Nikolaus Gansterer, Theory Casing IV (of the Middle of the Moment), 2013 | wooden sticks, sticking tape, polystyrene balls, ca. 130 x 80 x 80 cm | Courtesy the Artist Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com
Nikolaus Gansterer, Theory Casing IV (of the Middle of the Moment), 2013 | wooden sticks, sticking tape, polystyrene balls, ca. 130 x 80 x 80 cm | Courtesy the Artist Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com
A key fear in the life of modern humanity is the loss of control — a fear of the incomprehensible and the irrational. How do subjective and collective fears shift the relationship of threat, security, and freedom? A conversation on the global web of fear, terror, and trauma Nikolaus Gansterer, Theory Casing IV (of the Middle of the Moment), 2013 | wooden sticks, sticking tape, polystyrene balls, ca. 130 x 80 x 80 cm | Courtesy the Artist Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com
Nikolaus Gansterer, Theory Casing IV (of the Middle of the Moment), 2013 | wooden sticks, sticking tape, polystyrene balls, ca. 130 x 80 x 80 cm | Courtesy the Artist Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com
Introduction Bernd Scherer (2:20) // Introduction & Lecture Arjun Appadurai (10:25) // Introduction & Lecture Tony Bennett (39:45) // Introduction & Lecture Sharon Macdonald (72:50) // Discussion (102:10) Museums stage objects as testimonies of specific narratives. How do these museum things articulate the global order and supplant alternative narratives? What meanings do they adopt in the context of the dynamics of globalization and decolonization? At one of the last events at the Dahlem location of the Ethnologische Museum, Arjun Appadurai, Tony Bennett and Sharon Macdonald will explore the “thing”: its subtexts, its tenacity and its political dimension. Using selected objects from the collections, three experts probe the narrative styles of “things.” Arjun Appadurai, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, examines the migration of things and asks how they become legible as bearers of aesthetic knowledge. Tony Bennett, Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory at Western Sydney University, presents the evolution of seeing in museums and the fixation on the viewer’s perspective. The cultural anthropologist Sharon Macdonald, Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität, combines the two theoretical approaches with the latest developments in Berlin’s museum landscape. How do things become signifiers in the museum space? How do societies handle problematic aspects of cultural heritage? What processes of learning and unlearning are necessary in order to decipher hegemonic narratives and geopolitics? Image (c): Nikolaus Gansterer, Theory Casing IV (of the Middle of the Moment), 2013 | wooden sticks, sticking tape, polystyrene balls, ca. 130 x 80 x 80 cm | Courtesy the Artist Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com
The concept of truth in universalistic thought of western enlightenment and humanism is no longer able to produce foundations for solving global conflicts, yet a common ground is more urgently needed than ever before. In a world of simultaneities and divergent perspectives, how can one adopt a stance without thinking in terms of absolute truths? Film theorist Manthia Diawara and the Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka use the Négritude movement and Glissant’s theory of relation as the points of departure to examine methods of assertion and techniques of the production of truth. Image (c): Nikolaus Gansterer, Theory Casing IV (of the Middle of the Moment), 2013 | wooden sticks, sticking tape, polystyrene balls, ca. 130 x 80 x 80 cm | Courtesy the Artist Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com
Within what forums can the political evolve today? In the face of post-democratic mechanisms of globalization, the crisis of the national state and increasing restrictions on human rights and civil liberties, there have been shifts in the places and practices of social negotiation. There is an ever-growing distance between the spaces of global politics and the networks of local political initiatives. Departing from the idea of the Greek polis and Hannah Arendt's concept of political acting as free, public negotiation, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty and the architect Eyal Weizman explore the term forum. Image (c): Nikolaus Gansterer, Theory Casing IV (of the Middle of the Moment), 2013 | wooden sticks, sticking tape, polystyrene balls, ca. 130 x 80 x 80 cm | Courtesy the Artist Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com