April 29/ April 30th, 2024
Assistances (Ongoing Title)
Public Workshop
with Christopher Weickenmeier, Ghislaine Leung, Marina Vishmidt, Miriam Stoney, Simon Asencio, and Vika Kirchenbauer
If assisting is charged with the promise of the artistic future, autonomy, and proprietary authorship, what would it mean to do this work without it? And would this shift allow for a different response to the material conditions in which we find ourselves? The workshop aims to dwell in a suspended moment in which there’s no art, in the broken promise of life in art, where there’s only a continuous flow of work.
We pick it up from where we left off. Faced with the current failure of public institutions in Germany, how do we understand our indebtedness, participation and responsibility in maintaining them, whether we consider ourselves external to them or not? In fact, this separation appears more volatile than ever. The artist’s ability to hover on the edge where they meet the institution and the institution meets the public, is one of their advantages that is also a disadvantage. Once recognised by the institution in their capacity to produce value, artists may affirm the promise of negotiating the conditions of their production. What the institution is able to provide is mediated through the assistant, whose position is determined by the needs of both the artist and the institution. In this equation, the assistant often becomes a filler of an overdetermined space in between. We’re interested in that space, maintained by the attachments to the institutions of art and artist, which are felt and sustained by a set of psycho-social and material relations. The attempt to own these attachments may be misinterpreted as ambition, resilience or criticality. It's always in the institution's interest to do so. Subsumed in the artistic process, the assistant’s work shifts to another task the moment a problem is fixed; the assistant is in tune with machines and feelings alike. If everything works, the work works. Of course, the artists and assistants have more than one thing in common, including the shared affection towards the institution of art. We would like to stay in that charged space and think of the specific practices, protocols and ethics of making, that create different orientations towards these ruins that we call institutions. Through notions such as palliative care, unpayable debt and the contingencies and uneven distribution of support, we want to learn what the assistant has to teach, that is, a work that depends, and a work “as dull and and newborn as the present” (Ghislaine Leung).
Assistances (ongoing title) is a continuation of the workshop seminar organised and taught by Christopher Weickenmeier (Leuphana University) and Tamara Antonijevic (LiveArtForms, AdBK Nuremberg). Last spring they hosted a two-day workshop on the topic of reproductive labour and assisting in theatre and art institutions, with inputs and contributions from Stefano Harney and Valentina Desideri, Mathilde Supe, Annick Kleizen, Eric Golo Stone, Cally Spooner, Will Holder, Terre Thaemlitz and Marina Vishmidt: https://www.e-flux.com/education/features/536806/support-systems-assistances-working-title
Schedule
April 29th, 2024
10h - arrival, coffee
10:30h: Tamara Antonijevic and Christopher Weickenmeier, introduction, Pavilion 24
12h: Miriam Stoney, Pavilion 24
15h: Vika Kirchenbauer / Multifunktionsraum
18h: Marina Vishmidt / Aula (online)
April 30th
10h: Ghislaine Leung (online), Pavilion 24
12h: Christopher Weickenmeier, Pavilion 24
15h: Simon Asencio, Pavilion 24
18h: discussion, dinner
Contributors
Miriam Stoney
April 29th, 12PM, Pavilion 24
Miriam Stoney is an artist, writer and translator. Her practice is primarily text-based and includes artistic writing, performance and installation. Performances and exhibitions have taken place at: Brunette Coleman, London; Austrian Cultural Form, London; Salzburger Kunstverein; Kunstverein München; Klosterruine Berlin; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna; Blickle Kino/Belvedere 21, Vienna; Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, and others.
Vika Kirchenbauer
April 29th, 3PM, Multifunktionsraum
Vika Kirchenbauer is an artist, writer and music producer based in Berlin. With particular focus on affective subject formation, she examines violence as it attaches to different forms of visibility and invisibility, and considers the ways in which subjects are implicated in and situated within institutional power structures. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Kirchenbauer’s work have been presented at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; and at Kunstverein Kevin Space, Vienna. Her videos and installations have been exhibited in group shows and screenings at, among others, d/p, Seoul; the Tainan Art Museum, Taiwan; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; the Berlin International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. Her first monograph is published by Mousse Publishing, and unites essays and works from the past ten years of her practice. Since 2022 she is Professor of Fine Art / Foundation Class ‘Film/Video’ at the Braunschweig University of Art.
Marina Vishmidt
April 29th, 6PM, Aula
Marina Vishdmidt is a writer and editor. She teaches at University of Applied Arts Vienna, Art Theory Department. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Artforum, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, e-flux journal, Australian Feminist Studies, Mousse, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is currently editing a reader on speculation for the Documents of Contemporary Art series (Whitechapel/MIT 2023). She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). She is a member of the Marxism in Culture collective and is on the board of the New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society series (Bloomsbury Academic). In 2022, she was the Rudolph Arnheim Visiting Professor in Art History at the Humboldt University in Berlin and will take up a fellowship at the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies, 2023-24. Her research has been funded by the DAAD, the European Social Research Council and the Swedish Research Council.
Ghislaine Leung
April 30th, 10am, pavilion24
Ghislaine Leung is a British conceptual artist. Her work uses score-based instructions to radically redistribute and constitute the terms of artistic production. For Leung, limitations, felt as personal, institutional, structural or systemic to the parameters of industry, are engaged in as means to institute differently. Born in Stockholm, Sweden to a father from Hong Kong and a mother from London, she was raised first in Reims, France and then in London, England. She received a BA Fine Art in Context at the University of the West of England in 2002 and a Masters in Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University in 2009. Between 2004 and 2014 she worked at Tate and LUX, London. Leung has had solo exhibitions at Renaissance Society, Chicago, Simian, Copenhagen, Maxwell Graham, New York; Ordet, Milan, Italy; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany; Cabinet, London, UK; Netwerk, Aalst, Belgium; Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; Chisenhale, London, UK; Reading International, Reading, UK; Cell Project Space, London, UK and WIELS, Brussels, Belgium. Leung’s first book was Partners (Cell Project Space, 2018) with her second book Bosses published in 2023 with Divided. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2023 and lives in London, UK.
Christopher Weickenmeier
April 30th, 12pm, pavilion 24
Christopher Weickenmeier is a curator and research assistant at the Kunstraum Leuphana University Lüneburg. Besides teaching and organizing exhibitions, he is pursuing a PhD on palliative forms of institutional critique in contemporary art. Between 2019 and 2022, he was the artistic director at Klosterruine Berlin. His writing has appeared in Texte zur Kunst and Pfeil Magazin and his latest publication Klosterruinenzines (…a map, a notebook, a calendar, a diary) was co-edited by Maxi Wallenhorst and published by Bom Dia Books. Recent projects include TWICE with Park McArthur and DEADTIME with Cally Spooner and Will Holder, as well as Assistances (Working Title), a workshop on affordance, dependance, and deproduction in contemporary art production, co-organized with Tamara Antonijevic, with Valentina Desideri, Stefano Harney, Will Holder, Jason Hirata, Annick Kleizen, Mathilde Supe, Cally Spooner, Eric Golo Stone, Terre Thaemlitz and Marina Vishmidt. A corresponding publication (b_books) is forthcoming.
Simon Asencio
April 30th, 3PM, pavilion 24
Simon Asencio creates performances that question the notions of liveness, stage and audience. His work takes the form of exhibition scenarios, text-based ephemera and covert acts. He often uses imposture and the expression of doubt as means to develop and present his work.
Since 2014, he is a body for Jessica’s work, a protracted performance of real-life background acting; and works on the publication The Book of Rumours, an extended project on deceptive narratives and the performance of information. In 2018, he launched Memes, a series of text-based experiments to enable transferences of subjectivity.
Simon co-edits the online publishing platform misted.cc in collaboration with Clara Amaral. He teaches Performance at ESADMM, Marseille and the Institut Supérieur des Arts et Chorégraphies, Brussels.
The full schedule is available for download here, as wellas the workshop reader.