Anselm Franke

Anselm Franke is Head of the Visual Arts department at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, where he was part of the curatorial team of the Anthropocene Project and organised exhibitions such as Animism (2012), and together with Diedrich Diederichsen The Whole Earth (2013), Forensis together with Eyal Weizman (2014) and Ape Culture together with Hila Peleg (2015). He was chief curator of the Taipei Biennale 2012 and the Shanghai Biennale 2014. He completed his PhD at Goldsmith College in London in 2015.

Fabien Giraud

Fabien Giraud is an artist. Since 2007, he has collaborated extensively with the artist and filmmaker Raphael Siboni, with whom he has exhibited internationally (Palais de Tokyo – 2008, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris – 2009, Santa Fe Biennial – 2008, Moscow Biennial – 2009, Sharjah Art Foundation – 2013, Biennale de Lyon – 2015 ). Since 2014, their new and ongoing body of works entitled The Unmanned has been presented in a series of monographic shows in Luxembourg (Casino Luxembourg), Canada (Vox in Montreal) and France (Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de l’Ile de Vassivière).

Together with Ida Soulard, he co-founded The Matter of Contradiction in 2011, a series of seminars and workshops addressing the geological concept of the Anthropocene and its consequences for the theory of art. In 2012, they co-initiated Glass Bead, a research platform and journal launched in 2014 through a series of events in New York and Paris. They currently collaborate on a book entitled The Marfa Stratum.

Ida Soulard

Ida Soulard is a doctoral researcher in art history at ENS / PSL University and co-director of Fieldwork: Marfa, an international research and residency project run by les beaux-arts de Nantes and HEAD-Genève. She currently teaches at les beaux-arts de Nantes Métropole.

Together with Fabien Giraud, she co-founded The Matter of Contradiction in 2011, a series of seminars and workshops addressing the geological concept of the Anthropocene and its consequences for the theory of art. In 2012, they co-initiated Glass Bead, a research platform and journal launched in 2014 through a series of events in New York and Paris. They currently collaborate on a book entitled The Marfa Stratum.

Beyond the Monument

The research project Beyond the Monument: Political Mobilization, Citizen Initiatives and Art Interventions in Memorial Processes [BM] aims to explore the connection between the paradigm shift in memory politics that occurred in the 1990s (evolution of the normative framework of transitional justice) and situated art practices (from the counter-monument to interventionist, discursive and “performative” proposals) and their situation in the public space. The study examines (1) the transformation of memorial policies since the 1980s; (2) the simultaneous emergence of original artistic formats in this area at the intersection of citizen, activist and artistic initiatives; (3) the impact of developments in transitional justice on art practices; (4) the contribution of art practices in the development of memorial policies. Beyond the Monument is conceived by Pierre Hazan, Denis Pernet, Catherine Quéloz, Yan Schubert, Mélanie Borès and Mischa Piraud.

Griselda Pollock

Griselda Pollock was born in South Africa, grew up in Canada and is Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of Centre for Cultural Analysis, History, and Theory at the University of Leeds. Her most recent publications include Concentrationary Imaginaries: Imaginaries of Violence and the Violation of the Human (editor, with Max Silverman, 2015), After-affects | after-images. Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum (author, 2013), Visual Politics and Psychoanalysis: Art & the Image in Post-Traumatic Cultures (editor, 2013), Digital and Other Virtualities: Renegotating the Image (editor, with Antony Bryant, 2010), The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference (editor, with Victoria Turvey-Sauron, 2008), Museums after Modernism (editor, with Joyce Zemans, 2007), and Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum Time, Space and the Archive (2007).

Eyal Weizman

Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2011, he also directs Forensic Architecture, whose collection FORENSIS was published by Sternberg Press in 2014. He is a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. His books include Mengele’s Skull (with Thomas Keenan at Sternberg Press, 2012), Forensic Architecture (dOCUMENTA13 notebook, 2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (Nottetempo 2009, Verso 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), A Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003), the series Territories 1,2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines and edited books. He has worked with a variety of NGOs worldwide, and was a member of the B’Tselem board of directors. He lectured, curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide.

The curatorial

Curatorial Politics
M1/M2
English/French (texts)

Doreen Mende

Turning the inextricable [or, intractable] condition against itself

“Violence is at the beginning of thinking; it is the thing of thought, of reason.” (Denise Ferreira da Silva) Violence is also at the beginning of making; it is the thing of art. This is not a dilemma. But a matrix: Violence marks the rule of law, not as an event but as a condition. The seminar aims to problematize violence as an inextricable condition from which there is neither an escape nor an excuse nor an apology. This condition has always been formative and will inextricably continue to affect art as a concept and a practice of transcendental reason. Put differently, art is implicit as well as complicit with the rule of law (and signification) legitimizing colonial (juridical) and racial (symbolic) violence. There is an end to this only possibly at the end of art as we know it.
This year’s seminar will engage with the very difficult question how to make a research public, from a curatorial perspective, with the aim to rehearse how it could be possible to not reproduce the violence that is inscribed into our means of making as artists, curators, theorists, architects, researcher or designers. How could research become a set of practices to prepare the conditions for practicing a decoloniality to arrive, which will be needed for turning the inextricable [or, intractable] condition of violence against itself? These all are very difficult questions. The practice-based seminar will not claim to answer them. But it will try to create openings, responses, offerings, spaces, time-zones and constellations to think with.
We will read key texts by Denise Ferreira da Silva, MTL Collective, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. We will visit ongoing exhibitions nearby with the aim to analyse them with questions from the seminar. The assignment of the seminar consists of small exercises with concrete material from your own research, or otherwise, in relation to the reading of texts. Furthermore, it also is expected from the students to create independently and selfresponsibly a diary of terms, methods and concepts with the possible capacity of turning the inextricable [or, intractable] condition of violence against itself. –– The seminar resonates with the following two research processes: PARSE conference «Violence» including Yasmine Eid- Sabbagh and Denise Ferreira da Silva from 17 through 19 November 2021; the exhibition Saisis par l’art (working title) for the Musée du Luxembourg de Grand Palais in Paris in collaboration with the state collections of art Dresden planned for September 2022.

Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies
M1 et M2: Anne-Julie Raccoursier (en français et anglais)

Les Cultural Studies 2015/16 ouvrent un champ d’étude transdisciplinaire et critique qui prend pour objet les institutions, les pratiques et les formes culturelles dans leurs relations aux structures politiques dominantes, aux hiérarchies sociales et aux minorités marginalisées. L’enseignement met en relation les théories et les méthodes qui fondent ce champ d’étude avec des pratiques artistiques situées, discursives, interventionnistes. Le séminaire alternera exposés, lectures et travaux pratiques.

Études Politiques « Comment juger? »

Études Politiques
M1/M2
French/English

Pierre Hazan
Début: 9 Octobre, 2017, 10.00

Faisons table rase du passé ?

Les révolutionnaires français rêvaient de faire table rase du passé. Mais force est de constater que le passé n’est pas encore passé, il a même un très grand avenir. La constitution de l’identité aussi bien personnelle que collective, le système de valeurs, la projection d’une société dans l’avenir dépend largement de la représentation qu’elle se fait de son passé. Le démantèlement des statues du général Lee à Charlottesville et de Christophe Colomb à New York, la destruction des œuvres d’art par Daech en Irak ou l’érection de monuments à Genève le montrent de manière saisissante. Comment se construit et se modifie le lien au passé et à quel passé ? Quel regard porter aujourd’hui sur le colonialisme et la traite esclavagiste ? Selon quelle lecture historique ? Selon quelle vision de la culture, de la vérité et de la justice ? L’enjeu de ce cours vise à mieux appréhender les ressorts de la représentation du passé dans l’espace public.

Publication : les étudiants seront amenés à travailler sur des œuvres en construction ou faisant l’objet d’une discussion sur leur destruction/démantèlement, ou qu’ils souhaiteraient détruire. Dans leur texte, les étudiants devront analyser les enjeux idéologiques et esthétiques, les dynamiques politiques, le rôle de l’artiste et des pouvoirs publics. L’ensemble de leurs contributions, éventuellement enrichies de contributions extérieures, feront l’objet d’une publication.

Pratiques artistiques situées

Pratiques artistiques situées
Situated Art Practices

M1/M2
French/English

Anne-Julie Raccoursier, Tarek Lakhrissi

The CCC ResearchMaster Program  promotes artistic research. It transforms the conception of artistic practices and develops independent information through the study of critical sources and formats. It explores the role of art in society and considers artistic practice as the production of organic knowledge in the context of production. The seminar, taught throughout the curriculum, is conducted in close collaboration with the Writing Research Practice seminar. It offers training in the methodologies of research through the means of art and allows students, based on discussions around their projects, to build devices to make their research public. It promotes a conception of research that is mutualized and step-by-step. It is based on a conception of artistic practice that is conscious of the differences in cultures and languages and concerned with the economic mechanisms of society and their political dimension. It develops critical, analytical and visionary strategies and encourages interventions – both individual and collective – with multifaceted meanings in a wide range of formats and situations. Research is carried out in technical reproduction media and experimental formats. The artistic practice is situated, discursive, interventionist, politically engaged and transdisciplinary. The Program supports art engaged in the public sphere or in civil society, understood as theater of debate and deliberation, as an intermediary place between private space and institutions.