If archeology turned out to be looking for non-existent origins that are subsequently declared “history” by contemporary narratives, then EXCAVATING THE PRESENT is the only thing left to do. The workshop series proposes gatherings around multiple forms of excavation sites. In conversation with artworks and artists we explore ways to involve ourselves with that what is left of the present and turn our attention to how our entangled bodies inscribe themselves into these fugitive times.

A joint adventure of Klosterruine and Annika Haas’s seminar Archeolgy of the Self at the University of the Arts Berlin. With financial support of: Women’s Representative, Faculty of Design / University of the Arts Berlin, Fachbereich Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte des Bezirksamt Mitte von Berlin

 

 

PROGRAM:

Monday, July 5, 9 PM
Screening “The City” (Rossella Biscotti) 

Rossella Biscotti’s video installation “The City, 2018”, is informed by her extensive research and filming of the Çatalhöyük archaeological site in Konya (Turkey). Biscotti investigates the relationship between the neolithic community that built the earliest urban centre known to date and the archeological community that has been unearthing it over the past twenty-five years.

Tuesday, July 6, 5–7 PM
Reading group with Enzo Camacho: “The Angry Christ” (by Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho)

“The Angry Christ” is a remarkable religious mural in the Philippines. Commissioned for a chapel built to service the workers of an industrial sugar refinery on the agricultural island of Negros, the mural was painted in 1950 by the queer, Filipino-American modernist Alfonso Ossorio. Amy Lien’s and Enzo Camacho’s essay examines Ossorio’s artwork in relation to its immediate environment and accounts for some of the multiple narrative threads that cross through it, entangling questions of Modernism and spirituality, queerness and class struggle, sugar and death. We discuss and read the text together with Enzo Camacho, who will share his insights into their expansive artistic research project.

>>>dowload the text here<<<

Tuesday, July 6, 9 PM
Artist talk (hybrid) with Rossella Biscotti and Övül Durmuşoğlu

Following the screening of Rosella Biscotti’s film “The City” on the 5th, we invite you to join a conversation between the artist and the curator Övül Durmuşoğlu, one of the curators responsible for commissioning the work in 2013 as part of the Asar-ı Atika/Ancient Works series of the Independent Curators International Open Call sponsored by the SAHA Association.

If you want to join the Artist talk online via BigBlueBotton, follow this link: https://meetings.udk-berlin.de/b/ann-6q1-wyd-5fb

July 12–18
أَعْفَر – Exhibition with Dina Khouri

The week long exhibition entitled أَعْفَر consists of a series of subtle interventions into the architecture of the Klosterruine. The exhibition works to shift the focus away from the archeological artifact to the material and historical conditions of their extraction and subsequent aestheticization. Critically questioning the object-hood of her own installative works, Khouri engages with painting as a medium characterized by exclusion and cohesion, thus sidestepping the implications of a Western epistemology that creates meaning through separation and framing. أَعْفَر unearths traces of histories of violence and oppression by turning to the most of ubiquitous of things: dirt.

Wednesday, July 14, 4 PM
Artist talk with Dina Khouri