Professor of Migration Studies Agata Lisiak and student Mohamad Othman (BA '21, Syria) will participate in the conference “We, the City. Plurality and Resistance in Berlin and Istanbul,” held on May 23-25 at various locations in Berlin. The conference brings together scholars, activists, and artists from Berlin and Istanbul to explore various forms of knowledge-production, including workshops, panels, and installations. 

On the first day of the conference Mohamad Othman will guide a tour titled “Why We're Here” which offers a unique comparative take on conflict and uprising in Syria and Berlin. Mohamad will engage with recent Syrian history by drawing parallels to selected events from Berlin’s past. The two-hour tour will start at U-Mohrenstrasse in Mitte.

The speakers in the panel “Re-Writing the City Through Engaged Walking” co-organized by Agata Lisiak will explore various political efforts centered on the idea of walking, which aim to re-write hegemonic narratives of cities. The speakers (academics and activists from Istanbul and Berlin) will also closely consider walking as an ethnographic and activist method of engagement with the urban and discuss with the audience how we can make cities more inclusive through walking and how we can make walking more inclusive.

More about the conference>>

On May 16-18, 2019 faculty member Aya Soika participated in the conference "Unbewältigt? Ästhetische Moderne und Nationalsozialismus. Kunst, Kunsthandel, Ausstellungspraxis" [“Unresolved? Aesthetic Modernism and National Socialism. Art, art trade, exhibition practice”], conceived by Meike Hofmann (Research Center 'Degenerate Art’, Freie Universität), Dieter Scholz (Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), together with Bernhard Fulda (University of Cambridge) and Soika, and supported by the Ferdinand-Möller-Stiftung.

The international conference brought together experts in National Socialism and early 20th century Art and Culture to introduce and discuss the latest findings from research and exhibition practice. The participants aimed to examine the motivations of artists, art historians, and art dealers in connecting the forms of expression of modernism with National Socialism, as well as to explore how the multifaceted and contradictory image of the German art world in 1933-1945 could be presented in the institutional context of a museum. 

In the frame of the conference, Soika was invited to speak on co-curating the exhibitions A German Legend. Emil Nolde and the Nazi Regime (Nationalgalerie, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin) and Escape into Art? The Brücke Painters in the Nazi Period (Brücke Museum, Berlin), and to moderate a panel on the "Persecution Narrative and Heroic Stories of Modernity in Post-war Germany." 

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Faculty member Marion Detjen contributed to a radio show on the history of the German Basic Law, which aired on Bayerischer Rundfunk on May 20, 2019 to mark the 70th anniversary since the birth of this text.

Detjen, who is co-author of the volume Die Deutschen und das Grundgesetz: Geschichte und Grenzen unserer Verfassung [The Germans and the Basic Law: The History and Limits of our Constitution], was invited to speak about the Germans’ perception of the Basic Law around its birth. Detjen noted that in the aftermath of the Second World War, feelings such as freedom or self-determination were far from the German population, and it took a while to realize the constitutional and liberal potential of the Basic Law. Detjen also discussed the constitutional experiments that took place before the reunification and the organic character of the Basic Law. 

Listen to the piece here>>  

On Tuesday May 14, 2019, Bard College Berlin celebrated the inauguration of its new student residence, Henry Koerner Hall.

Named after the Austrian-born American painter and graphic designer Henry Koerner (1915-1991), the building was designed by the renowned Rotterdam-based Atelier Kempe Thill. 

The festivities began with a ribbon cutting ceremony which featured short addresses from Leon Botstein, President of Bard College; Peter Baldwin, Co-founder of the Arcadia Fund and Member of the Board of Governors of Bard College Berlin; André Kempe, Co-founder and Partner at Atelier Kempe Thill; and Sӧren Benn, Mayor of Berlin-Pankow. Two exhibitions were on view at Henry Koerner Hall following the inauguration. The first presented a group of prints by Henry Koerner, including My Parents based on an iconic painting by the artist. Also on view was a selection of issues of TIME magazine featuring portraits by Koerner on the cover. The second exhibition, The Skin of the Law. European Migration Regimes and their Global Realities, showed works created by students from Bard College Berlin and was curated by professors Dorothea von Hantelmann and Marion Detjen. 

The day continued with a series of discussions at St. Maria Magdalena Church, located in the proximity of Henry Koerner Hall. Joseph Leo Koerner, Harvard art historian, author and son of Henry Koerner, gave a presentation on the work and life of his father. The college was delighted to host keynote speeches by Sigmar Gabriel, Member of the German Bundestag, and the artist, architect, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar. The closing event was a panel discussion and open forum with Tracey Emin, artist; Barbara Haskell, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Orwa Nyrabia, Artistic Director of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam; and Joseph Koerner, moderated by Leon Botstein. 

The college wishes to thank Arcadia, A charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, for making the construction of Henry Koerner Hall possible. 

Booklet on Henry Koerner Hall>>

Press features
Im Geist von Hannah Arendt, Der Tagesspiegel, May 13, 2019
Wiener Emigrant Henry Koerner wird Namenspatron eines Berliner Studentenheims, Der Standard, May 14, 2019

 

The article "Comparing Public Communication in Democracies and Autocracies - Automated Text Analyses of Speeches by Heads of Government" co-authored by faculty member Seraphine Maerz and Carsten Q. Schneider (Central European University) was recently published in the international journal of methodology Quality & Quantity. 

Article abstract:
Renewed efforts at empirically distinguishing between different forms of political regimes leave out the cultural dimension. In this article, we demonstrate how modern computational tools can be used to fill this gap. We employ web-scraping techniques to generate a data set of speeches by heads of government in European democracies and autocratic regimes around the globe. Our data set includes 4740 speeches delivered between 1999 and 2019 by 40 political leaders of 27 countries. By scaling the results of a dictionary application, we show how, in comparative terms, liberal or illiberal the leaders present them-selves to their national and international audience. In order to gauge whether our liberal-ness scale reveals meaningful distinctions, we perform a series of validity tests: criterion validity, qualitative hand-coding, unsupervised topic modeling, and network analysis. All tests suggest that our liberalness scale does capture meaningful differences between political regimes despite the large heterogeneity of our data.

Read more here>>