Jane Jin Kaisen
Community of Parting

Book release and online conversation
January 23rd, 2021

On the occasion of the release of the book Community of Parting, Archive hosted an online conversation conceived to unfold different trajectories emerging from the book. This conversation brought together Jane Jin Kaisen, curator Heidi Ballet, who contributed to the book, as well as curator Anne Kølbæk Iversen, co-editor of the publication.

Documentation of the event will soon be available.

About the book

Community of Parting is an extension and continuation of the artistic practice of Jane Jin Kaisen. Bringing past and present, the eternal and the temporal into play through layered, performative, and multi-voiced feminist works, Kaisen explores topics such as memory, war, migration, and borders in a field where individual experiences and collective stories intersect. Her works negotiate and mediate the means of representation, resistance, and reconciliation, thus forming alternative genealogies and sites of collective emergence.
The book is composed of several interwoven voices: oral testimonies with poetics by Kim Hyesoon, poetry by Mara Lee, and shamanic ritual chants by Koh Sunahn, accompanied by essay contributions by Heidi Ballet, Anselm Franke, Pujita Guha and Abhijan Toto for the Forest Curriculum, Anne Kølbæk Iversen, Jane Jin Kaisen, Hyunjin Kim, Soyi Kim, Yongwoo Lee, and conversations with Mary Kelly and Kim Seongnae. Learn more about the book on Archive Books

 

About the screening

A selection of films by Jane Jin Kaisen were made available in our screening-room until January 23rd. The films included: Community of Parting, Strange Meetings, and The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger authored with Guston Sondin-Kung.

About the speakers

Jane Jin Kaisen

Jane Jin Kaisen works with video installation, photography, performance, film, and text. Her practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research and engagement with diverse communities. She represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale and has shown her works at venues such as Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Arko Art Center, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Palais de Tokyo, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Times Art Center Berlin, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Kunsthal Aarhus, the Liverpool Biennial, and the Jeju Biennale.

 

Anne Kølbæk Iversen

Anne Kølbæk Iversen, PhD, is a researcher, curator, and writer based in Copenhagen. She obtained her PhD in 2019 from Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University as part of the research project The Contemporary Condition. 2019-20 she was affiliated with ARKEN Museum of Modern Art conducting the research project From a Grain of Dust to the Cosmos, studying works from ARKEN’s collection informed by discussions around the Anthropocene and notions of cosmos. Publications include “Visualising the Invisible, Imagining til (Im)possible,” in ARKEN Bulletin, vol. 8 (2020); “A Parting Ways While Being With. Critical Investigations and Acts of Assembling in Jane Jin Kaisen’s Practice,” in Jane Jin Kaisen. Community of Parting (2020) “Bodies and Rhythms,” with Sevie Tsampalla, in The Contemporary Research Intensive (2018).

Heidi Ballet

Heidi Ballet is a curator based in Berlin with a research interest in the geopolitics of oceans and the psychology of climate chaos. She is currently preparing the 2021 Beaufort Triennial, a public art triennial along the Belgian coast. Exhibitions that she recently curated include the 2019 Tallinn Photomonth Biennial, the 2017 Lofoten Biennial (LIAF) and the exhibition series Our Ocean, Your Horizon at Jeu de Paume Paris and CAPC Bordeaux (2016). Between 2012 and 2015, Ballet worked as a research curator on After Year Zero, an exhibition project shown at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2013) and the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (2015).

After operating nomadically in Berlin over the past year, Archive has a new home. SAVVY Contemporary, an organization that continuously inspires us, will share its new space with us. From its inception ten years ago, Archive has grown into a decentralized organization. Three main sites – Berlin, Dakar, and Milan – are essential in shaping our program. Archive is a community of practice acting across – and connecting – different socio-cultural environments and imaginaries. The experience of producing through and from within a continuous conversation allows us to bring multiple voices to the forefront of each of our propositions. To respond to increasing precariousness, we rely on bonds with sister organizations and individuals that, like us, focus on nurturing new forms of imagination, practices based on sharing, co-learning, and cohabitation, moved by radical care and love. We are blessed that SAVVY’s new home is in the neighborhood of Wedding, whose community has been instrumental in Archive’s development.

From 2021 onward, Archive, in dialogue with other publishers, will set up a learning site for radical publishing. Based on the premise that the written word in its “published” form continues to exist within hegemonic systems of knowledge, we believe that publishing needs to be critically scrutinized with regard to its function to render visible, mediate, amplify, and disseminate — addressing such critique through the prism feminist and decolonial theories and practices. Archive is conducting a series of preparatory sessions in 2020 which bring together practitioners from different regions. These groups will contribute to a transdisciplinary and transnational exchange, posing the question of how and for which purpose national and disciplinary modes of interaction can be overcome through publishing. The acts of translation necessary for these debates will be integral subject matter of Publishing Practices.
Publishing Practices program
From 2021 onward, Archive, in dialogue with other publishers, will set up a learning site for radical publishing. Based on the premise that the written word in its “published” form continues to exist within hegemonic systems of knowledge, we believe that publishing needs to be critically scrutinized with regard to its function to render visible, mediate, amplify, and disseminate — addressing such critique through the prism feminist and decolonial theories and practices.
Archive is conducting a series of preparatory sessions in 2020 which bring together practitioners from different regions. These groups will contribute to a transdisciplinary and transnational exchange, posing the question of how and for which purpose national and disciplinary modes of interaction can be overcome through publishing. The acts of translation necessary for these debates will be integral subject matter of Publishing Practices.
Lubumbashi & Kinshasa, session 1, September 17-18

Part of a series of preparatory sessions for the ongoing initiative Publishing Practices. Organized in concert with Atelier Picha, Lubumbashi.

Accra, session 2, October 28–29

A sessions in Accra in connection with CritLab organized by Foundation for Contemporary Art-Ghana. (tbc)

Rabat, session 3, November 2-3

Part of the series of preparatory gatherings for Publishing Practices, this session connect with the project In search of archives and it’s organized in concert with Les Archives Bouanani, Rabat.

Dakar, session 4, December 17–18

Last gathering for Publishing Practices in 2020, this session activates the feminist library run by Radio AWU and Archive in Dakar.  

Projects in Berlin

Wild tongues* is a recurring space for reflection and dialogue concerned with many kinds of borders – borders between nations, cultures, classes, genders, languages. This long-term research endeavor will stretch across various geographies and temporalities and will manifest itself in multiple forms. While addressing the complexities of the borderlands, of diasporic politics, physical and internal displacement, cultural dislocation and hybridity, production of Otherness, and the violence of border regimes – Wild tongues intend to establish a space to enact and rehearse forms of togetherness, radical care, and conviviality. The project draws from a genealogy of feminist writers, amongst them Gloría Anzaldúa whose work inspired the title, Cherríe Moraga, María Lugones, Chela Sandoval, Mariana Ortega, Emma Pérez. Wild Tongues will be launched in December 2020.

* “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” in Gloria Anzaldùa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987.

From the archive

Gaddafi in Rome

Gaddafi in Rome

14.07.2019

In June 2009 Muammar Gaddafi and Silvio Berlusconi met in Rome to celebrate the Italy-Libya Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation and discuss the Bilateral Agreements on migration and fuel trade. As the event sparked several protests, it caused a media frenzy in Italy that brought to the fore the controversial relations between the two countries. Attempting to turn an archive of live news updates produced during the meeting into a script, this performative lecture strives to dissect the memory of this event and the way it was reported.

In Search of Archives

In Search of Archives

23-26.01.2019

In Search of Archives inquires into contemporary notions and practices of the archive in postcolonial constellations. While the state of archives in former colonial settings is continuously marked by limited access, dispersed documents and repressed histories, contemporary art and research have been opening various ways of appropriating, (re)collecting and rendering visible the diverse traces and memories, creating new meanings of the past for the present and the future.

AntiColonial Records

AntiColonial Records

24–26.10.2018

A three-day programme including working groups, film screenings, presentations and discussions revolving around the question of social justice born out of the postcolonial situation. The encounter is set up to facilitate collaborative explorations of the potential of the creative work to disrupt ingrained ideas and representations through affecting the senses and imagination.

Discreet Violence

Discreet Violence

19.12.2017

Based on private and institutional archives, including the French Service cinématographique des armées, Discreet Violence: French Camps in Colonized Algeria features certain aspects of the massive forced resettlement of civilians during the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), and disclosures the ways with which the French colonial regime attempted to divert the military purpose of the camps in the aftermath of a medial scandal of 1959.