CRITICAL FRIDAYS
Reflecting on Art, Bodies, Intimacy, and Emotions
Imagine any movement. – Now imagine that same movement taking place in different contexts: in the kitchen, at a museum, in a church, at a soccer game, on a date, at the doctor’s office. How does the environment affect the meaning of the gesture? And what happens when practices are transferred from one context to another? What, for example, is being cultivated when wellness treatments are used in art? What do we mean when we speak of being touched not by hands, but by works of pop culture? And how do physical insights change when I try to capture them in writing?
At Critical Fridays, the body as a medium of artistic and ritual practices takes center stage, and embodied knowledge is put up for debate. Invited artists and care workers offer insights into their bodywork or artistic practice through performances, workshops, readings, and film screenings, thereby providing a starting point for reflections with invited cultural studies scholars. We understand bodies and their ritual, sexual, technical, and playful movement sequences as products of social, cultural, and historical processes. This enables us to ask how personal perception is shaped, which cognitive and visceral reflections become visible in artistic practices, or how art performances and exploratory workshops challenge social norms
turn things upside down. These participatory events invite you to engage with embodiment in a playful way and take the beautiful risk of exploring alternative forms of knowledge.
The Critical Fridays events aim to bring together theoretical and embodied knowledge. Each event includes a practical component (workshop, performance, etc.) and a reflective component (discussion, plenary session, etc.). Together, we philosophize using tools from feminist and postcolonial theories, and we use the presented bodily practices to challenge unquestioned assumptions, stereotypes, ideologies, and power structures. At the same time, we aim to anchor texts and discourses from cultural studies in the sensory realm of artistic and bodily experience, to ensure that theory does not begin to revolve around itself. Thus, in each session, embodiment is playfully explored, examined, and discussed in different ways.
The program is curated by Carla Peca, co-founder of the Off-Space Kein Museum , curator, and cultural studies scholar, as well as by Matís d’Arc, founder of the label luhmen d’arc for event formats at the intersections of bodywork, play, art, and performance, and the artist collective and production platform iridescent matters.
A project by iridescent matters in collaboration with Carla Peca, presented by luhmen d’arc. With the kind support of
For every CRITICAL FRIDAY, there is a reader with further reading suggestions. This preparation is not mandatory, but it is, of course, highly recommended as a source of inspiration for the discussions.
You can find the readers available for download in the respective course sections under the corresponding link.
