Narration and Embodiment – A Video Lecture Series brings together twelve short presentations by internationally active artists, scholars, and curators. Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, David Teh, Eisa Jocson, Işıl Eğrikavuk, Kawita Vatanajyankur, Lins Derry, Mi You, Natasha Ginwala, Natasha Tontey, Sin Wai Kin and Ute Meta Bauer investigate materials, research questions, and provocations that pertain to both historic and contemporary narratives, examining the potential for collection, transmission, and worlding. The videos contribute to the project's broader inquiry into how embodied creative practices, such as performance, can unfold alternative narratives, practices of embodying histories and the transfer of embodied knowledge.

Narration and Embodiment – A Video Lecture Series is part of the research transfer project Circulating Narratives – Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art, which explores how diverse histories inform performative practices and shape communities as embodied knowledge. In collaboration with Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, the project accompanies the museum's exhibition Nation, Narration, Narcosis: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories, curated by Anna-Catharina Gebbers with Grace Samboh, Gridthiya Gaweewong and June Yap, funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and initiated by the Goethe-Institut, which opened in November 2021 in Berlin. The project primarily focuses on the intersections between Southeast Asian and so-called 'Western' performative practices, while addressing the blind spots in traditional historiography in 'the West', as well as the consequences of colonialism and relationships capable of advancing the deconstruction of the 'Western' canon. Conceiving the global cultural institutions of the future involves addressing the questions of how traces of history – embodied both in actual bodies and in artifacts in museum collections and archives – can be made visible, and how forms of memory can be both preserved and treated respectfully.

Programme: Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Siobhan Leddy, Annette Jael Lehmann, Lieselotte Schinzing
Organisation: Siobhan Leddy & Lieselotte Schinzing
EXC 2020 Temporal Communities, Freie Universität, Berlin
Research Area 2: Travelling Matters
Project: Circulating Narratives – Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art
Project Lead: Prof. Dr. Annette-Jael Lehmann

Broaden the Narrative

This conversation between the curator for international media and performance art at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, and research assistant at the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities, Lieselotte Schinzing, is based on their common interest in the methodological approaches of Donna Haraway and Ursula Le Guin on Narration and Embodiment. Their conversation takes as a foundation the curatorial practice of Anna-Catharina Gebbers in specific anticipation for her upcoming exhibition, Nation, Narration, Narcosis, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, part of the research and exhibition project Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories. Initially from their own work environments, later together between artworks, they are opening up questions surrounding an art historical canon and ways to perhaps disrupt its exclusive rigidity through a cross-conceptual way of thinking, bringing together many influences and approaches. Anna-Catharina Gebbers explores the process of conceiving the exhibition as an example of such thinking and talks through two artworks by Joseph Beuys, as one of the starting points for the exhibition, but not its centre, embodying different stories by means of their materiality. Coming back from the detailed to conceiving an entirety, Ursula Le Guin and Donna Haraway come up as sparks to broaden this linear narrative of art history, towards a pluri-vocal exhibition, and staying calm through stirring up trouble.

Disembodiment

The presentation by Anne Duk Hee Jordan reflects on the work Culo de Papa, on show during 2021 in the courtyard of the Humboldt Forum, as well as further investigations titled Disembodiment (2012). Here, the potato plant acts as a starting point to critically explore Prussia’s colonial history, weaving images of disembodiment together with personal experience to reveal environmental, demographic, and colonial processes. Jordan explores the plant’s dis-/embodiment throughout history and its role in imperial waves of exchange, such as the Columbian Exchange, a widespread movement of ideas, diseases, food and populations between the Americas, Europe, and West Africa in the 15^th and 16^th centuries.

The Story of the Curator

Curators David Teh and Anna-Catharina Gebbers discuss the narrations they embody when they play the role of their occupation, along with other roles they realise, having experienced living and working in and with different regions and places. David Teh describes changes in the history of curating and reflects on his experiences as a curator in Southeast Asia. Through exploring the exhibition landscape, he distinctly divides artist-run environments from those institutionalised, by also drawing on his book Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992-1998, thereby questioning the place of production of contemporary art and the role the curator embodies in it. He notes the importance of the development and preservation of archives in Southeast Asia as something that is often singularly being done by artists themselves, their families and loved ones. Yet this can restrict it to a site as embodied knowledge. So, what does the curatorial role mean within the frame of global contemporary art? Rather than only looking at the beginning of non-institutional curating in North America and Western Europe, why not everywhere else, too? To begin to grasp such questions, specific histories and narrations that are embodied in a place need to be considered in more depth. Coming back to their roles, Teh briefly explores why he is not an art historian in the classical sense, while Gebbers gives a brief overview of the everyday tasks of a curator employed at an institution, from practice to theory, to paperwork and interspecies communications — as seen in her past and present exhibitions.

Corponomy Online

What narratives are embedded in Filipino bodies that precondition us for affective labour in the global service industry? Engaging such questions hijacks and unravels systems of labour and control both through and within colonised bodies. 

From pole and macho dancing to hostesses, princesses, superwomen and zoo creatures, Eisa Jocson’s body becomes an archive of performative labour techniques that unpack identity, class and gender formation, seduction politics and Filipino social mobility.

How to Write Stories with a Stranger/How to Tell Stories to a Stranger

Rooted in performance, writing and storytelling, Işıl Eğrikavuk's practice brings together dialogue-based community art practices with fiction and imagination. She works with the specific dynamics of the site, its inhabitants, history and politics and connects the outcomes of her research to her writing by creating imaginative, often humorous and satirical stories.

In this presentation, Eğrikavuk focuses on three performance works of hers. In a recent performance, Dear Fear (2019), she has worked together with a 'Jugendheim' (youth home) in a Berlin village, where young refugee boys are staying. In another performance in 2017, titled Pluto's Kitchen, she compares the exiting of Pluto from the planetary system to England's exit of the EU (Brexit) and a personal break up story, around a dinner table performance. In her 2012 work, Change Will Be Terrific, she proposes to bring the pyramids of Egypt, the Greek Parthenon and Palmyra in Syria to Istanbul's famous Taksim Square, to take part in a mock talk-show.

Performing Textiles Series

In this video, Kawita Vatanajyankur explains her interactions with the world through her experiences during field studies, interviews, and sharing ideas with different communities and workers. She shares hidden mythologies, use of materials and colours behind the symbolism within the work and their relations to current oppression in the modern world of fast consumption — in particular, the exploitation of labourers. Vatanajyankur also discusses her individual embodied knowledge during the performances; the messages that are realised during the actions, reactions and the experiences in-between. Towards the end of the video, Vatanajyankur elaborates on why art is more powerful when it is outside of the art world.

Where There is a Body, There is a Story

This presentation argues that where there is a body, there is a story, revealing how certain narratives are culturally emergent, despite any dramaturgical intent. By decoupling stories from storytelling like so, latent body narratives that underscore both performance and human-computer interaction are shown as interrelated. These non-linguistic and even non-linear narratives are understood to be foundational to embodied knowledge. As such, stages and computer interfaces are discussed as mediums for transferring and archiving this knowledge across analogue and digital domains. This parallelism makes it possible to bridge choreography with interaction design, as demonstrated in my research on choreographic interfaces. Peppered with questions throughout, last to be asked in the essay is: as new media is used to transfer embodied knowledge just as stages for millennia, what new narratives will surface — structurally in performance, personally for performers, and automatically for human and non-human (computer) observers?

Embodying Earth in Eurasia

Narrative practice is an embodied practice connecting and (un)folding multiple timespaces. Mi You's research, teaching and curatorial work turns around Eurasian geographical imaginations. At once a geographical and geopolitical space, Eurasia offers rich narrative sources of mythologies, stories and tools of navigation — physically and metaphysically. With these, Eurocentric and nationalistic narratives are resisted by constantly mapping, remapping and unmapping. Technologies to-come fold ancient technology into the futuristic, and align the cosmos with the techne. The ontology of land, body, and the spiritual realm in the light of ever-unabating transformations are recast. In Mi You's practice, research lingers in life, while in the video, a narrative becomes an embodied enaction.

Vignettes from Performing Lives

Natasha Ginwala's presentation explores the narrations, site-making and knowledges produced through the performing body. She suggests that performance has always been part of oral and living practices, outside the climate we know as the globalised art circuit. Artists have drawn inspiration and learnings from the ways in which stories are told, dramatised and passed on through a spectrum of performance traditions.

Some of these practices are not codified in a time-bound reality, but rather endure over centuries in an improvised, lyrical and communal manner. How may contemporary performance methods draw on those embodied knowledge systems, which accompany us from birth to death, rather than being particular to just one moment? Giving examples of artistic practices she has engaged with, Ginwala presents the work of Wu Tsang and Boychild, who create affective modes of call and response, floating between the personal and collective; Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's approach to study and fugitive intelligence; Venuri Perera's investigations into border regimes, the temporality of ritual and uneven violence of the gaze; Nikhil Cophra, who asks how the body cites itself and how citations from the landscape enter the living body, revisiting the past and present through roleplay; and a procession featuring several artists at the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning.

The Outcasted Entities and Non-Linguistic Narrative

This contribution examines Natasha Tontey's artistic practice in relation to the notion of outcasted entities, particularly cockroaches and stone in Minahasan Indonesian culture, approaching them through a non-linguistic mode of communication. While both the cockroach and stone culture in Minahasa are outcasted entities, they help her to reflect, to imagine, and to dwell with questions related to fear, stigma, and embodied knowledge.

Non-Binary Storytelling and A Dream of Wholeness in Parts

Storytelling is a human technology for the construction of objective knowledge, where man-made false dichotomies are created and naturalised. In their lecture, Sin Wai Kin discusses their research on queer methodologies for non-binary storytelling, and how it is embodied in their recent work, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2021).

Embodied Knowledge

Ute Meta Bauer focuses on three exhibitions she either curated or co-curated at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, a national research centre of Nanyang Technological University. Bauer positions curatorial and artistic forms of inquiry as a means of engaging with knowledge that is embodied in materiality. The exhibitions, Tomás Saraceno. Arachnid Orchestra: Jam Sessions (2015), Trees of Life — Knowledge in Material (2018) and The Posthuman City – Climates. Habitats. Environments. (2019/2020) all investigate diverse forms of materiality from substantially different perspectives, such as the communication between spiders and their webs with other species; the ecosystem of indigo, lacquer, rattan, and mulberry; and the urban as a terrain of co-habitation of life-forms. Bauer poses questions such as: what kind of knowledges are we producing in artistic inquiries situated in spaces of the curatorial? How do they serve as a knowledge container? And how do exhibition displays communicate knowledge in different ways? What is embodied knowledge and what languages, what forms of exchange, do they constitute? Rather than considering the enlightenment as the period that has lit up the world, perhaps darkness, the darkness of the ocean or that in a spirit-house, equally contribute to the transmission of knowledge.