Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst
Archive
2024–2021
2025
2024
26.09.2024, 07:00 pm

Belia Zanna Geetha Brückner 
A good theory in theory 
poster frame serien “Re-Framing”
Opening with cheesecake

22.06.2024, 03:00 pm

Steps through stories – Collective walk along Waller Heerstraße (EN)
with Bubu Mosiashvili

> limited number of participants, please register via office(at)gak-bremen.de

21.04.2024, 03:00 pm

nearly all types of honey crystallize
Guided tour with Victor Artiga Rodriguez & Dawoon Park (EN)

02.04.2024, 07:00 pm

nearly all types of honey crystallize

Artists of the Binational Artistic PhD Program of HfK Bremen
Exhibition Opening
19 h speeches, 20 h concert by Christian Rosales Fonseca, Dj-Set and Honigbrot

2023
2022
2021
2020–2011
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010–2001
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2001
2000–1991
  • Toon Fibbe, Lady Credit or Finance in Drag (Videostill), 2023

DEBT. Unsettling Matters of Interest
International Symposium

22.05, 07:00 pm -23.05.2025

The renewed prevalence of debt in political discourse accounts to significant shifts in global power dynamics and environmental conditions, while regimes of compulsory growth claim borrowed funds as a prerequisite for sustained production in postindustrial societies. This indicates an extension, if not an escalation, of the analogy between artistic practice and a financialized present outlined by Marina Vishmidt and others in the notion of speculation. Yet once the stakes are exhausted, it goes into debt.
Following Leigh Claire LaBerge’s proposition that there is “no more abstraction,” the symposium consequently explores the social and cultural productivity of debt. “Bodies,” “Ecologies,” and “Infrastructures” provides instances for situated analyses of how property, value, and interest as structures of both debt and art since the becoming of modernity unfold in a speculative contemporary. Instead of explanatory containment, the aim is to contribute to an extended understanding of debt as a formative framework of computational actualities.

Abstracts & Biographies of the speakers here

Program

Thursday, 22.05.2025
19:00 Precarization, Care, and Queer Debt – How to Rethink Democracy ISABELL LOREY (Cologne)
Opening Lecture
German / simultaneous interpretation to English)

Drinks & Communal Dinner

 

Freitag, 23.05.2025
10:00 Welcome and Introduction SUSANNE HUBER (Bremen)

10:15 PROPERTY: Corporeal Charge and Embodied Unownership
Moderator: Susanne Huber

Debt’s Debt: A Body History of Inequality after the End of Slavery to the Present in the United States FELIX KRÄMER (Erfurt)

The Birth of Debt from the Nature of Value – and a trans lesbian response LUCE deLIRE (Berlin)

Too Big To Fail, Too Small To Notice TOON FIBBE (Rotterdam/Brussels)
Performance

Lunch Break

13:30 VALUE: Ecologies in Measure and Scale
Moderator: Friederike Nastold

The Past is in Front of You: Thinking Climate Justice through Debt VASNA RAMASAR (Lund)

Urban Visions of Global Climate Finance: Indian cities and the making of Groy FRITZ-JULIUS GRAFE (Zurich)

Coffee Break

15:45 INTEREST: Infrastructures of Expansion
Moderator: Daniel Berndt

Slicing the Cake: On Lebanon’s Economy of Exhaustion IBRAHIM KOMBARJI (New York/Beirut) – digital

Strange Progress: Financial Temporality and the Problem of Indifference BASSAM EL BARONI (Espoo)

________ Break

18:00 ACTIVISM: Connectivity and Collectivity

Moderator: Annette Hans

Transfeminist Struggles against Financial Authoritarianism LUCÍA CAVALLERO (Buenos Aires) – digital

“You are not a loan” – The history and present of debt abolitionist movements CHRISTOPH SORG (Berlin)

Read more
Thu 22–Fri 23 May 2025

Thu, 22.05. 19:00
Fri, 23.05. 10:00–20:00

An initiative by Universität Bremen and GAK Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst Bremen, in cooperation with Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg and Hochschule für Künste Bremen, Klasse Temporary Spaces

Speakers

with Lucía Cavallero, Luce deLire, Bassam El Baroni, Toon Fibbe, Fritz-Julius Grafe, Ibrahim Kombarji, Felix Krämer, Isabell Lorey, Vasna Ramasar, Christoph Sorg

spatial activation by Temporary Spaces (Class Asli Serbest, HfK Bremen): Sara Ahmed Neyazy Khayry Elbarkouki, Vladislava Arzamastseva, Belenika Eichhorn, Johanna Hiege, Lea Jung, Jisu Kim, Keumjung Roh, Yoona Song, Yunda Suh, Vera Tolmatsova,  Zeynep Yesilmaden, with support and contributions by Elizaveta Boucke, Seulwoo Choi, Robert Coellen, Sebastian Grundmüller, Shatw Gurji

Cooperation

The impact of debt on bodies, organisms, and relationships, as well as on environments and infrastructures, is often obscured by financial abstractions and moral charge. The group exhibition You Breath Differently Under the Weight. Schuld und Haben and the symposium DEBT. Unsettling Matters of Interest shift the perspective to a transdisciplinary exploration of how liabilities materialize, how they operate, and by which media and apparatuses.

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
Manfred und Ursula Fluß-Stiftung

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