Symposium
Contested Bodies: Navigating Control, Resistance, and Technological Impacts
23.11.24, 12:00 – 17:15
In English
Free admission

The one-day symposium expands on the themes explored in The New Subject. Mutating Rights and Conditions of Living Bodies, the final exhibition in a series investigating the evolving challenges of human and non-human bodies within the context of global biopolitics and technological advances. 

Through a series of dynamic presentations and discussions, the symposium will investigate the legal, somatic, and cognitive dimensions of bodily rights, spotlighting tensions between control, resistance, and technological influence.

Curators, artists, and researchers, including Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits (Curators, TOK), Micha Frazer-Carroll (Writer and researcher, London), Ulrika Flink (Curator, Stockholm), Clara Sika Helbo (Artist and designer, Copenhagen), Caitlin Berrigan (Artist, filmmaker and writer, Berlin and Vienna), Anan Fries (Artist and performer, Berlin), and Avi Feldman (Curator and lawyer, Director of Wannsee Contemporary, Berlin), will share their insights on the intersections of bodily autonomy, legal frameworks, and technological innovation.

Programme

12:00
Doors open

12:15
Welcome and introduction
Kathrin Becker (Artistic Director, KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art)
Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits (TOK Curators)

12:30
Keynote speech by Micha Frazer-Carroll 
Micha Frazer-Carrol will address normativity, conventionality, and transgression of bodily and mental standards, in line with the exhibition section Self-Perception and Practices of Recognition, followed by a discussion and Q&A, moderated by Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits.

13:30 – 14:00
Break

14:00
Conversation between Ulrika Flink (Curator, Stockholm) and Clara Sika Helbo (Artist and designer, Copenhagen), moderated by Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits
The conversation focuses on embodied resistance and corporeal struggles, as explored in the exhibition section Legalised Violence and Embodied Resistance.

14:45
Pre-recorded presentation by Caitlin Berrigan (Artist, filmmaker and writer, Berlin and Vienna), moderated by Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits
The presentation focuses on public health, medical categories, stigmatization, exclusion, and the pharmaceutical industry's connection to legislation.

15:15
Presentation by Anan Fries (Artist and performer, Berlin), moderated by Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits
The presentation focuses on reproductive rights, expansion of boundaries, and the Posthuman Wombs project.

15:45
Break

16:00
Legal Matters?
Presentation by Avi Feldman (Curator and lawyer, Director of Wannsee Contemporary, Berlin) on legal shifts and artistic responses to bodily rights, with a focus on reproductive rights, gender transition, and future technological advancements affecting bodily autonomy.

16:40
Closing notes, discussion and Q&A

17:15
End of the event

Participants

Micha Frazer-Carroll is a writer based in London. She published Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health with Pluto Press in 2023. She has written about politics, disability, and the arts for publications including The Guardian, The Independent, Novara Media, and HuffPost. She is a trustee of the National Survivor User Network, a members' organization for people with experiences of mental distress, ill health, and trauma. While at university, she founded Blueprint, a mental health magazine. She has been nominated for the Bread and Roses Award for radical publishing and the Anthony Burgess Award for arts criticism.

Ulrika Flink is an independent curator based in Stockholm. She has held roles including artistic director at Konsthall C, curator at SETTINGS and Konstfrämjandet Stockholm, curator of Momentum 9 – Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art in Moss, Norway, and producer at Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm. She completed the MA Curating Contemporary Art (CCA) programme at the Royal College of Art in London and is the co-founder of the curatorial collective Parallelogram.

Clara Sika Helbo is a Danish-Greenlandic-born researcher and designer committed to exposing and challenging systemic inequalities through the lens of social design. Graduating cum laude from Design Academy Eindhoven with an MA in Social Design, she pushes the boundaries of traditional design to advocate for systemic change. Previously she worked as a researcher at the BBC and as a designer at the United Nations in Copenhagen.

Caitlin Berrigan is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose recent work explores poetics and queer science fiction as world-making practices. Her speculative cosmology, Imaginary Explosions, has been featured in a book (Broken Dimanche Press, 2018), solo shows at JOAN Los Angeles (2023) and Art in General (2019), reviewed in Artforum, and premiered at the Berlinale Forum Expanded Exhibition (2020). She has exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum, Henry Art Gallery, and La Casa Encendida. Her writings appear in e-flux, Georgia, MARCH, and Duke University Press. Currently, she is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Anan Fries works at the intersection of digital and performing arts. They were the artistic director of the media-art collective machina eX, where they designed immersive experiences and a co-founded of the experimental feminist performance collective Henrike Iglesias. Anan Fries' latest work, RIP - Resurrect in Peace, a funeral for an extinct bird, is a techno-spiritual hybrid dance performance set in a digital ecosystem.

Avi Feldman is a curator and lawyer with a global interest and expertise in contemporary art, dance and performance. With a degree in law and a doctorate in curating, he forms an interface between art and law. For example, he was guest curator for the MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 in New York and founded the independent organization The Agency for Legal Imagination for exchange and collaboration between institutions, artists, activists and scholars in the fields of art, law and politics. Avi Feldman currently runs the Berlin gallery Contemporary Wannsee.

TOK is a curatorial collective founded in 2010 by Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits. Their practice is rooted in historical analysis and political imagination, generating multidimensional projects that explore the causes and consequences of mutating political realities. tokcurators.art

The exhibition The New Subject: Mutating Rights and Conditions of Living Bodies is on view from 15.9.24 – 26.1.25 at the Maschinenhaus M2.
Admission is free for symposium guests.

The entire building is wheelchair accessible.
Please note that there have been adjustments to the programme due to organisational reasons.

Funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation), the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media).