Friendship in Dark Times: Research Creation Exhibition
Monday, May 6, 2024 5:30 pm – 10:00 pm CET/GMT+1Monopol (Provinzstraße 44, 13409 Berlin)
We are experiencing first-hand that unfreedom and complicity with injustice not only prevail in dictatorships but also affect democracies. Hanah Arendt conceputalized the loss of freedom as a loss of the world: when the spaces for collective action become ever narrower and people withdraw into the private. "In history, the times are frequent when the space of the public sphere darkens and the existence of the world becomes so questionable that people demand no more from politics than that it takes due account of their vital interests and private liberty." A historical response to political oppression and dehumanization has always been solidarity: equality in shared suffering, "brotherhood/sisterhood". But Hannah Arendt, with Lessing, was interested in a different kind of response: friendship. Friendship, when it is understood as a conversation, as a shared participation in the world, is lived plurality, and in friendship, even under oppressive conditions, space for the public and for politics emerges again.
Our exhibition and discussion event deals with the political potentials, contexts, and ambivalences of friendship. In order to regain the world in and through our relationships, we need - again following Hannah Arendt - a constant and free movement of thought: constant learning and unlearning, even in contradictions. The exhibition shows our students' artistic and research-based appraoches to friendship in dark times. We will hear from the writer Priya Basil, the artist Yehudit Yinhar, and the curator Daria Prydybailo about how politics and friendship are connected for them. And we will discuss, in a "fishbowl" format, political learning and unlearning processes that we have taken on for friendships or through friendships.
The exhibition event is taking place as part of an Open Society University Network (OSUN) course and includes works from our partner classes at Universidad dee los Andes/Bogota and Witwatersrand University/Johannesburg as well as works from guest students.
There will be drinks and Afghan Burgers from the Afghanistan Awareness Initiative.
This event is taking place during BCB's Open Studios at Monopol.
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