Panel Discussion: Terms and Conditions: Colonial legacies, artistic futures, June 25, 2024, Berlin Artistic Research Programme

© Forensis/Forensic Architecture 2023.

On Tuesday, June 25, at 7 p.m. the Berlin Artistic Research Programme will host “Colonial legacies, artistic futures” at Schönleinstraße 5, Berlin-Kreuzberg, as part of the artistic research project “Terms and Conditions. The Legal Form of Images”: A broad spectrum of artistic practices has set itself the goal of investigating the long-term effects of colonial jurisdictions. At the same time, the “terms & conditions” under which work is carried out in the artistic field inevitably also entail elements of colonialist (legal) conditions. What currently characterizes methodological, artistic and institutional developments and – above all – the boundaries that need to be overcome in order to deal with such work?

The evening will begin with a live sound intervention by Nguyễn + Transitory (Nguyễn Baly and Tara Transitory, Fellows 2022/23) referencing their research work in Thailand and Vietnam titled yue|cham-cam, followed by a conversation including the artist and theorist Tiara Roxanne, the legal scholar Gwinyai Machona, who specializes in (colonial) legal history, and Mark Mushiva, researcher at the artistic investigative agency Forensis. The event is co-organised and moderated by Christoffer Horlitz, curator and human rights researcher.

Gwinyai Machona is a researcher at the law faculty of Humboldt University Berlin. He studied Law in London and Berlin and Historical Studies at Oxford. His research focuses on the entanglements between colonialism and German constitutional and administrative law in the 19th century. Gwinyai Machona also works in the field of (colonial) provenance as well as restitution and law in museum contexts.

Tiara Roxanne is a Purhépecha  Mestiza scholar and artist based in Berlin. Dr. Roxanne’s work is dedicated to rethinking the ethics of AI through an anti-colonial and cyberfeminist lens. As a performance artist and practitioner, they work between the digital and the material using textile.Tiara has presented at Images Festival (Toronto), Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center (NY), Trinity Square Video (Toronto),  European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), among others.

Mark Mushiva is a Berlin-based Namibian multidisciplinary technologist and artist whose work and music interrogate and recast the role of the cyborg as a key figure in contemporary radical black thought. Mushiva’s work incorporates novel technologies such as computer vision, sound synthesis, and robotics as tools for critical design and decolonial futuring. He holds a PhD in Human Computer Interaction (Pro-social Games) from the University of Trento, Italy and currently works as computational researcher at Forensic Architecture/Forensis.

Nguyễn + Transitory is composed of Nguyễn Baly and Tara Transitory. Their work crosses the disciplines of sound, performance, and installation. Working mainly with movement, synthesis and converting spaces into musical architectures, they attempt to approach noise, folk traditions and performativity through a less colonial lens – looking into how frequencies, the physicality of sounds and its incidental vibrations relate to cognitive memories, shared histories and catharsis. Their recent works include the performance »หยื้อ (yue)« (2024), »cham-cam« (2024), »Symphony Of Intimacies« (2022), the sound installation series »Topography Of Vulnerabilities #1-5« (2020-2022) and »Bird Bird, Touch Touch, Sing Sing«, an immersive site-specific installative sound performance which has been presented at CTM Festival, Berlin; Serralves Museum, Porto; Ultima Music Festival, Oslo; WORM, Rotterdam; Submerge Festival, Bristol; House of electronic Arts, Basel; and PACT Zollverein, Essen (all 2019) among others. Besides their artistic practice, they run their own mastering studio called Queer Ear Mastering.

“Terms and Conditions: Colonial legacies, artistic futures” is a cooperation project with the Berlin Artistic Research Programme.