Talks
Curator Talk: Diedrich Diederichsen
March 9, 2019
2:00PM
Participants: Diedrich Diedrichsen, Anselm Franke
Or Gallery will host a curator talk and conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen. He will address the polyphonic curatorial and publication model used in his and curator Anselm Franke’s multi-sited exhibition and publication project, Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology, in terms of possible critical strategies of cultural and political redress and (self-)reflexivity.
Since 2017, Diederichsen and Franke have collaborated as artistic directors on Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology. This multiplatform project has so far been presented in key locations for Fichte’s work: Lisbon, Portugal; Rio de Janeiro and Salvador de Bahia, Brazil; Santiago, Chile; Dakar, Senegal; and New York, USA.
In fall 2019, the final iteration will open in Berlin at the HKW (House of World Cultures). Click here for project page and link to web journal.
Following the talk, Or Gallery will launch its fundraising subscription edition, Select//Or mixtapes with Diederichsen, who generously guest-DJed one of the 12 mixes.
Participant Bios
Hubert Fichte
Hubert Fichte (1935-1986) was a German experimental poet, critic and author who travelled constantly as part of a process of accessing and developing an intensively engaged postcolonial discourse in order to complicate prescribed ethnographic and literary methodologies and to foster a new postcolonial world literature and world art. Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology takes up the author’s 24 novel-cycle, Die ‘Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (The History of Sensitivity), which Fichte worked on from the early 1970s until his death in 1986. Between 1987 and 2006, seventeen of these volumes, some fragmentary, were published, which engendered a renewed critical reception in the German-speaking world. As part of Love and Ethnology, several of these novels have been translated to initiate further discourse in the regions and cities that were the focus of Fichte’s study and travel.
Diedrich Diederichsen
Diedrich Diederichsen (b. 1957, Hamburg, Germany) is a writer, editor, curator and university professor based in Berlin and Vienna. Past appointments as a guest professor include: Stuttgart (Merz-Academy1992-98), Pasadena (Art Center 93-95, 97, 01), Munich (Akademie der Bildenden Künste, 95/96), Weimar (Bauhaus-Universität, 97), Los Angeles (USC, 07, 09) and the Städelschule Frankfurt (92). From 1998 to 2007 he was Professor for Aesthetic Theory/Cultural Studies at Merz-Akademie, Stuttgart.
In 2006 he was appointed Professor for Theory, Practice, and Communication of Contemporary Art at the Institute for Art History & Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Art, Vienna. His writing has appeared in Texte zur Kunst, Spex, Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung amongst others. Since 1992, he has curated exhibitions in Zürich, Stuttgart, Los Angeles, Berlin, Graz and elsewhere.