HRS Lecture: Anselm Franke

Описание: Animism is an exhibition and research project that shows that the power of animation cannot be isolated as aesthetic phenomena, but ultimately concerns boundaries of in- and exclusion drawn by, and around, all social formations. Animism is imagining these boundaries as variable and ultimately, as questions of cosmology and media technologies. Such “ boundaries” always emerge at the nexus of material practices and conceptual differentiations such as the distinction between life and death, between nature and culture, but also between mind and world, subjective interiority and the conception of the external world and mere “thing”, or commodity. The project furthermore envisions modern European history returning as its inverse: not as a story of the rise of science or the evolution of secular society and the enlightened subject, but rather as the invention and production of unfree matter and the non-animate—as an, imaginary division whose material organization in capitalism is constitutive of modern forms of sociality and power.

Anselm Franke is a writer and Head of the Department of Exhibitions at the HKW / Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin. He is currently completing a film on Aby Warburg’s "Serpent Ritual” lecture with Erhard Schüttpelz and working on a collaborative project entitled “Illiberal Arts” with Kerstin Stakemeier.

Franke worked as a curator of interdisciplinary research projects and festivals in several theatres, including: the Volksbühne am Rose-Luxemburg-Platz and Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin until 2006, often in collaboration with Hannah Hurtzig. From 2001–2006, he worked at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, where he curated numerous exhibitions, among them, Territories, along with Eyal Weizman, Rafi Segal and Stefano Boeri in 2004 and No matter how bright the light, the crossing occurs at night, along with artists Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ines Schaber and Judith Hopf in 2005. Later, he was artistic director at Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp from 2006–2010, where he curated exhibitions such as Self-Fashion Show (2007), Mimétisme (2008) and Drawing Documents (2009). His multi-chapter exhibition project, Animism was shown in Bern, Antwerp, Vienna and Berlin (2010-2014). Since 2013, Franke is listed among the 100 most powerful people in the artworld in the yearly ranking by the ArtReview.