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The Missed Seminar/ Decolonizing Socialism. Entangled Internationalism

Topic: Exhibitions
Periods:
  • 2022 — 2023
Video interview with Katharina Warda and Doreen Mende about their Intervention The Missed Seminar. After Eslanda Robeson. In conversation with Steve McQueen's „End Credits“.
Interview with Katharina Warda and Doreen Mende in Berlin, 20.02.2023.

The Missed Seminar. After Eslanda Robeson. In conversation with Steve McQueen's „End Credits“ was conceived by Doreen Mende in collaboration with Katharina Warda, Avery F. Gordon, Lama El Khatib and Aarti Sunder. The project was exhibited at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2022 and as a showcase installation at the Albertinum in Dresden in 2023. Drawing on various archival materials, it is dedicated to the life and work of the African-American feminist, photographer, anthropologist and writer Eslanda Goode Robeson (1895 - 1965). Based on her visit to East Berlin in 1963 and her encounter with the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Loeser, The Missed Seminar ponders a fictional seminar in which they could have developed their political visions together. The exhibition featured The Missed Seminar in a dialogue with Steve McQueen's audiovisual installation End Credits (2012-2022), in which he traces the FBI's surveillance of Eslanda Robeson and her husband Paul Robeson.

Impressions of the exhibition as well as a detailed curatorial statement can be viewed on the website of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Albertinum:

https://archiv.hkw.de/de/programm/projekte/2022/themissedseminar/start.php

https://albertinum.skd.museum/ausstellungen/the-missed-seminar/

The Missed Seminar is part of the research project Decolonizing Socialism – Entangled Internationalism, which is lead by Doreen Mende at the Institut de Recherche en Art et Design (IRAD) of HEAD Genève. It uses a transhistorical approach to examine artistic practices in the socialist geographies of the Cold War. A focus is on connections between South and East that were established in and via the GDR: https://entangledinternationalism.org/

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