21-29 June exhibition global Munich. in perspective
Vernissage: 21 June, 18:00-22:00, Habibi Kiosk, Münchner Kammerspiele, Maximilianstr. 26, 80539 Munich
Processes of globalisation, their effects and their constraints affect each of us every day. Still, the media, politics and academia tend to shape what globalisation means to us. Headlines and political spin reduce our perception of it to sound bites, like ‘Millionendorf’ (a village of millions) or ‘Weltstadt mit Herz’ (a global city with a heart).
The Global Munich. In Perspective exhibition starts from the assumption that globalisation means something very different for many of us. Hence, artists Hêlîn Alas, Aydin Alinejad, Jeanno Gaussi, Sofia Dona, Nikolai Gümbel, Narges Kalhor and Franziska Windolf will tell us their stories of globalisation in the city of Munich.
Hêlîn Alas charts and analyses economies and approaches of the art system, with its implicit privileges based on class, origin and gender. In diversity work LIVE (Lenbachhaus), she invites visitors to playfully retrace the intra-institutional contrast between the outward image of the art system, which emphasises diversity, and its internal homogeneity.
Where can I feel at home in a globalised world? In Gis (‘wisp of hair’ in Persian), their short film, screenwriter Aydin Alinejad and screenwriter-director Narges Kalhor tell the story of Faezeh, who is about to return to Iran from Germany.
Jeanno Gaussi’s art deals with mechanisms of remembrance, the search for identity and attendant processes of social and cultural appropriation. In her work entitled Salaam Kâkâ Bilkâ (‘Hello Uncle Bilkâ’) Jeanno Gaussi reflects on the world of global goods and the markets where they’re exchanged, identifying supermarkets as meeting places for various communities in her own experience.
Nikolai Gümbel’s work is characterised by multimedia and highly contextualised pieces. In his video piece Schichten, die wir sehen (Abschnitt I, Ausgrabung und Modell) (The Layers We See (Part I, Excavation and Model), the artist obliquely treats the emergence of Freiham-Nord, a new subdivision in Munich, to investigate the past and future realms of possibility of a seemingly ahistorical, post-global place that, according to the brochures, is supposed to be open to all.
Franziska Windolf’s art deals with the question of how sculpture and the body can take on personal-political meanings and how they move through speech, history and social relations. In her works, she recollects stories of exile in Munich, begging the question whom or what we actually remember.
Moreover, the exhibition will present a video from the site-specific installation APPLAUS by artist Sofia Dona. The work treats the Starnberger wing of the main train station in Munich as a location of arrival. Combining various stories of mobility, Sofia Dona’s work presents the station as a place that incorporates forgotten stories of various actors in the city’s globalisation narrative.
From their diverse perspectives and biographies, these artists cast a critical gaze on gaps in our knowledge about Munich as a locus of globalisation. As part of the What is the City NOW? Festival, we celebrate diverse perspectives on Munich along with the city’s inhabitants and ask: what does globalisation mean to you?
Please click HERE to download the programme flyer of the exhibition and HERE for the catalogue.The Festival What is the City NOW? is an initiative by global dis:connect, Münchner Kammerspiele (MK), the TUM Center for Arts and Culture, the Habibi Kiosk, balkaNet e.V., Cine Vélo Cité, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, MK:Mitmachen, Refugio Kunstwerkstatt, MK: Musik, Cozy Sound Sytsem, Mittelschule am Gerhart-Hauptmann- Ring, Hochschule München (Faculty of Architecture), EU Horizon Projekt, NEBourhoods: PEARL Creating Cultural Places for Young People in Neuperlach
Curated by Martín Valdés-Stauber with Andrea Benze, Elke Bauer, Sophie Eisenried, Mona Feyrer, Julia Lena Maier, Gina Penzkofer, Marvin Scheler, Janina Sieber und Clara Valdés-Stauber, Jakob Weiß
For more information on the festival programme, please click HERE. Continue Reading
Workshop at the Paris Lodron University Salzburg, organised by Martin Knoll (Salzburg), Eva-Maria Troelenberg (Düsseldorf) and Roland Wenzlhuemer (Munich)
From the Planetary to the Global, and other lost histories of the 20th century.
Developing Theatre in the Global South
Perhaps nothing demonstrates the complexities of globalisation more clearly than war. The international reverberations of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have painfully exposed the interconnected nature of modern economies and our vulnerability to forces beyond our control, prompting anxious speculations about deglobalisation. Yet, experts agree that the more likely outcome is not isolation, but instead, changing geographies of connection. Similarly, recent historical scholarship has complicated conventional understandings of war as a dividing force, instead emphasizing both the connections and disconnections that it brings in its wake. In wartime, enemies are dehumanised in government propaganda, travel is disrupted, and trade blockades are enforced.
Wartime is associated with absences, interruptions, and detours, as lives are lost, scientific exchanges are cut off, and mobilized populations find themselves transported far from home. Yet, war can also create new spaces of interaction and encounter, sometimes across enemy lines. Some of these exchanges are illicit, such as smugglers who evade military blockades, or spies who penetrate enemy territory. Others are more overt, between prisoners of war and their captors, or surgeons who treat enemy combatants. War can provide the impetus for new connections and the widening of geographical horizons in the pursuit of resources, sometimes with lasting consequences. War, in other words, is the optimal lens through which to trace global connections and disconnections.
Workshop at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, LMU Munich
4-5 April 2024
The importance of agriculture and extractive industries to the making of the Global South in the 20th century has been obfuscated by the resonance of modernisation theory, dependency theory and development economics since the Second World War. With this workshop, themed Agriculture and the production of the Global South, 1900s-1960s, we seek to move beyond the rigid dualism of postwar models of growth and development by excavating processes and trajectories in the Global South and Global North that reveal the importance of agriculture and extractive production to the making of our contemporary world.
Organisers: Judd Kinzley and Paula Vedoveli
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Travelling Back presents a critical perspective on the narratives and collections Bavarian scientists Johann Baptist von Spix (1781–1826) and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794–1868) brought from Brazil to Munich in the 19th century. The exhibition follows their extensive three-year journey across the Brazilian hinterland, including the Amazonian region.