AFR
The former Danish primeminister Anders Fogh Rasmussen after he had been attacked
with red paint inside the parliament by anti-war protesters in 2003.

International seminar:
Image Politics - To see is to destroy

Folkets Hus (The People’s House), Copenhagen, April 10 & 11, 2010

(Seminaret foregår på engelsk)

Since September 11 a new visual landscape has emerged following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a part of the so-called War on Terror a visual bombardment threatens to leave us with still fewer counter-images and resistance-strategies. Censorship of the media and control of the public sphere has become the order of the day. But the images from the Abu Ghraib prison show that despite a tightly managed visual regime – images that disturb the tightly managed control of representation of the war do still appear.

The seminar's main focus will be the image politics during the War on Terror combined with an attempt to pick up on new modes of resistance and production of counter images emerging from subcultural groupings around the world.

Speakers include Iain Boal/Retort (US/Ir), O.K. Werckmeister (Ger), AW (DK), Curatorial Action (DK), Madeleine Bernstoff (Ger) and Rune Eltard (DK).

Organised by associate professor Mikkel Bolt (art historian), University of Copenhagen, professor Nils Norman (visual artist), The Royal Academy of Copenhagen, and professor Jakob Jakobsen (visual artist), Funen Art Academy and the students from these departments.

Venue: Folkets Hus Stengade 50, Nørrebro, Copenhagen Time: Saturday April 10 at 10am to 6pm - food/social in the evening Sunday April 11 at 11am to 6 pm.

Time: Saturday April 10 at 10am to 6pm - food/social in the evening Sunday April 11 at 11am to 6 pm.

Seminar program:

Saturday April 10

10am
Introduction by Mikkel Bolt and Jakob Jakobsen

11am
Iain Boal/Retort: Terror is the Health of the State: Capital, Space, Spectacle 2.0

Iain Boal considers certain recent developments in the realm of the image-world, in particular the politics of emergency vis a vis the interlinked financial and ecological crises. He will explore the difficulties facing opponents of capital and empire in attempting to articulate a planetary "point of view" that does not find itself trapped in the mills of the spectacle and that is not complicit with imperial or statist assumptions. He will conclude by proposing some conditions for an image-regime counter to the spectacle and conducive to commonist relations.

1pm
Lunch

2pm
AW: Localizing As Method

In continuation of our work as a collective investigative group, we will in this seminar, talk about our working methods, present examples and open up for a collective reflection upon possible strategies to act within an image-producing practice.

4pm
Madeleine Bernstoff: Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure / Break the power of manipulators!

6pm
End

Evening: Food etc.

Sunday April 11

11am
O.K. Werckmeister: The Apache Paradigm

The video-electronic equipment of the US Apache AH64 battle helicopter dramatizes a blending of the two image spheres I have attempted to distinguish in my Medusa-Effekt of 2005: the operative sphere, where images operate within electronic circuits without ever meeting human eyes, and the informative sphere, where humans view and act upon images in specific ways affecting their judgment on reality processed through electronc perception. This combat equipment constitutes an extreme case of self-orientation in today’s video-electronic life environment and its attendant visual culture.

1pm
Lunch

2pm
Curatorial Action: Images of Nordic Colonialism: Curating Across the Colonial Divide

In this talk, we will give an account of Kuratorisk Aktion's ongoing curatorial engagement with the history of Nordic colonialism. Taking our point of departure in a number of our recent projects, we will address the specificity of Nordic colonialism, its contemporary repercussions, and the reasons for its extensive repression. The talk will give testimony to the central role played by film, photography, cartography, and anthropology in colonial processes and how these disciplines, in the case of Nordic colonialism, were instrumentalized as means to portray Nordic colonialism as an exceptional, soft, and charitable form of colonialism. Interestingly, as the experiences and conclusions generated in each of our projects show, these disciplines have become equally central in contemporary artistic, theoretical, and activist attempts to examine this repressed history and the postcolonial condition it has left the Nordic region in.

4pm
Final disucussion with Rune Eltard.

Final discussion taking point of departure in an anti-war protest against the Danish involvement in the war in Iraq, where protesters threw red paint at the prime minister and the foreign minister inside the Danish Parliament. The background to this image attack will be introduced by Rune Eltard, one of the protesters involved.

6pm:
End

The Speakers (more info to come):

Iain Boal is an Irish social historian of science, technics and the commons, resident in California since 1985. He is associated with Retort, a group of writers, artisans and artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is affiliated with the Geography Department and the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley, and the Community Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz. In 2005/6 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Science and Technology. He co-edited Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights Press,1995) and was one of the authors of Retort's Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso, 2006). He helped to fabricate Retort's installation, "To Offend our Enemies", at the Second Seville Biennale. The Green Machine, a socio-technical history of the bicycle in planetary perspective, will be published by Notting Hill Editions, London, in the fall of 2010.

Kuratorisk Aktion is an independent curators’ collective committed to curating radical critique and critical action. The collective was formed in 2005 by Danish independent curators Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen with an aim to take curatorial action against the injustices and inequalities produced and sustained by global capitalism. This has resulted in an ongoing curatorial investigation into the complex relations between historical colonialism, capitalist globalization, and neocolonial forms of exploitation on the one hand and postcolonial forms of conviviality on the other. In a broad body of projects, ranging from cross-disciplinary exhibitions to film programs, publications, and public discussions, Kuratorisk Aktion has strived to examine to what degree colonialism’s catastrophic race- and gender-thinking continue to structure the nationalized, racialized, classed, gendered, and sexed divides of globalized corporate capitalism. Kuratorisk Aktion’s recent projects include: Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts (2006), The Road to Mental Decolonization (2008), Metropolitan Repressions (2009), and TUPILAKOSAURUS: Pia Arke's Issue with Art, Ethnicity, and Colonialism, 1981-2006 (2010). www.kuratorisk-aktion.org

Otto Karl Werckmeister (born in 1934) taught art history at the University of California at Los Angeles, California, and at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, from 1965 to 2001. Since 2001 he lives in Berlin, his native city. Last books: Linke Ikonen, München, 1997 (English: Icons of the Left, Chicago, 1999), and Der Medusa-Effekt: Bildstrategien seit dem 11. September, Berlin, 2005. In preparation: The Political Confrontation of the Arts: From the Great Depression to the Second World War, 1929-1939.

AW is a group which started to work collectively in the time after Church Asylum. They work with an active investigative practice in which curiosity and knowledge-sharing plays a central role in the search of possibilities to act.

Rune Eltard is a journalist and former activist connected to the radical left in Denmark. Currently working at the news portal Modkraft.dk

To see is to destroy - introduction

Images have always played important roles in shaping the political horizon of society. Two examples are history painting and television. These image techniques have had important roles in representing power and ideology in Western societies. Napoleon on his white horse crossing the Alps as depicted by Jacques-Louis David in 1801 and the images of Neil Armstrong leaping down on the surface of the Moon shown on direct television in 1969 are powerful levers of certain power relations and certain hegemonies. But images also have the potential of challenging and perhaps even undermining powers. The films and pictures being dispersed from the Vietnam War are good examples of the political impact images can have in concrete political conflicts.

After the Second World War the image also became an important vehicle for the emerging consumer society whereby it was possible to control and produce desires creating isolated and marketized 'individuals'. The image of smoking women and the image of the happy family in the kitchen eating cereals became signifiers of the new freedoms that could be realised through buying certain products.

The counter cultural motto 'All Power to the Imagination' was in itself a claim to the image, a claim for a new political imagination. This claim was connected to the rebellion against the Fordist disciplinary society of the 1960s and developed into a wide array of experimental micro-political projects from production collectives over separatist feminist communes to alternative media that developed after 1968.

Dansk introduktion:

Billed Politik - At se er at dræbe

Internationalt seminar
Folkets Hus, Stengade 50, Nørrebro
10. & 11. April

Internationalt Seminar om billedpolitik arrangeret i samarbejde med Københavns Universitet, Det Kgl. Danske Kunstakademi og Det Fynske Kunstakademi. Seminaret finder sted i Folkets Hus på Nørrebro og vil byde på oplæg fra teoretikere, kunstnere og aktivister fra USA, Tyskland og Danmark. Udgangspunktet er den såkaldte krig mod terror, som har medført et altdominerende billedregime, der gør det meget vanskeligt for befolkningerne at udvikle modbilleder eller modstrategier. Ved seminaret vil billedbrugen under krigen mod terror blive belyst, og der vil endvidere være oplæg om mulige og umulige modstrategier. Seminaret vil foregå over to dage og vil involvere oplæg, workshops og filmforevisning.