https://www.raqsmediacollective.net/
By staging the shadow of a chance encounter between the historical/literary figure Till Eulenspiegel and his distant cognate Mulla Nasreddin, the exhibition turns to humor and its political and social force, its benefits and its dangers.
Both Eulenspiegel and Nasruddin are read as gentle saboteurs of pomp and circumstance. They are pranksters and anti-heroes, figures of fun and fearless frolic who can look power, and the frozen structures of social convention, in the face. Laughter, even the kind that sticks in our throats, becomes a force to reckon with—not least in view of the punishments and harsh restrictions that comedians experience when they use their language and humor to utter a counter-opinion to the powerful in political regimes.
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/412612/raqs-media-collectivethe-laughter-of-tears
Lynn Hershman Leeson
n 1973, Hershman Leeson began a private performance as the fictional character, Roberta Breitmore. Breitmore’s first act was to arrive by bus in San Francisco and check into the Dante Hotel. In the following years, she undertook real-life activities such as opening a bank account, obtaining credit cards, renting an apartment, seeing a psychiatrist, and becoming involved in trendy occupations, such as EST and Weight Watchers.
https://www.lynnhershman.com/project/roberta-breitmore/
https://www.lynnhershman.com/project/the-dante-hotel/
https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/the-novalis-hotel/
Laura M Marks
Haptic Visuality
haptic visuality refers to viewing which, usually because of the lack of distinction in the image, draws upon other forms of sense experience. Haptic visuality is thus a “tactile” way of seeing and knowing which more directly involves the viewer’s body. The eyes metaphorically function as organs of touch. Laura U. Marks, a Canadian media theorist and curator, initially develops this concept in relation to the formal and aesthetic strategies of intercultural cinema. In The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, she argues that intercultural media, which often points to the limits of sight, sound, and representation appeals to a intimate, embodied and multisensory viewing.
https://www.muthesius.cloud/s/5y8HDG33dbDLYDP
https://susanschuppli.com/MATERIAL-WITNESS
This research and my related MIT Press book and documentary film introduces a new operative concept—material witness—an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events as well as exposing the practices and procedures that enable such matter to bear witness.
Material witnesses are non-human entities and machinic ecologies that archive their complex interactions with the world, producing ontological transformations and informatic dispositions that can be forensically decoded and reassembled back into a history. Engaging, at the same time, with the institutional logics that structure their difference in order to expand acts of witnessing to more-than-human realms.
As a conceptual imperative and practical project my aim is ultimately to relink the material world and its affordances with the space of the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.