposium talks and just kind of more of a mediation about what's going on in the art world. And in a way, through these debates and lectures they kind of create a different space in the urban city where they're at because usually they're in a public space. So, I consider these exhibitions to be a medium which is a tool to disseminate knowledge and artistic production and ideas. And so if you think of it that way then the potential for some kind of an impact or effect of these exhibitions is pretty great because they can reach a mass audience and they can really communicate a lot of different ideas. So, by functioning as a medium the exhibition contextualizes and mediates art and it's where the coalition between artwork and viewer is negotiated and dialogue is initiated and that's where meaning is constructed. And this interconnectedness could be described as trans cognition which is what Sullivan who is an artist and an art educator wrote in his artistic thinking as trans cognitive process. This trans cognition is the process where the self and others are parallel and necessary agents of mind that inform each other through analysis and critique. So, in that sense the exhibition is that intersection where the curator, the artist and the public meet and construction of culture and knowledge exchange takes place. So, but to go back to the beginning a little bit when Venice started it took about half a century for the next biennial to be established and that happened in 1951 and it was in Sao Paulo in Brazil and it was also based at the beginning on this national pavilion model. Then this was followed by documenta in Casa most of you maybe have heard of documenta it's not a biennial it takes place every five years and so this was in 55 then in 73 it was the Biennale of Sydney, Australia and then the Havana biennial in Cuba in 1984. So, for the first, for one century there were almost just a handful of biennials and then it was in the 1990s that there was an explosion of all kinds of art biennials and mainly this coincided with global political changes, economic changes, changes in the political system and uprising and on the other hand I think a big reason for it was that there were just simply more institutions that were providing education in art practices, curating so these people needed some kind of a platform to work. The other thing that it's worth mentioning is that many of the biennials have started at a place of conflict where the city or the country had experienced some trauma and the biennial was a way to sort of revitalize the spirit of people so for example documenta in 1955 it was after World War II and it was a way to introduce German people to the movements in contemporary art and modernism at the time actually it was very historically oriented the very first one and it kind of showed art that was made since the beginning of the century art that German people because of the war were not able to see. Another example is the Gwangju Biennial in South Korea that started in 1985 and it was a form of commemoration of the tragic events that occurred there in 1980s in May there was a demonstration against the military regime at the time and many, many students who were not armed were just killed so this is a very tragic event in South Korean history and they basically established a biennial to commemorate this and to keep it in the memory they always have some kind of a reference to it and a more recent biennial that started was Prospect One in New Orleans in Louisiana the United States and that was about three years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city and the curator who initiated it was Dan Cameron who has had a huge appreciation of the heritage of New Orleans and he wanted to just bring people there and bring artists to respond to the situation and bring awareness also by bringing the biennials bring a lot of tourism to the cities and they also impact the economy that way another set of reasons for establishing a biennial have been to demonstrate openness and progressive development also to showcase cultural heritage and such cases are just name a few the Istanbul Biennial in Turkey which started in 87 the Shanghai Biennial in China which started in 96 and the Shiraya Biennial in United Arab Emirates which started in 1993 and then there are a few biennials such as the Dakar Biennial in Senegal which is called Dakart was established in 1996 and also the Havana Biennial they were both established with the reason to kind of create their own representation and to have an alternative to the Western Eurocentric art exhibitions at the time so what is different how did biennials differ from let's say art fair or museum exhibitions or galleries mainly I would say that they're organized in temporary spaces they don't have a set space I mean a lot of them now do but that's one reason also they're considered to be non-commercial so the artwork that you see there is not for sale however once an artist participates their value on the art market really increases but typically the artists receive a small fee a small honorarium to participate however what is different is that the biennials have funds to pay to produce new works and these new works usually can be pretty big and pretty expensive which is something that being in a museum setting or gallery is not possible always also there's the discursive element as I mentioned before and there's a big kind of element of performance performance not only in the sense that they present performances but also there's a performative aspect to curating a biennial so that's the main kind of difference and then you know if we think about art we think about traditionally museums which is where the spaces where art traditionally has been exhibited and made available to the public however museums are not as flexible to change their exhibition that often also to find funding it's a big organization usually and they're very slow so what is also different than a museum let's say who has a permanent curator working there is that the biennials have a new curator or a new curatorial team that has been selected by an international committee for each edition so you have a completely new idea on how to realize this completely new set of approaches, artists and so on so the curator once they're selected they can bring their own team associate curators and people that they enjoy working with and they can trust because that's a big issue they don't have that much time usually they have about 16 months to prepare a big exhibit which means they have to find a lot of artists organize the production of the work find venues, funding, etc so what is interesting to mention is I think that there has been a lot of questions about how are the artists chosen to participate in the Biennale and the answer is it's super subjective it's who the curator is who they know a lot of times they for practical reasons want to invite artists that they have worked with already and they know that they will produce work that will be high quality and on time but speaking of museums I want to expand a little bit on museums to talk for example about the ethnological museums and ethnographic sometimes they're called which is where we go to see items objects that are kind of physical traces of heritage and these objects have a huge representational value they tell stories they tell of cultures they tell of people and it's just this one object that it's in a glass cabinet and it's precious you know it's there it has the information and it's really elevated and so I was I mean of course objects trigger memories and so on and they carry also memories but I'm also thinking about how what happens to an art object of contemporary art object when it's put in a museum what is the value of that object does it have the same kind of associations as an object that's supposed to represent heritage and it's if you're in Berlin it's a very good time right now it's the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and a big part of their exhibition is in the Ethnological Museum in Dahlem and you can kind of feel that you can see it and experience this because the contemporary exhibition spaces are right next to the permanent collection which hasn't changed since the opening of the museum so it's interesting to kind of walk through really old stuff objects little figures, vases and then encounter contemporary art in the same setting so if you're interested in this kind of connectedness you can experience it maybe it's open until August I think at the beginning of August and I'll mention the Berlin Biennale a little bit later as well so what do we do with these biennales you know who is supposed to study them are we supposed to study them how do we make sense of them so this has been for the last few years kind of a topic for a group of people and they've organized kind of an archive it's called the Biennale Foundation and it's mainly people that have worked in biennales for a long time and they started compiling and archiving documents and papers that were written articles about biennales to kind of organize this existing knowledge in 2010 they published the Biennale Reader which is a collection of texts about biennales and it's their attempt to create an anthology of pre-existing knowledge and they also have a conference here in Berlin in July if you're here and you're interested you can attend it it's open to the public it's going to be on the 13th of July so I think I can now present a few do you have any questions by the way so far okay I will present a few case studies just so that you can kind of make sense a little bit of okay this is what they are but how does it actually work since I talked about Prospect One in New Orleans I can start with that as I said this is the first large international biennial in the United States there's the Whitney Biennale but it's mainly for US based artists and the Prospect One took place in 2008 in New Orleans and there were about 80 international artists and there wasn't a one venue one building but they were spread around the city which was the idea of the curator that visitors can actually explore parts of town that are not the tourist locations this is not what you know about New Orleans when you go there and see but the areas that still have been where the time I think maybe now still are struggling with the after the devastation from Hurricane Katrina so there was not a thematic kind of framework artists were just supposed to go there experience see what's happening in the city and make works based on that so many of the artists for example Vangesshi Mutu and Mark Bradford they made their works in the Lower Ninth Ward which was the most devastated area and it has been completely forgotten I mean a lot of the like the tourist destinations like the French Quarter of New Orleans were being rebuilt and still was attracting tourists but the kind of the poor areas have been completely ignored so by exhibiting works there they forced the audiences to go and actually see what's going on and perhaps in a way take action and one of the artists actually built a house for a lady who lost her home and somehow with her insurance things didn't work out so her artwork was she just met her there heard her story the artist is Vangesshi Mutu and her artwork is called Miss Sarah's House so during the Biennale she just made a construction and made Christmas lights so that it's it can be lit in the dark and collected funds and organized the building of the home so the home was built after I think a couple of years it was finished so it's interesting to see that this kind of intent from the curator had a real impact in the city and there were other situations too since we're talking a lot about heritage here and New Orleans is a very special place in terms of heritage it's very unique I don't know if any of you have been there but so there was a group of two collaborators one from Thailand one from Canada and it's called Navin's Party they had a very simple project they kind of are looking up the name Navin is there somebody in New Orleans with the same name and we can do something collaborative with them and somehow it was misspelled and they came up to this really famous musician who passed away during the evacuation he was evacuated because of Hurricane Katrina and they weren't able to then move him back to New Orleans and give him the proper jazz funeral which is a big thing there I mean this is a big part of their heritage that they have this jazz funeral and people walk and they play music it's a big band and throughout the city and it's a big procession that's something big so the artists were actually able to do this they did a jazz funeral for this musician so these are kind of examples of what is happening with these more open and flexible platforms for contemporary art another very interesting biennial is the Istanbul biennial that started in when did it start in 1987 what I was curious about is so a lot of biennials have titles and you know when you title something you kind of guide people to have already some idea about what you are expecting what you should expect to see or guiding you how to interpret what you are seeing so I wanted to give you kind of as a historical thing because the Istanbul Biennial has all actually all of the exhibitions had names some exhibitions don't have names but I'll just give you starting from 87 so the first two 87 and 89 were just titled contemporary art in traditional spaces because they were establishing the biennial and they kind of were obviously being very conservative the next one was in 92 production of cultural difference followed by orient with hyphenation so orientation the image of art in a paradoxical world and this was the first one that actually had a curator before it was a committee artistic committee from the city then it was followed by own life, beauty, translations and other difficulties so going more into poetics followed by the passion in the wave ego fugue fugue from ego to the next emergence poetic justice 2005 was simply Istanbul and 2007 has a very long name this is actually the one that I did a research on not only possible but also necessary optimism in the age of global war this biennial was curated by Wuhan Ru who is a Chinese born curator and 2009 it was what keeps mankind alive followed by untitled in 2011 and the most recent one in 2013 mom Emma Berberian was the title of it so you can see there's a lot of a lot of thought put into creating these biennials and making them more of a kind of an intellectual platform not only to present art but having these kind of discursive platforms and so what I asked Wuhan Ru about his very long and cumbersome name what does it mean to name a biennial what does it do who is it for, is it for the artist, is it for the audience and so he said it was a way to contextualize artistic production and bring a starting point to generate a situation based on response to this kind of one title, one sentence and he believes Wuhan Ru that it's not about illustrating a theme but it's providing a space a time, a context for artistic production so Wuhan Ru's interest in Istanbul was obviously in this past but also in the present he was looking into the current urban culture and the political situation in Turkey as something exemplary that can be a model that could be transported and applied in other countries and so he focused this it was the 10th Istanbul Biennial on revitalizing the debate on modernization and modernity and to put forward activist proposals so for him it wasn't so much about an exhibition but about how to look at a life in a city which has such an incredible and complicated and contradictory history so I just will give you one example of an artist project from this Biennial because I find it very interesting how this kind of ideas travel and circulate and can be applied trans-culturally and it's an architect and artist based in San Diego, California his name is Teddy Cruz and he his research focuses on the trans-border issues between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego specifically people from Mexico go to the US in search for work and people from the US or for cheap labor basically and they establish through this NAFTA trade agreement a lot of Machiaodoras or little factories were set up in Tijuana specifically to produce things cheaper for the United States and so what that did Teddy Cruz was looking at what happened then around these Machiaodoras where the people who works there and where do they live what conditions so of course he found shanty towns around people were living in really made shift homes and there's a rainy season every year and so they were all collapsing so it was a constant struggle and he was looking into how can me as an architect and artist what are my responsibilities because I also consume these goods it's not fair for these people to live in these conditions it doesn't take much to improve that their situation so he approached the factories and asked them can we make our design frames our design support system and we can adapt to make them from materials that you're already working with in your factories and maybe even discarding and we can provide structural support for the homes of the workers because they're there to stay they're not going anywhere so he did this and then he also started looking into creating this living spaces for Mexican workers who are working as a very cheap labor in San Diego and were living in very also bad conditions so what was interesting is that I saw this project in Istanbul and it's about San Diego in Tijuana and I was curious what it worked really well because every country probably has this kind of problems specifically Turkey so it was interesting to see how the curator chose this project as to being in this kind of thinking of how can things be models of social life of different arrangements can be applied in other countries in other situations so in a way Teddy Cruz's project received global exposure instead of just being in San Diego, Tijuana and his ideas have been applied in many places by now which is great so one more, I don't know if I'm running out of time I'm not keeping track I can talk a lot about this stuff but I think another interesting Bayanya is the Shanghai Bayanya which is in China in 1996 and it was actually it's on their website they're saying that the Bayanale aims to expand Shanghai's importance as the gateway to the west through the art sector additionally it means to serve as an international platform for the self portrayal of China and Shanghai so that's a really interesting Bayanale because they're dealing with a lot of censorship initially the first few Bayanales were curated by Chinese or other Asian curators that were used to working within the censorship system when I went there in 2008 it was the 7 Shanghai Bayanale and the curators were both from Europe one was Heng-Slauher and the other one Julian Heinen and so they had a third curator who was Chinese and they had a lot of issues with trying to make an exhibition the already the theme was set to them by for them by an artistic and educational committee and it was called translocal motion so they had to do something with it and they decided to take the square which is kind of the main gathering area it's the very center of Shanghai and to do some projects about this to study the project there's a public space, there's an urban space and it's social implications but a lot of projects were not possible they were censored at the end there were 110 artists that presented work and the event was broadcast on Chinese television it was this really huge event mass media event so the curators proposed to do a three part exhibition one was called project where artists were invited to reflect on the city anyway on people's square and kind of do work that it's not so obvious but a little bit more sublime and to work within this censorship committee because each project at the end had to be approved there were going like 20 people with their folders and they had to mark everything off they were looking at all the artworks which was very strange for a lot of artists some of them actually had to sign a contract that they would change the project and so on so another one was keynote where there were just three artists focusing on issue of mobility related to urban development and the next one was context where 33 artists examined the theme of the Biennale in a wider global context what is interesting about Shanghai is that this was a very good project to examine people's square because Shanghai by now is over 24 million it's the biggest city in Asia but it's composed of 40% of comprised of 40% migrants 40% of the population have migrated there for work so of course they each bring their culture, their heritage their habits and this is very much reflected in that people's square where they all gather at one point and a very interesting project based on this research on people's square was by a German artist Hito Steyerl she is based here in Berlin and interestingly her mother who is Japanese was actually born in Shanghai during the war so she initially went to look for the birthplace of her mom but it wasn't there anymore of course so she had to change the project and she just started looking at the bootleg activities that were being sold at little tables so what happened was initially she was looking at which films are being taken stolen and then she was looking at the images which were very interesting and then what became very interesting to her was the language what was written on them it was a very broken English but it had some kind of a regularity and she also found a name for that language you know how on the DVDs covers it says German, English, Chinese so she found the language consistently it says Spamsock and she figured that this is kind of must be this new language in coming and it's completely I mean it's very funny when you read these covers they change name of actors the name of the films some are really hilarious but for her she also started associating this with the whole social process and consequence of migration and translations and people having to learn new languages and integrate and she also found it very close to how her mother speaks because her mother lived in Germany now she's in the United States she's Japanese, lived in China so she mixes these four languages and it's very similar to what she actually calls DVD covers so in a way she did this mapping of the space of People Square based on the languages the language, this new language on the DVD covers which is very consistent it's really interesting there is another artist who is ethnic Chinese but was born in Indonesia then immigrated to the Netherlands and he's always being perceived people expect of him to make somehow Chinese art just because he looks Chinese and so he has always struggled with this and it was interesting for him also to reflect back to be there in this space and see how does this affect him and his own history and he actually made a film and an installation with a friend of his from Africa selling African goods and there are no African goods in China I mean the Chinese are in Africa so he was working with this kind of reverse stereotypes and it was a bit shocking because people are looking at this wondering of Africans selling stuff in China he was kind of walking the streets so it was interesting and then I will just briefly talk about the Berlingpian on it and then I will give you the podium so the Berlinpianale also started after the reunification so it also was based on okay we need to to do something here and to see what experiments and what art and what ideas we can put forth through organizing a biennale and the one that is happening right now it's the 8th edition because the main curatorial idea is to explore the intersections between individual individual's lives and larger historical narratives and he is very much concerned with representations with objects what objects hold, what images mean and not surprisingly he chose the ethnographic museum as the biggest venue so I definitely recommend it if you have time to see it and also it's a very in a way safe biennial because if you compare it to the previous one the 7th Berlinpianale it was really I don't know if any of you know anything about it but it was titled Forget Fear and it was practically a platform for social activism political activism and pushing the boundaries of the institution of how the institution of the biennial works how the institutions of artwork what are the responsibilities of the artists of the curators of all the cultural agents involved in organizing such exhibitions and urging them to contribute to current political and social issues so this was very interesting and interestingly enough though most of the art community refused to even go and see the exhibit so it was kind of put in a different category and also it was the very first biennial that had entrance free of charge typically you have to pay between 10 and 16 euros and this was open to the public anybody can go at any time which also made it a little bit more democratic and sharing and I would like to end with Documenta because Muti will actually speak about Documenta the show was organized in 1955 by an artist Arnold Boda he was at the time in CASO and CASO had a horticultural show a very big horticultural show and this was kind of a side thing let's kind of there are going to be a lot of visitors let's do an art exhibit and they were actually able to get a lot of donations I mean people from all over the world send them art for to be exhibited and it was a huge success and that's how it started so but also what has to be said about Documenta is it has a much longer period to get organized much bigger budget and it has a huge space also and availability of venues they are able to to present a very well researched and very thorough kind of survey of current contemporary art practices so it's very well respected and very well known also the fact is that CASO is a town is not known for pretty much anything else than Documenta so in a way Documenta kind of is the what you would think of CASO you know unlike Berlin even though now you also know the Berlin Biennale but it has a huge impact on the city and the city economy as well and Moody will talk more about specifics of Documenta thank you very much thank you very much the paper I'm going to present is called the Curatorial Color Curtain who curates post-colonial contemporary African art I would like to start my presentation with a quote from a Nigerian born curator Uku Enrezo who declared in an interview with the New York Times magazine that the aim of a curator is not to not to be a taste maker but to produce knowledge Uku Enrezo was the lead curator of Documenta 11 in CASO Germany but this quotation I am underlining by this quotation I am underlining the existence of curators and art historians of contemporary art from Africa whose absence I do not refer to in this presentation but rather I am suggesting the existence of a hierarchy of cultural memory and cultural relevance in the production of exhibitions like Documenta as a form of archive that nakedly gestures to heritage I am questioning the nature of filters of selection, inclusion, exclusion, definition and ultimately taste creation that support or is derived from international art platforms like Documenta the last Documenta was two years ago and Documenta takes comes every five years and it's a gathering to see and chart new pathways for contemporary art in CASO and the world it's considered the biggest and most critical in terms of curatorial perspective of arts in the sequence of Banyanians, Trianians and international art fairs and exhibitions according to a quote from Goethe Institute's website Documenta is the only major exhibition of contemporary art that always promises and analyses of the present day Documenta 13 the most recent Documenta created by Caroline Christof Bakaev which is important to note because she is the second only curator that has created Documenta was controversial for its non-thematic concept focus with not much painting the exhibition's anti-capitalist team according to Christof Bakaev given by holistic and non-legocentric vision that is skeptical of the persistent belief in economic growth and was a stage to present questions that shape our notion of life in the present the program of Documenta 13 departed from the part of Documenta 12 and was very similar to Documenta 10 and 11 which both had political teams central to their curatorial world view for a curator like Caroline who apparently had nothing to prove she used Documenta 13 as an opportunity to address certain imbalances she felt existed in international contemporary art which over a third of the participating artists being female the highest percentage of women ever shown in Documenta so here you see an exhibition being used to play international politics gender issues race in an interview Caroline theorized on how strawberries can become political actors and distinguish the lack of fundamental differences between humans and dogs to her it was important to recognize and I quote the role of art the role art can play in society and how art and thinking can react to knowledge capitalism and to the financial world as and its injustices and end of quote which brings me to the main trust of this paper injustices or using an euphemism imbalances reviewing the list of over 200 names it becomes obvious that in terms of definition Africa is being represented by the Maghreb and the south of Africa it is surprising that the famously viewed ethnographic west Africa has little or no presence or had little or no presence in Documenta 13 in terms of artistic representation this is noteworthy because Caroline had declared and I quote the riddle of art is that we don't know what it is until it no longer is what it was end of quote this begs the question why is it that the work of Anglophone Francophone, Lucophone, Postcolonial Art is hardly get shown at big international contemporary art fiestas is it possible that there exists no critically worthy sculptures paintings, installations performances, photography and films in such general genres like aesthetics, art politics, cinema, literature science and philosophy in west Africa or is it not strange that in Documenta in a Documenta that argues a case for gender and animal rights not to mention inanimate objects that a region of the world that boasts of ancient civilization a benign empire of the world has no representation is this truly an honest appaisal by an exhibition that always promises an analysis of the present day and attempts to collapse all conventional assumptions of contemporary art one would argue that the premise of western art comes from a philosophical position so one wonders whether this is not an affirmation of the Scottish philosophical view forwarded by David Hewley that wrote and I quote it is natural for us to seek a standard of taste a rule by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled at least a decision afforded confirming one sentiment and condemning another end of quote these questions are pertinent especially as Caroline declaims that the borders between art what is art and what is not art obviously she follows the sociological thinking of Pierre Bourdieu that disagreed with Kant and who argued that taste could be disinterested and could have no agenda obviously art has an agenda and so it begs the real question what is the criterion of selection for documenta interestingly the idea behind documenta has a unique history documenta was founded in the spirit of healing the word was she mentioned by an artist called Arnold and it began in 1955 to introduce West Germany to the world's cultural conversation the goal of the first documenta was to exhibit art that had been dubbed degenerate in the Nazi era surely even on the count of degenerate at Africa should have some form of representation Castle Cleary reveals the sustains the existence of the complexity of race and identity issues and the politics of hierarchies of culture in the arts as Oliver Machard would put it the politics of political difference this prevalence of an all-time modern perspective and the dominance of a white male Christian western European cultural preference hints directly to the racial European legacy of propagating modernist logic in the lingering colonial matrix the state's cultural suppression of black expression the colonial construct still shapes contemporary ideas and notions of how Africa is positioned and how it positions itself and hugs back to the era of necrophilia and was like primitive tribal and uncivilized art which not only happens in Africa but also as I spoke yesterday in New Zealand and other places this polemic is not new African art historians from this region have forever cried out loud about western complicity in the process of marginalization Sylvester Obeche a professor of art history a Nigerian professor of art history teaching in California always talked about the cult of the superstar creators stating the hype and stark cult quality of most contemporary creators factor into reorganization of cultural production courage and management creators fit into the new economy as cultural brokers who mediate the value of artwork in economic and critical discourse the difference between the political and politics in western and African world viewpoints has inevitably led to the exploitation, discrimination oppression and manipulation of one cultural group by the other western creators, critics and art historians more often than not today determine what is in the center and what is in the periphery this dichotomy of center versus periphery according to Obeche even continues in academia where he claims that in art history the opinion of most minor western scholars is greater has a greater weight than that of the most advanced African scholar which shows a similar bias in the value of knowledge work this situation poses a clear dilemma as culture has always been about policy any form of validation desired or required from a former master colonizer immediately undermines the cultural, intellectual and political potency of any creative artistic tradition or endeavor cultural has always been a means for holistic empowerment the OBE Du Bois in the criteria of Negro artist in the Cultural Wingo Artist Conference in 1926 declared that all of the artists in the world in the world are the artists in the world in the world of propaganda and ever and ever must be Du Bois was far cited when back then he understood the relevance of cultural production and he asserted that art is too potent a political medium to be left up to artist he clearly saw the emergence of cultural gatekeepers now called curators Du Bois espoused of 1955 those that don't know about this this was a conference for the non-aligned countries that thought about using art as a way for cultural cultural identification and politics unfortunately the political relevance power and status has split curators, art historians artists and academics of African descent into a Hegelian dialectic divide between continent and diasporic definitions of Africa that serves no useful purpose other than to complicate the challenges of contemporary African art what is critical is to reclaim African culture especially as the best of African culture production has been collected in western museums like Dalem through Pilejina with no regrets culture has always been a potent option an entry point for black advancement it is important to commend people like Simone Nijami and Ukwe Inwezo here for if not for their cultural efforts that put Africa on the map the possibility of the framing of this debate on the direction of African contemporary art will not even exist but this again seems to be the problem there are relatively very few African curators who obviously are not excluded from the center periphery dichotomy it is very obvious that the gaze by which African curators are looked upon in some portals is often through a colored African lens and this as well causes a struggle with the politics of race and color this ugly game of pointing fingers ultimately points to the critical catalyst for the control of the discourse and economics of the field of cultural production money at the core of the debate is the question of who funds who and who is willing to fund African contemporary art where are the spaces interested in showing African contemporary art outside of Africa why is it easier to fund the contemporary African art space on the African continent than it is to fund one in the west and for instance there's a lot of funding that goes to a space maybe in Africa but to put it to fund a space in the west that deals with African contemporary art that engages diaspora and immigrants and trans border identities nobody wants to fund that we are the new arenas where cultural authorities are negotiated which retains that the visual field of western reception demands that contemporary African art conforms to established western paradigms of art making rejection of this paradigm means most curators don't get the funding to do their work from funding institutions particularly all of which are based in Europe and the US and this participates in a relocation of African cultural patrimony to western ownership by enhancing western authority in defining the value of African cultural production one very interesting fact is that documenta is funded largely by governments, public foundations and ticket sales which reviews the political and global dimension of the importance and interest in cultural production cultural refinement has become a stimulant for mass tourism and tourism has changed the way art spaces operate with tourism and with tourism comes migration that brings a new diversity perspective and perspective art indeed has some gone global and the number of western art spaces has risen to match the demand in the increased number of regional and foreign investors that are attracted to these spaces art spaces like museums must meet the expected content accessibility of their audience i.e. they must reinforce stereotypes that are made about African contemporary art so in Dalem you would see all the sort of animist art nothing would suggest that there is any progress in that conversation or risk and if they don't do this they risk losing a great share of this market with all these evident facts it will be difficult to deny the capitalist aspirations of globalization economics is the most consequential feature of globalization which determines politics and politics in turn affects economics and both of these influence the cultural magnitude of globalization globalization art has become a commodity to be consumed and there is no other world culture that has been commodified as in the case of African art African cultural products are consumed judged and appraised in terms of their Africanness so the mask must be very African and ironically the reverse is the case for the cultural African curator who has to tool the line of globalization and western dominated homogenization so while the art has to be very African and primitive the African curator has to be very western in his approach or he gets no funding whether he wants to present an African globalization as we all know is not neutral globalization functions automatically to reinforce the center which in this case is the west and the periphery which is usually Africa the logic directly the trajectory of globalization destroys culture and builds intolerance hatred suspicion and fundamental and growing inequality of cultural production and distribution the danger is that the present dialogue between world cultures and heritage has begun to sound more like a monologue the question is to do western cultural the question is do western cultural institutions see the need the question is do western cultural institutions see the need the importance to develop a model for operating with a globalized society that differs from the present corporate model because you would hear oh this is a gallery that is not commercialized meaning that it doesn't do a certain type of approach or it's independent but that's also the case with big things like biennial documenta can western art initiatives rely on the initial core principles of education communication preservation and the promotion of free exchange of art and creative ideas along with the current focus on building and sustaining community through culture offering new vision of globalization you know that's why I time termed the organizers for even allowing us to have a chance to have this conversation of broadening the conversation because very important I once tried to present this paper and I was shut down because the funders wouldn't like this sort of talk a way forward would be for western governments and public institutions in countries with diverse racial identities to see the benefit of encouraging and supporting cultural activists and promoters of cultural spaces within these communities to develop a dialogue with more plural cultural voices that speak of their own contemporary cultures as it relates to the world this could even be done to an extent by the redistribution of financing which comes with an exhibition which comes when an exhibition is co-hosted in other regions like document 13 and document 11 before it. Cultural in its most explicit definition is not located to a particular region but to the entire world as confirmed by the global outreach whenever cultural patrimony is threatened. When we had problems in Timbuktu for instance and there was a breaking of the old manuscript the whole world said this is rubbish or in Afghanistan the Buddhist symbols were destroyed so it tells you that culture is global maybe by my initial question of who creates postcolonial African art the answer might be to include Africa in world conversations and in world platforms to understand as we said to pollinate the ideas that they come from and extend the conversations of cultures or cultural practices that might not be marketable to the West but contribute to global art and cultural production. Thank you very much. Super. Thank you. Wow. I, so this next part of the session would be a bit more that if you guys had questions for each other I have questions. But I think it's nice if maybe there's a dialogue between your two presentations first to kind of establish some similar themes and I'm sure there's people in the audience as well who have questions so I'm just going to sit here a bit in the front and then in a little bit maybe introduce some other questions does that sound okay? Oh I'm sorry why don't you have the microphone should I start? Well actually Moody and I met the other day and we were a little closer sorry we were we just were getting to know each other what our topics of interest and research are and we had this very heated discussion about one of the documentus documenta 12 which was the previous one it had I personally interviewed three of the African artists that were exhibiting their work there and I was just sharing with Moody that I was very impressed by their work and what I thought about it and he had a completely different perspective on it so I'm just going to tell you what this one well the three of them okay so one of the artists was professor David Aradeo he's actually an architect from Nigeria and he traces the the influences that are still visible today between the west coast of Africa specifically Nigeria and Benin and maybe and Brazil I don't know of any other countries in Africa but and specifically there was a group of slaves that were in Brazil and they were always causing trouble so they sent them back and there were 500 people who were Muslim they were sent back to Nigeria and they started building mosques in the styles of the basilicas in Brazil and when they were in Brazil they were also putting a lot of elements in the buildings there that they brought from their own heritage and methods of building so he was professor Ardeo was tracing these reflections and what you it's still visible now and so his work was exhibited there and we had a very interesting conversation and I thought it was first a very important way a very important idea a new idea to present someone that was not an artist but an architect now it's more prevalent but at the time it wasn't the last document I had a scientist of what is it a physical a physics yeah a physics right yeah I'm just going to get to the next artist because of what this David Ardeo said about it and then we'll I mean unless you already want to say something about David Ardeo what she said is very precise there was a a lot of riots in Brazil at the time so they put all the you know the people that caused all the misdemeanors into a ship and ship them back to the West African Coast and they dropped them on each port so you have a trace from like Sierra Leone to Ghana but the majority of them were dropped in Nigeria on the West African Coast you can see some form of architecture dialectical vernacular as it were that suggests this Latin influence in how they build so they lent their craft but it shows the power of identity and culture but they still expressed it in their religion which is it's very hard to see an African society that does not embrace spirituality and religion and it translates to almost anything they do so and because a lot of religion now in Africa has become very hybrid so you have it taking all you know things from different places they said building their mosques in the tradition in the progressive tradition of what they lent in Brazil as in the plan of the church and I thought that was a good thing that Professor Aridion had you know shown to the world where cultures become hybrids and they are interpreted in different ways and people see them as different things so while this is a Basilica somewhere else it's a mosque somewhere else and vice versa and I think she wanted to ask another question and I think the question she was going to talk about was basically about a certain body of work of certain types of photography and how this was meant to establish the artist eventually in Nigeria and I said to her at the time when we spoke that it's difficult to understand and appreciate that viewpoint because a lot of photography in the last decade that has come to the west has been influenced by wire services Reuters, AFP pictures from you know development work UNICEF and usually they frame an Africa with an aesthetic that is consumed by the west and if you don't sort of tour that line you don't get paid so it's a business the world desires to see a low level Africa with starving children an Africa that has bad social infrastructure an Africa that does not seem to have any other narrative than this downtrodden narrative and it's problematic because in photography you have people like Martin Parr that show you know sections of England that is buoyant that is moving forward in its own direction and I don't think that that is the only way you're here in Africa Moody maybe we should introduce what the work was so this work was so correct correct yes yes and then I said oh and do you know Georgia Sodie who is an AP photographer basically he provides press photographs for the west and he was chosen a body of his work that was of the is a Niger Delta the problems with the oil in the area and how it affected people, the locals a series of 200 photographs were presented at Documenta and what I wanted to say there was that David Aradão actually said about Georgia Sodie that by him being presented chosen and presented at Documenta and seen in the west not only as a being you know providing images for the western press but also as an artist to actually look at the aesthetics of his work and his personal connection to what he does and how it affects him he thought that he also has a critical stance and and once he comes back he goes back to Nigeria having seen at Documenta having had this exposure and approval of the west he'll have a voice and he potentially could have a different position there and this is where we had a very heated discussion okay I was reluctant to answer a question because I'm very conversant with the work what I tried to tell her was the nuance in the presentation of this sort of photography and how it's very important to understand the industry behind these sort of images it is true that a lot of genius things happened in the Niger Delta and it is true that a lot of it also was constructed in terms of imagery presented to the west there was a very famous story about western CNN correspondent that apparently constructed the setting where there was a kidnapping and this caused a lot of problem and I think began the end of the production of these sort of images because they said oh it was constructed ETC but what I was pointing out to her was that it begs the question of a gaze what gaze do you shoot a photograph with so how do you make a photograph and photography is important to know that in photography there's no objective gaze because you shoot one thing and you are leaving something out so it depends on the gaze and the angle you want to shoot now if you take pictures for AFP the photo editor in AFP has to to the line of the mass consumption of an image so at the time there was document at 11 there was a 12 sorry 12 also this work said at 11 under but at 12 the whole world heard about these kidnappings in the Niger Delta about the hanging of Kensa there was a lot of backing from body shop from and it's erotic it was pretty much the story in the headlines and you had to present an image that fit the narrative and no one was going to put the other stories that were coming out from the Niger Delta so all I said to her was that I know of another photographer called George Esiri that maybe was a pioneer in the Niger Delta and his gaze was never exactly commercial in the sense that he really is an enjoyment and he comes from the area so whenever he shoots the photographs he makes pictures that speak about his identity as a member of that region and speaks as the identity also as a man documenting this process and the images tell a different story because the world might not know his images but they are wonderful to see I wish someone would show that and at the time there were two people shooting this body of work there was a guy called Ed Cash Cashid, American guy and the gaze he came into from the New York Times was completely different from the gaze of Osudi both documenting reality and the truth as they saw it but then whose truth is it? It's the same as I was saying if the creators there chose Osudi's work because it fitted a story that the West wanted to see it doesn't speak it doesn't say that the work wasn't good quality or wasn't fantastic photography but it's told a certain line and it might be an honest line but the gaze is still there it's not as objective as maybe it could be because the world might not want to see what multinationals were doing there or the manipulation that world politics was affecting the Nigel Delta and that is where I told her that there's this there is such a thing as the aesthetics of the West and the business of cultural production that caters to the West yeah some of you guys know it's better to use the microphone otherwise people in the live feed can't hear too impatient too impatient yeah Lydia thanks it's been really interesting a few things about the B&L it connects with what we're talking now and I'm wondering if you identified in your research which is clearly very thorough you gave a good account of you know the years and how it was established and all that and you talked about the thematics just as an aside before I get into this the B&L of Sydney is on right now I think it finishes next week maybe it finished maybe now this weekend and it had a political thing too where the people who are funded were found to be the people who build they're a very well known company Transfield and he is ahead of a very large family of philanthropists but they were involved in supplying some things for the refugee accommodation on the island where Australia ships refugees to and so the artist protested against this and in fact he withdrew and they withdrew the funding and the system had to come up and this is millions and millions and millions so the artists in that instance politically had an effect so that's the latest thing and also it had a title which was I think you are what you desire so it was this thematic like Juliana and but anyway that's just the B&L the one that's on now but my interest is in the years of say documenter of when this was taking the 11th and the 12th because it seems to me that there's an aesthetic not just an aesthetic of the west there's an aesthetic that happens within art for example a few years ago if you didn't make abject images you know images of abjectness not beauty abjectness yeah you wouldn't get shown practically anywhere yeah because there was this kind of really big resurgence of the sort of the dark side and so if it was an image of a child couldn't be a nice child had to be a devil child yeah I don't know plan anything you know I'm trying to come up with examples do you know what I'm saying and so I'm interested about that kind of aesthetic flavour that plays itself out either in 11 and 12 documenter perhaps that that also confuses this matter because I hear what you're saying Moody and whether you see that playing out on a broader way the coming and going of the aesthetic almost taste style actually thank you so much for the comments and the question can you hear me there's it's interesting that you mentioned I'll first start with the Sydney Biennale and the whole situation there because something very similar happened in St. Petersburg with Manifesta which is the European Biennial it's in a different location every time and of course artists there were protesting against what's happening in Russia and Ukraine and what happened in Sydney actually was that some of the artists then retracted and said well we actually were sort of coerced into saying this and then went back and but it went into a discussion in the senate and they just said well what do the artists want that's not their function and we can just withdraw funding and that's it they didn't but it was kind of it actually did go somewhere and it started discussion the same happened in St. Petersburg but I think what the Russian government decided was that they'll just have the right to withdraw they don't see fit so but in terms of aesthetics and if there is a trend I think really because Biennials are so much responding to a situation to a time they're very specific to what's going on right now in our society that is bothering us or we like and we want to do something about it so I would think that it's more connected to what troubles are going on in the world and so this was so I think the last few years have been really intense in many parts of the world and of course that's reflected in the imagery in the aesthetics in the commentary and the reflections of artists there was an artist well there is an artist from Mexico Margoia's she has been in a few Biennales now and she usually does huge installations but I think her last work which is a little bit different than what she usually does was so strong and it was I don't know if you saw it at the last Berlin Biennale it was an entire wall covered with 365 covers of a daily magazine that's being published every day at two o'clock or one I don't know in Juarez, Mexico and every single cover had a big image of a dead body due to drug crimes and there was a small picture of some kind of a sex something some pornography it was just shocking to see this and this is a magazine that comes out a publication every day all the children can see it when they come home from school every stand and you realize this is their reality it doesn't it's shocking to me but for them it's something normal you know so it's kind of it was very striking to see this so yes it was uncomfortable to look at and you're right but her previous work at the Venice Biennale was what else can we talk about and I think this is very kind of telling about this trend I hope that answers the question to contribute to what she says I would say I would look at it from a different angle I think it comes straight from the 60s from Deshaun and the definition of what contemporary post-modern art is and we have to recognize that contemporary art or the whole construct of documentary Biennales and everything and the Uber creators that is also commodified and there has to be some form of a filter that separates one creator from the other and usually they use intellectual arguments to define how why I should be chosen over the other and usually it's under lined by some understanding of philosophy, artistic history all kinds of measures are brought to bear in terms of let's say photography, they say a photograph stops being a snapshot or a pretty picture when you can see clear intervention in the photograph and anything that does not have intervention that can provoke an emotion is not art it is just a photograph so there must be a clear intervention in the photograph for it to be qualified as contemporary art or this is the theoretical definition of all this now it is harder to sort of evoke emotion through a gaze than through very simple principles of using violence or blood that things that shock and go can be easily used to evoke emotion and that automatically classifies you as contemporary art because you are bringing many people would say that any art that cannot evoke any emotion is a craft so if for instance I can't get moved in any certain way then it's no more art as we see it which is problematic but then you can understand how this has progressed or degenerated because I mentioned Kant and I mentioned Perdue and all these philosophical declarations about what art is and what art is not and if you say you can do art for art's and say things like anything could be art it's really now a question of through the back door we are getting people that now are the people that are creating what is taste and that speaks directly to class systems it speaks directly to capitalism it speaks directly to things that are really against the whole notion of contemporary art because basically even people like Racing Perry speak a lot about these ideas that taste is defined by your social status so what a lower class person would say it's tasteful it would be different from a higher class so it depends and there's no such thing as good taste but then but though they pushed this idea of there's no good taste or there's no such thing as good taste is limited because he didn't understand art or wasn't an artist in a certain way and there are things that we almost agree are good things I mean if you look at the assistant chapel everybody can see the genius there you would all agree that this is genius art so I think it's simplistic to say there's nothing like good taste or anything but really when you answer your question it is maybe intellectual laziness and an easy way out to say we look for things that are shock and awe people and say oh this is so crazy and then this is good and then we put it in and usually human suffering can shock you all forms of bizarreness you see this in fashion as well they would say oh I don't like this collection in fashion because it has no anarchy and if there's no anarchy then the collection is not good so you see it in McQueen for instance the later collections by Alexander McQueen were very very strange and bizarre things he put up and that is exactly the same way that people curate art the more bizarre and you know and strange then it is once they some people would say once I can't explain it then it's good art you know but then that turns everything on its head and it now begs the questions of who determines basically like what I was saying we extend my presentation and saying who curates African art who determines what should be good or bad you know and yes it's also based on the climate and what is present and everything but as much as there's an explosion happening now somewhere there's also a marriage happening or an anemic ceremony or many things that we are happy about so is it's right to say that it's only a bomb blast or an assassination is a reflection of the present I'm not saying I'm saying that even the curators it's as I don't know I think you said the fact that these fiestas are also performances in a sense and the curators are performing you understand and that is you are performing to a script and the stage is a script so then you would say okay I want something that is not pleasant and it can't be anything that can touch another part of my my spiritual being or my consciousness as it were it must be something that will shock me not something that will calm me down you know and then the next year there will be another philosophical thinking and yeah sorry yes and then everybody says okay this is nice now it's just like a few years ago or even the last documentary paintings were not cool a painting is not art so it must be video art photography or performance and this is what we hear in Africa if it's a painting then it's not art so you have to do performance, you have to do video art and that this is what the west was this is what we hear so if you are into photography you are into video art and you are into performance then you have a chance to be shown abroad so painting isn't good and then you come here and then you go to you see all these galleries with paintings or you go to these really so and you are thinking okay what is it that I'm missing is this not painting and is painting still not art you know I don't know whether I have answered any part of your question but this is how I understand it well I can definitely see your perspective but when we talk about biennial aesthetics there's also something that I call shared context that they create whereas works that could be autonomous on their own then they start sort of communicating relating to one another once they're in the same space and I think curators are very much aware of this and they do try to have some balance but at the same time there's an element of risk and unpredictability because they most of the time commission new works and of course they don't know what the artists will do so that's kind of another discussion about what is the involvement of a curator in the artistic production is it in developing the idea is it just supporting the production and so a lot of curators are very much aware of this and they don't want to have this much involvement at the same time there's a good result but you can clearly see like in this eight biennial works are really beautiful you know they're very they're very nice and clean and organized as opposed to the previous biennial so it does have a lot to do with the curator as well and what their framework is even if they say we are not setting out framework they are either by the name of the show or by their idea I just wanted to talk about the darlim because I just did a one month residency there just before the biennial and you know I'm not a named famous artists that the curators have earmarked and you know I was brought in by another to other organizations to work with the collections which I'll talk about later but it was interesting because a lot of the requests that I were putting forward I mean I have never heard no so many times in my life and a lot of it was under this thing of because we've got the biennial coming up so I was really at one stage I had to really draw a line with the Humboldt lab because these were the people that I was in terms directly dealing with and in terms of just this particular world that these bienniales create in terms of the value what you talked before about the value of artwork inside the ethnological museum space because actually and I'm going to talk about a lot this later because I am an artist that works in this space it's hugely problematic it's a highly negotiated space but at the same time I have a good little tussle with them but it was interesting because actually reflecting on a group I was with the Pacific sisters we were involved with the Sydney Biennale years ago and again we were treated like these underdogs you know there was times where we were asking for particular production values so that we would not look like amateurs and this was my problem with Dalim too as I said I did not come here to be average and that when I went to the Biennale I saw a lot of them had done a lot of you know I'd asked for lighting to be changed you think I'd ask them to pull out their teeth but when you've got this big authorised sort of thing behind them they were fine with them but not with not with this particular artist so in a way I really did feel like that I was looking that I was being treated like the ethno artist that was going they got a very big surprise when I finished with them because actually their own ignorance to my art practice was very prevalent too same in Sydney in terms of there was one Chinese artist now we found out that they spent $6,000 for brackets alone to hang these works and she had six works and they were squabbling with us over three lights and some decent sound because we were kind of just like the performing artists so we were kind of like the performance wasn't in that year so but it is interesting these power structures and this value that is attached and actually these Biennales have created a hyper world actually if you're not sort of part of it then your work has actually devalued a lot and I was intrigued that the Biennale wanted to come into the museum space and I would have liked to have seen a lot more rigorous intellectual sort of something behind a lot of the things I don't know that's where I actually don't mind the Ethnological Museum as a space but I actually do care about the histories and about some of these stories I mean there's highly contentious and negotiated again but it's still very different to the White Cube where context is relevant and you just get given a frame there but I just like to sort of put that in in terms of an artist who does work inside that space I wanted to add to something she said I disagree in part with what she said that the creators really give you leeway I don't think that's the truth I think there's a real clear agenda here and as you mentioned before they work with their artists they know the people they like the risk they take are with the people that are the fringes and those people they they censor them by budgets or send them by access or even by where they put their work and then these are people that are normally said oh okay we brought this person from here of course the venue would not be the main venue it would be a fringe venue but then on paper it would be said that I brought a person from Nigeria he was shown here he did that so he balances things out but your known artist that you work with the big names the ones in the lights you know what they're going to produce you can't say the creators don't know they know and that's why they would sit down and buy brackets for 6000 they know I mean nobody's gonna you can't draw up a big budget and the person would ask you you need $6000 for you know embraces they know so I disagree that it is not as unconscious it is very conscious and the the truth that they now deny that they are people that define taste is not true because they define taste they define consumption they define and exclude what they want and they push their own agenda as in if I think there should be more women I bring them in if I think there should be more Africans I bring them in if I think there should be more multicultural gays I bring them in and though the team is there you can bend the team to mean anything there's a different way you can bend the team so I don't think it's really clearly I agree in parts but I disagree in parts too and as we discussed every biennial is different every team is different so it's really difficult to generalize from my observation of just researching in depth 7 or 8 biennials in one I was the last the 7th Berlin Biennial I was with them for an entire year so that's how I actually got to know a lot about also this power relations and the power structure and actually Artur Zimziewski the curator of the 7th Berlin Biennial thought that the person with the more power the most power is the attorney of the Kunstwerke so he has the he's on top this is how his power hierarchy was but to go back to Dahlem I agree with you that it's a very big institution it's part of the all 19 state museums in Berlin so they actually have a centralized governing body and then they have local there are three museums there's the Asian Museum the so but it's also difficult for them individually to make any decisions and to implement any changes without having the approval of somebody who is not even in their museum and even as something simple as videotaping the exhibit I have a workshop where my students are interviewing artists and it's in a collaboration with the museum and the Biennale and the artists want to do this and the official department which is somewhere in Berlin is not giving us a permit to go with a video camera in the museum which is a public space it's a everybody wants to give interviews to do it it's saying that there was video cameras there was three there was three video cameras at the Biennale when they want to they can make decisions very fast when they want to and I made them want to a couple of times but it was through a highly negotiated process and just for the fact that you know I'm a very experienced person in terms of negotiating these spaces so it's just I suppose this reflection of of the power structures within themselves you know of the institution and to another institution like the Biennale too because that's another institution it has money behind it it has a it has a historical framework and a global one too I mean it did interest me that they were interested in working inside the Ethnological Museum in terms of artists who don't usually do it but if you get one who usually does it the value of my work was definitely not put on the same bar as the these you know kind of real artists but how do you judge this well I judged it from my treatment so I'm coming from a very personal experience on this level and one is a practicing artist for over 20 years too so you know it just didn't happen overnight in terms of experiencing some of the barriers which is why I'm very good at negotiating these spaces but in terms of really making sure that I got out of it what I want because I will always work with the Ethnological space and maybe some of these artists might play with it but then next year will be something else and something else and something else I actually just wanted to say something really quickly ask one of the questions that I had which is connected actually to the potential partnerships and work that Innovate Heritage wants to do is that there is the new Humboldt forum that's being constructed in the center of Berlin which is basically reconstruction of the former Prussian palace with the new interior which is where the Dala Museum and the Asian Art Museum and also the library and the university and a lot of different collections are going to be there but I mean Katerina had a meeting with Professor Partsinger who is one of the lead people in this project and he was talking about really wanting to include like having artists and contemporary and all these different things and I've been reading about this so it's this thing where I mean Moody was also talking to us the other day about these ideas of how these kind of Ethnological museums function because it's really like at what level are these spaces newly constructed so that they are being more I don't know if it's politically correct or they're being more conscious or something and including more people but there's I don't know how much repatriation stuff is actually being included it's kind of like there's still a treasure chest in this like old like this very intense colonial aspect to it so for me it's like this you know it's a really amazing opportunity of course to have for especially for dialogue and I mean I think there's work for healing there's a lot of things and I think Rosanna's work with the reactivation we saw the Dullin Museum was really I really like that kind of dialogue space that's beginning but I'm just wondering about these kinds of ideas around arts in relationship to heritage spaces in these museums and stuff I mean sorry that's I know this we have ten minutes so we're trying to wrap up but this is something I would be really interested to hear maybe from the both of you and I don't know I think Rosanna will talk about it in her talk later so sorry I know that's big but I think it's this idea of a humbled form in this idea of arts in these when these spaces are being newly constructed and I don't know how advice on how to engage in that I'll start with the notion of repatriation as it refers to heritage and culture you have to start by looking at what the colonial concept or construct did to identity did to philosophy and did to culture of the people so once you look at that then you now see the real big problem of post-colonial deconstruction of these views so you the process will be you first acknowledge that there was a colonial invasion into your identity and your heritage then the next thing is to how do you deconstruct this construction how do you say so you look for where they intervened in who you were where they tampered with your identity where they tampered with your culture but then the real challenge comes in how do you decolonize your thinking and logic how do you put value to something that has been devalued over centuries how a person takes your beanie mask and says it's animist it's a very primitive mask you don't know what to do you have never known how to forge metal you know like you have no culture you have no philosophy it's always said to us in West Africa and then you now look at all of a sudden they want to give it back to you because it has value but they've told you for over a century that it has no value is a memory of some a marker of your backwardness then you now have to now value something that you have forced yourself to devalue for over a century it becomes very problematic what are you repatriating back how do you give people back what you've forced them to disagree that to agree that it has no value so this is really where the problem comes as we spoke about the other day that some of these museums are actually installations confirming superiority really it's a reminder that we were above you really that we can still keep your skulls and we can keep your daggers and all these symbols of authority that you have and we can now talk about it and talk about how relevant it is but in truth they work in a negative way by affirming a hierarchy of superiority because we could hold this part of who you are and as a proof that we could devalue it to you and to us and then we now tell you ok it's valuable and you now make a sense of it it speaks directly to hierarchies of cultural dominance and the problems that surround such spaces they are valuable in many ways they are also spaces that show how culture heritage is maybe the last bastion of racism, gender issues and all these other things thank you it's of course I I mean you have the best perspective because Africa is items from Africa are in the museums so I think what I can say is that I mean I absolutely agree and this is a huge problem in anthropology of what to do with this how to handle the past and how to incorporate it in the present because it is there it happened it's part of history so on its own it's a document it's a part of part of history and it's an evidence exactly so I think what the Humboldt lab is trying to do with the museum is also addressing these issues and say what can we do with this can we attach stories they actually did something where they recorded about 250 or 25 hours no 25 hours of stories about items and they were looping it in the museum just so that you actually it's not just this fetish item that it's there that had completely different meaning in the place where it was taken from and now you're using it as a representative of something a lot bigger so they were actually attaching stories of how it was taken and all that and the Dallem museum has about 500,000 items and only 4% on display so that's another thing who chooses what to be displayed who chooses these 4% a lot of the curators have been working there for 40 years and so that's also a big issue now that they will be moving in 2019 to the very center of Berlin they need to modernize the way they present the way they address the issues I know that's also a big issue this is the kind of erasing of physical memory architectural memory from the city that is also very political because it was the the story about Palazzo Republic it was the East German government building that was destroyed in order to make this so it doesn't exist anymore it's not in the collective architecture space so maybe this can be the last comment I just want to say this is the last comment and then we are going to end because we will have a 15 minute pause but adding to what she said there are also notions of what value is and whether value can be linked to a space in Africa certain things are the value is in the space the fact that the object is situated in a certain space there are certain functional spiritual items that once you move them from the space the value has disappeared so you find these things in Dalem you can't give them back to an Ifapris it has been devalued immediately by touching it and moving it from that space you understand and it's like how would I put it I saw her with HSB now if you're a Muslim and a person hasn't performed abolition and carries the Quran it has devalued the whole thing so there's that notion of location, specific valuation so you can't return certain things that you've devalued by just moving them it's not just a case of oh you painted on it or you took out all the precious stones no you moved it and you devalued it you just took a step with it it's been devalued so some of these things have been devalued with other than just taking them and putting them somewhere else okay on that note I think sorry I have to finish wrapping up so I think this is a really great conversation of course we can continue so hopefully we continue to have more conversations like this thank you so much for our speakers thank you so I'm just gonna say we have I think a 15 minute break