Prof. Dr. Lilian Haberer

Curatorial, research, and educational projects involving museum collections of 20th and 21st century art have responded to the demand to decolonize the museum and expand it to include significant global perspectives, micro-histories, and actors. This is documented by museum research projects such as Global Art and the Museum at the ZKM Karlsruhe, museum global. Microhistories of an Ex-centric Modernity at the K20 Düsseldorf, and the conference on the radically democratic museum in 2024 at the Dortmunder U – the latter with the aim of challenging the archive through counter-publics, different knowledge and radical mediation. In which way materializations and practices play an essential role within this focus, can be understood by critically examining photographic archives, such as Tina M. Campt's investigation of the role of vernacular image production for the African American diasporic community in the production of counter-images. Another approach is Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s and David Campany’s dialogue to identify indeterminacy as an alternative photographic practice. With readings in small groups and projects on the Cologne Photoszene, Artists meets Archive, a visit to the collection presentation Aufbruch und Befreiung: Internationale Kunst von 1960 bis 2000 at the K 20 Düsseldorf and other exhibition excursions, we will work on our own questions, micro-histories and perspectives in the seminar. Literature: David Campany & Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, Indeterminacy. Thoughts on Time, the image, and Race(ism), Discourse 006, London 2022. Tima M. Campt, Image matters: archive, photography, and the African diaspora in Europe, Durham/London 2012. Tina M. Campt, Listening to images, Durham NC 2017. Aïcha Diallo, „Who Is in the Archive?“, in: Sverre Bauer/Figge/Großmann/Lukatsch (Hg.), Künste dekolonisieren. Ästhetische Praktiken des Lernens und Verlernens, Bielefeld 2023, S. 211¬–218. Birgit Mersmann, „Decolonial Insurgency for Art Systemic Change: Dissenting Art Museums in New York“, in: Bublatzky/Dogramaci/Pinther/Schieren (Hg.), Entangled Histories of Art and Migration, Bristol/Chicago 2024, S. 304¬–319. Nora Sternfeld, Das radikaldemokratische Museum, Berlin 2018.

The garden, with its historically evolved socio-cultural and urban-planning interdependencies, appears in the history of urban and artistic movements from below as an independent, neighborly, organized, resistant, and thus multitudes-forming, political place of care, self-sufficiency, and sustainability. Recent exhibition catalogs show that community gardens, permaculture, and guerrilla gardening have now arrived in museums. The seminar questions this trend by focusing on the politics of public gardens – as spatial processes that are, of course, also fed by grassroots histories. In a Zadie Smith essay, for example, the author's mother is the only black woman pushing a stroller through Hampstead Heath, and in Mahmoud Dabdoub's photographs of Leipzig's green spaces, the bank sleepers around 1985 rest unconcernedly. The “seed bomb” movement actively resisted de-popularization, urban planning affected by segregation and marginalization of certain neighborhoods, and achieved the construction of small self-determined, disruptive biotopes, shared care work and reforestation in the urban context. In the wake of Occupy Gezi and 100% Tempelhofer Feld, public parks were preserved through neighborhood protests. What do public gardens mean in such planetary interdependencies? What unruly figures does the artistic-curatorial engagement with improvising gardening practices make visible? The seminar enables you to combine visual and text readings with your own artistic projects and to deepen them in associative exercises. Many of the work steps are organized in small groups, in which you participate independently. A reader serves as a basis, which is provided in print and as a PDF. Literature: Mahmoud Dabdoub, Alltag in der DDR. Fotos aus den 1980er Jahren, Leipzig 2024. Kaya Genç, Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey, London 2015. Stuart Hall, Essential Essays Vol. 2, ed. by David Morley, Durham/ London, 2019. Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time, London 2024. Sofia Lemos (Hg.), Meandering. Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics, TBA 21, London 2024. Uriel Orlow, Soil Affinities, Paris, 2019. Alona Pardo, Re/Sisters: A Lense on Gender and Ecology, Ausst.-Kat. Barbican Centre, London 2023. Claire Pentecost, Notizen aus dem Untergrund, Berlin 2012. Elske Rosenfeld, Kerstin Meyer, Joerg Franzbecker, Zur Verfassung, Recherchen, Dokumente 1989-2017, Berlin 2017. Zadie Smith, Feel Free, London 2019. Robert Wiesenberger (Hg.), Humane Ecology. Eight Positions, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2023. Sylvia Wynter, On Being Human as Practice, Durham/London, 2015. Daniela Zyman, Das Lachen der Quallen. Zur künstlerischen Gegenforschung jenseits des Menschen, Wien 2024. Discussed exhibitions: Knowledge is a Garden, Migros Museum, Zürich, 2024/25. Rebel Garden, Groeningemuseum, Gruuthusemuseum & St John's Hospital Museum, Brügge 2024. The One-Straw Revolution, curated by iLiana Fokianaki, Framer Framed, Amsterdam 2024. Being as Communion, 8th Thessaloniki Biennial of Contemporary Art, curated by Maria-Thalia Carras, Thessaloniki 2023. Where is the Planetary? HKW, Berlin: 2023. The Planetary Garden: Cultivating Coexistence: Manifesta 12, (Creative Mediators: Bregtje van der Haak, Andrés Jaque, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Mirjam Varadinis), Palermo 2018. 77#13: Politische Kunst im Widerstand in der Türkei, nGbK, Berlin 2015.