Arrangements
A two-day and two-night symposium
Thursday 1—Friday 2 December 2022, 11:00 am–late
Gianmaria Andreetta, Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Therapy Girls, Elizabeth Graham, Laurin Huber, Kabelo Malatsie, Jasper Marsalis, Slauson Malone 1, Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson, Volker Pantenburg, Rory Pilgrim, Richard Sides, Terre Thaemlitz, Steven Warwick and Angharad Williams.
Arrangements is a two-day, two-night symposium, conceived of as an exchange between students of the Bachelor of Arts department (K++V) and a group of invited artists, writers, curators, composers and musicians. It explores how artists working with audio formats—or whose work is best understood in musical registers—engage with institutional arrangements: group dynamics, power relations, various forms of social, political, and economic organisation. It asks if and how listening offers a model through which art can offer social utility, and looks at forms of artistic production and distribution in relation to both the cultural worker as a self-standing institution, and the student group as a social institution within an educational complex that continues to be a site of institutional contestation.
The symposium is produced for and with the students of the Bachelor of Arts programme who have made it open to the public. Scheduled events are delivered in English. The symposium takes place in ‘Atelier West’, a space made available by a group of students who usually use it as a studio. Students will be onsite to provide information and assistance to members of the public. An open-to-all dinner is provided on the first evening. Arrangements is organised by Matthew Hanson with the students of the 2022 HSLU Kunst und Vermittlung K++V Bachelor programme.
Programme:
Elizabeth Graham with Rory Pilgrim:
Thursday 1st December, 11:00—12:30
Artist Rory Pilgrim and curator and educator Elizabeth Graham draw from their longstanding collaboration to orient a discussion around listening, embodying and dreaming as tools for practising desired futures. Their presentation includes an in-depth introduction to ‘Radio Ballads’, a Serpentine Galleries Civic Project co-curated by Graham, for which Pilgrim was commissioned to produce a new work, resulting in the multi-format operalla ‘RAFTS’.
Elizabeth Graham is a practice based researcher, curator and facilitator working in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Her work is grounded in an ongoing study of radical pedagogy, learning from Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s and bell hooks’ teachings, to advocate for and create practices that challenge neoliberal and colonial models of education that are still found in museums, arts organisations and institutions today. It is also underpinned by an engagement with group dynamics theory, abolitionist and transformative justice movements, cooperative work, decolonised approaches to non-violent communication, embodiment, somatic work and trauma-informed practices.
Rory Pilgrim (1988, Briston, U.K.) is an artist based in London whose practice—which encompasses songwriting, composition, film, music video, text, drawing and live performance—explores social engagement through personal narratives. Pilgrim’s multi-faceted art projects depart from and evolve through the artist’s intense and ongoing collaborations with individuals and groups embedded in specific social constellations. These relationships are catalysts for visual, performative and musical artworks which stand as intimate examinations of how communities form, how people come together, speak, listen, and strive for societal change.
Simnikiwe Buhlungu & Kabelo Malatsie
Thursday 1st December, 13:30—15:00
Artist Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Kunsthalle Bern director Kabelo Malatsie discuss the sonic logic and conceptual underpinnings of Buhlungu’s Kunsthalle Bern exhibition, *dissonated underings [hic!], after-happenings and khuayarings (sithi “ahhhh!”), histories and traditions of Gospel music and the art and life of Gerard Sekoto.
Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s (1995, Johannesburg, South Africa) artworks investigate the production and dissemination of knowledge. Her installations—which often include instruments activated by the presence of people—are conceived of as situations of a specific exchange: a shared socio-historical encounter in which adlibs, interruptions, delays and echoes symphonically articulate ways we come to know.
Kabelo Malatsi (1987, Mphakane, South Africa), Director of Kunsthalle Bern, is a curator whose work has examined how the underground and the non-linear operate as unique forms of knowledge which, though not always visible, permeate artistic thought and production.
Jasper Marsalis
Thursday 1st December, 15:15—16:45
Jasper Marsalis (1995, Los Angeles, CA, US) is an artist and musician from Los Angeles who, in addition to his visual art practice—working across painting, sculpture and text—is responsible for Slauson Malone 1, a performance piece exploring the possible intersections of popular music and performance art. In this artist talk, Masalis discusses how both his visual and musical practices elaborate a parallel between the space of painting and a performer on stage, both of which entail an experience of being consumed by audiences.
Terre Thaemlitz
Thursday 1st December, 20:30—21:45
Terre Thaemlitz (1968, US, a.k.a DJ Sprinkles, G.R.R.L, K-S.H.E), is an award winning multimedia producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label. Her work combines a critical look at identity politics - including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race - with an ongoing analysis of the socio-economics of commercial media production. He has released over 15 solo albums, as well as numerous 12-inch singles and video works. Her writings on music and culture have been published internationally in a number of books, academic journals and magazines. As a speaker and educator on issues of non-essentialist Transgenderism and Queerness, Thaemlitz has lectured throughout Europe and Japan. As of January, 2001, he resides in Japan. In advance of their contribution, she shares the following materials:
- We Are Not Welcome Here, An address for "Charming for the Revolution: A Congress for Gender Talents and Wildness," Tate Modern, February 2, 2013
- Taking Stock in Our Pride, from “Love For Sale” by Terre Thaemlitz, 1999
- What is Between is Missing, from Comp x Comp by Terre Thaemlitz, 1998/2019
- The Laurence Rassel Show, an electroacoustic radio drama about feminist anonymity, transgendered authorship, 2007
- A text about keeping works offline
- An index of writings
- A list of interviews
Laurin Huber & Volker Pantenburg
Friday 2nd December, 11:00—12:30
Laurin Huber & Volker Pantenburg: Harun Farocki, freier Mitarbeiter: Working For and Against Public Broadcasting in the Mid-1970s.
This talk on the life and work of German filmmaker and author Harun Farocki (1944–2014) focuses on the artist’s working practice during the mid-1970s. It examines the two films, two texts and one one radio play that Farocki produced between 1975-76. Laurin Huber and Volker Pantenburg discuss Farocki’s unique working method, the so-called “Verbund” (compound) system, and address forms of institutional critique in his work, in relation to the ambiguous relationship he maintained with public broadcasting companies such as the Cologne-based Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), and his attempt to initiate a collectively organised institute for documentary image production.
Works and texts:
Laurin Huber is a musician and label curator based in Zürich as well as a student at the Master’s program “SWISS CINEMA NETWORK” offered by the Universities of Zürich and Lausanne. Huber’s academic research interests include documentary and (anti-)ethnographic practices, the field of non-theatrical film of the 1940s and beyond and intersections of decolonial theory and film.
Volker Pantenburg is professor of Film Studies at the University of Zürich. He has published widely on essayistic film and video practices, experimental cinema, and contemporary moving image installations. Recent book publications include Aggregatzustände bewegter Bilder (2022), Matthias Rajmann: Back and Forth. Researching In Comparison (editor,, 2021) as well as Handbuch Filmanalyse (co-editor, 2020). In 2015, Pantenburg co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut, a non-profit organisation designed as a platform for researching Farocki’s visual and discursive practice and supporting new projects that engage with the past, present and the future of image cultures.
Gianmaria Andreetta & Angharad Williams
Friday 2nd December, 13:30—15:00
Through various projects, both commissioned and self initiated, curator Gianmaria Andreetta and artist Angharad Williams have collaborated closely and sustainably as they develop new work connected to writing, exhibition making, sculpture, performance and painting. This has enabled them to inhabit new spaces, generate different responses to the labour of artistic production and develop new modes of coming together . Their conversation draws on projects spanning almost a decade to discuss the nature of their collaboration, across different formats and outputs.
Angharad Williams’ (Ynys Môn, Wales) multifaceted art practice—painting, drawing, writing, sculpture, installation, film and performance—often attends to the languages, forms, images and materials that, hidden in plain sight, function as projective screens or filters for our most subconscious desires, drives and anxieties. In her artworks and exhibitions, concealed prejudices, judgements, securities and instincts for self preservation are revealed through the most quotidian and pervasive materials and languages. Recently, her work has been presented at Francis Irv, New York, 2022; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; MOSTYN, Llandudno (both 2022); Kevin Space, Vienna (2021); Schiefe Zähne, Berlin (2020); Haus Zur Liebe, Schaffhausen (2019). Performances, and group projects have taken place at Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2022); FriArt, Fribourg (2021); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Stadtgalerie Bern, Bern; Kunstverein Munich, Munich (all 2020); ICA, London; No Bounds Festival, Sheffield (both 2019). Since 2020, Angharad has been a guest teacher at UdK, Berlin with the Class of Prof. Josephine Pryde. Williams will publish their first book with After8 books in December.
Gianmaria Andreetta (Lugano, Switzerland) is a curator and educator living in Berlin. He is curator at The Wig (Berlin, DE), an exhibition space he runs with artists Angharad Williams and Richards Sides. In 2016, he co-founded the artist cooperative HTSU (Amsterdam, NL) where he commissioned new works by artists and writers including Ima-Abasi Okon, Gil Leung, Sophie Collins and Huw Lemmey. Since 2018, he has been a guest teacher at the CCC Research Master at the HEAD (Geneva, CH), and held a teaching position at the MA Fine Arts at the ZHdK (Zurich, CH). Recent curatorial projects include Ingo Swann: Being a faggot-spaceman I am awesome, Stadgalerie Bern, 2022; Drive Language Crazy, The Wig, 2022, The Wig, Bonner Kunstverein, and SECOND, Fri Art Kunsthalle Fribourg, 2021. He is editor of a forthcoming catalogue of the eponymous exhibition Paradis, curated by the artist Marie Angeletti in Marseille.
Richard Sides & Steven Warwick
Friday 2nd December, 15:15—16:45
Questioning each other about their respective practices and drawing on a range of pop cultural, cinematic and musical references, artists Richard Sides and Steven Warwick discuss navigating through language and affect in order to construct meaning, meaninglessness, narrative and rhetoric.
Richard Sides is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Berlin. His works often find form as assemblages of found matter, ad hoc models and layers of cultural detritus—both digital and physical—while his exhibitions manifest as environments that refer to the site of the exhibition as an obstruction. From one perspective the sampled, stitched and collaged methods he deploys demonstrates how affect, meaning and opinion are generated by image and sound. They also create a critical distance between the artwork and the expectation that we, the audience, might have of art to deliver a clear, critical point of view. Sides’ work has been exhibited at Kunstverein Braunschweig; Kunsthalle Winterthur; Frieze Art Fair New York; C-LAB, Taipei, Taiwan; Bonner Kunstverein; Kunstverein Hannover; Bergen Kunsthall and Swiss Institute, New York.
Steven Warwick is an artist, musician and author based in Berlin. He constructs narratives and situations across different media such as performance, plays, films, music, writing and sculptural / theatrical installations He has exhibited work at Schinkel Pavillon Berlin; Reading International; Zürich Moves!; ICA London; Steierischer Herbst Austria; SMK Copenhagen; Klosterruine Berlin; Cleopatra’s NYC; and Balice Hertling NYC. As a musician has performed multi-hour club sets at venues including Berghain Issue Project Room, Trouw Amsterdam, and festivals including Unsound Krakow, Mutek Mexico, Novas Frequencias Brazil and the London Contemporary Music Festival. His audio works include the albums MOI (PAN, 2019) and Nadir (PAN, 2016) and the solo project ‘Heatsick’ (2011-2013). His writing and criticism has appeared in Texte Zur Kunst, Urbanomic, Artforum and Electronic Beats and his recent books include Notes on Evil (Floating Opera Press, 2022) and Fear Indexing the X Files (Primary Information, 2017, co-authored with Nora Khan).
Jalalu Kalvert Nelson
Friday 2nd December, 17:00—18:30
In this talk, Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson shares stories from his five decade career as an artist, writer, musician and composer. He discusses his experiences as a student of Iannis Xenakis, his compositional work for ensembles including the Kronos Quartet, the ASKO/Schoenberg Ensemble, the Brooklyn Philharmonia and the Oklahoma Symphony, and his experiences with Ornette Coleman, Duke Ellington, Ralph Ellison, and Morton Feldman, as well as his visual and literary work.
Afterparty:
Friday 2nd December 21:00–00:00
21:00—22:00: Jalalu Kalvert Nelson, Xaver Rüegg, Anna Eichenberger
22:00—23:00: Slauson Malone 1
Under the moniker Slauson Malone, Jasper Marsalis released three albums between 2019 and 2022: A Quiet Farwell, 2016–2018 (Crater Speak), 2019; Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Crater Speak); 2020 and for Star (Crater Speak), 2022. Lyrically, acoustically and formally, these records—the first of which is a pointed reflection on Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 book “Scenes of Subjection”—offer acute interrogations of contemporary Black political thought, consciousness, and existence.
23:00—00:00: Therapy Girls
Infamous finsta punk band Therapy Girls are made up of Romeo Kardar Tehran, Sila Latz and Aase Nielsen. For over a decade the three members have had undeniable influence on the popular and unpopular currents in the Scandinavian music and art scenes. An institution in their own right, these shit core meme thieves are now the soundtrack to your worn and torn cheap monday jeans.
