"During the first session in 2017, Lisa Glauer is presenting her project “Striplandings”, which deals with the biopolitical facets of the border between San Diego and Tijuana. She will further dive into these topics in conversation with her guests Hillary Mushkin und Rajkamal Kahlon.
By hosting the series of events “Salon für Ästhetische Experimente”, the Graduate School is offering its international fellows, Alumni as well as all other protagonists of the Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences (BAS) a platform for creative ventures, interventions as well as speculative artistic activites. The diversely formatted evenings afford the opportunity to present, discuss and question artistic processes, new modus operandi, research questions and current projects in a public context. Within this framework, the presentation of completed works is ever subordinate to the sketching of postgradual modus operandi." =============
Lisa Glauer will introduce the salon by showing 2 short filmclips form the starting point and current development of her project Strip Landings. She is developing animated sequences based on drawings "covering" gestures excerpted from military filmclips in human border milk. These show physical movements and posturing associated with traditional nationalist masculinity. In the artistic analysis of the filmclips the artists is permitting herself to feel seduced and drawn in by the affective power of these propaganda images in order to hopefully arrive at a different, deeper and more personal type of visual artistic critique. The next steps will be to develop these movements in connection to a workshop she initiated with choreographer Mikel Aristegui taking place at Institute for Art in Context. ================
Hillary Mushkin will present her project Incendiary Traces, an experimental art, research, and media initiative focused on the politics of landscape, visualization, and national security. To perform research, teams of artists, architects and scholars observe and draw at military bases, training grounds, engineering offices and surveillance control rooms where global military and paramilitary leaders develop and use specialized landscape visualization practices. The initiative situates civilian drawing and observation as collective visual practices parallel to the military's, while highlighting human subjectivity, gesture and interpretation.
Hillary Mushkin is a visual artist and research professor of art and design at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She started Incendiary Traces in 2011 to reverse-engineer the politics of landscape visualization. The project is currently the subject of an exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art running concurrently with an exhibition of Goya’s Disaster’s of War. Mushkin’s essay on the project and Mexico City’s massive Ciudad Segura surveillance system will be included in the forthcoming book Control Rooms: Nodes in the Networked City edited by Simon Marvin and Andrés Luque-Ayala, with chapters contributed by Bruno Latour and Beatrice Colomina. Incendiary Traces will also be included in an exhibition at nGbK gallery in Berlin this fall.
Rajkamal Kahlon is an American artist and educator. Kahlon's drawings, paintings and performative installations use overlapping strategies of critical aesthetics and absurdist humor to interrupt the pedagogical function of texts and images found within historical and contemporary colonial archives. As Artist-in-Residence at the American Civil Liberties Union, Kahlon has been interviewing lawyers in the Human Rights and National Security Projects, and researching her ongoing project, Did You Kiss the Dead Body?, which centers on US military autopsy reports of Iraqi and Afghan men who have been killed in U.S. detention facilities since 9/11.
Kahlon's work has been exhibited in museums and foundations in North America, Europe and Asia, including the 2012 Taipei Biennial, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Wilhelm Hack Museum, NGBK, Queens Museum of Art, Artists' Space, White Box and Apex Art. Kahlon is a recent recipient of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Award, Lambent Project Grant and a Stiftung Kunstfonds Arbeitstipendium. Kahlon is a past recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award and a Lambent Fellowship. In 2012, she was Artist-in-Residence with the Goethe Institute in Amsterdam, where she researched colonial photographic archives for her ongoing project Double Take.