EINLADUNG

UNDER FIRE

The Organization and Representation of Political Violence
Discussion

Datum: Sonntag, 26. Marz 2006, 19 Uhr
Ort: Galerie der Heinrich-Boell-Stiftung, Rosenthaler Str. 40/41, Berlin-Mitte
In englischer Sprache
Eintritt frei

presentations by Anselm Franke, Brian Holmes, Thomas Keenan and Gema Martin Munoz
moderated by Jordan Crandall

In cooperation with KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Under Fire is an ongoing art and research project that explores contemporary militarization and political violence. It delves into the structural, symbolic, and affective dimensions of contemporary armed conflicts: the organization, representation, and materialization of war.

This session of Under Fire will focus on the status of political speech -- the operations of power that determine the legitimacy of action, and the conditions that render speech and action intelligible as a political force. From this basis, it will explore the dynamic between politics and violence and look at the way that new political spaces are opened or invented. Overall, it will foreground structural conditions of the new global landscape, exploring the nature of contemporary power and situating cycles of violence within the modalities of a global system.

Under Fire revolves around questions of representation. It explores the role that representations play as registers of symbolic meaning and as agents of cultural change. Yet at the same time, it acknowledges material, affective realities that resist symbolization, but which nonetheless play a powerful role in shaping consciousness and the belief systems that motivate action. It this sense it probes into the dynamic between discourse and affect, between larger rhetorical strategies and ineffable states of expression, and moves toward a performative politics that can accommodate a multiplicity of somatic and symbolic registers.

For further information on Under Fire, including archives of past discussions, please visit http://jordancrandall.com/underfire.

Organized by Jordan Crandall and Anselm Franke

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Brian Holmes is an essayist and activist-researcher. He has a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley, and now lives in Paris, collaborating with journals such as Multitudes (Paris), Springerin (Vienna) and Brumaria (Barcelona). All his work can be found online at www.u-tangente.org, including the collective project "Continental Drift" as well as the books HIEROGLYPHS OF THE FUTURE (2002) and UNLEASHING THE COLLECTIVE PHANTOMS (forthcoming).

Thomas Keenan teaches literary theory, media studies and human rights at Bard College, where he directs the Human Rights Project. He is the author of FABLES OF RESPONSIBILITY: ABERRATIONS AND PREDICAMENTS IN ETHICS AND POLITICS (1997) and the editor of two volumes documenting and analyzing the wartime journalism of Paul de Man -- Paul de Man, WARTIME JOURNALISM 1939-1943 and RESPONSES (1988/1989) and two volumes on THE END(S) OF THE MUSEUM (1995). His latest book is an edited volume, with Wendy Chun, called NEW MEDIA, OLD MEDIA, just published by Routledge.

Gema Martin Munoz is Professor of the Sociology of the Arab an Islamic World at Autonomia University of Madrid. She is the author of Iraq: A Failure of the West (2003) and Islam, Modernism, and the West (1999) and is a journalist for El Pais.

Anselm Franke is a curator and critic, based at Berlin's KW Institute for Contemporary Art until autumn 2006. He has curated and co-curated exhibitions such as "Territories. Islands Camps and Other States of Utopia" (KW 2003, Witte de With 2003, Malm? Konsthall 2004, Index Stockholm 2004, Bezalel Tel Aviv 2004), The Imaginary Number (KW 2005) and "B-Zone - Becoming Europe and Beyond" (KW 2005/2006), most of which are accompagnied by extensive publications. Anselm Franke is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Goldsmiths College London.