Working Through

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"Working Through" is the first chapter of the artistic research project "Relational Images in the Arts since 1920". The project seeks to develop the interrelations among art-historical, theoretical, and artistic inquiries into feminist, politically committed positions. Its point of departure is a series of photo-collages and photomontages collaboratively produced in 1933 by the artists Friedl Dicker, Margit Téry, and Mordecai Ardon and documented on a slide film. Connected through their studies at the Weimar Bauhaus in the 1920s, this group increasingly began in the 1930s to mobilize their artistic strategies against National Socialism. In their slide film, the group visualized concepts from Karl Marx’s "Capital" as well as the entanglements of economic crisis and fascism. In "Working Through", we realize a performative lecture and an installation that bring together spatializing and embodied artistic procedures with formal analyses and historical contextualization. To this end, the slide film is placed in relation to a possible stay by Dicker in Berlin around 1930, when she was involved in designing an apartment for Téry in the Berlin-Wilmersdorf artists’ colony. This milieu served as a hub for leftist intellectuals and artists, including the architect Karola Pietrowska-Bloch, the philosopher Ernst Bloch, and the psychoanalysts Annie and Wilhelm Reich. "Working Through" is premised on co-authorship – through shared research protocols, collective writing, and joint artistic practice, primary research – with a focus on feminist-materialist historiography and speculative reconstruction. By interweaving sculptural elements, drawings, and archival materials with spoken reflections and object-based interactions, we trace the narrative, medial, and material structures of the photo-collages as well as their aesthetic and social conditions of production. At the same time, we examine how the critical gestures of this historical artistic work might be reactivated in relation to contemporary crises.

Funding

Funding Category

Relationale Forschung