Simon Njami Ann L. Stoler - ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry

Lectures – Tuesday, 17 February 2015, 18:00 and 19:00, In English
Simon Njami – curator of the exhibition
WIR SIND ALLE BERLINER: 1884-2014 at
SAVVY Contemporary – will present the concept of the exhibition and the role and importance of artistic and cultural interventions. He
will discuss the shifting historical discourses
and the corresponding politics of memory.
Simon Njami is a writer and an independent
curator, lecturer, art critic, and essayist. He has
curated many international exhibitions, being
among the first to think about and show African contemporary artists’ work on international stages. He curated Africa Remix (2004-07
in Düsseldorf, London, Paris, Tokyo, Johannesburg) and co-curated the first African
Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. His exhibition The Divine Comedy – Heaven, Hell, Purgatory by Contemporary African Artists is currently touring after stations in Frankfurt a. M.
and Savannah (USA) to Washington D.C and
Lisbon. Njami is the co-founder of Revue
Noire, a journal of contemporary African and
extra-occidental art. His latest book publication is a biography of Léopold Sédar Senghor. Simon
Njami
In the Heart of
the Lights
Ann L.
Stoler
Ann Stoler’s keynote lecture will set the
framework of the discursive programme by redirecting the attention of critical engagement
with colonial aftermaths towards the “less
dramatic durabilities of duress”, the less visible and perceptible repercussions of imperial
dispositions, and the complex ways in which
they shape not only the material but also the
psychic space in which we live today. Stoler’s
shift of focus from “left over” relics (ruins) as
evidence of the past to what we are “left with”
- the ongoing process of ruination through
which imperial power occupies the present allows for an account of those subtle durabilities. She challenges established assumptions
about the way colonial pasts and colonial presents relate to each other, about the remnants
of empire that do not only persist, but also
continue to be reanimated. Her lecture will
take place against the backdrop of a Germany
- and a Europe - that is experiencing protests
and attacks against foreigners of an unforeseen magnitude and a sharpening of public
anti-foreigner rhetoric. It will provide a crucial starting point to reflect upon the complexity of colonial presents and a basis to rethink
contemporary socio-political developments in
order to shift them.
The lectures constitute part I of the multidisciplinary programme: WIR SIND ALLE
BERLINER: 1884-2014, commemorating the
Berlin Conference. Part II will take place from
26 February – 1 March 2015 at ICI Berlin,
KuLE Theater, and SAVVY Contemporary.
For further details please see
www.ici-berlin.org
A Project by SAVVY Contemporary in
cooperation with the ICI Berlin and
the Institute for European Ethnology at
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Concept:
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung with
Elena Agudio, Anna Jäger, Saskia Köbschall
Ann L. Stoler is the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology
and Historical Studies at the New School for
Social Research. She has worked on the politics of knowledge, colonial governance, racial
epistemologies, the sexual politics of empire,
and ethnography of the archives for more
than thirty years. Her publications include
amongst others Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense;
Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race
and the Intimate in Colonial Rule; Race and
the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of
Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things and
Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in
North American History.
Imperial Debris and
Why it Matters Now
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