Talks and Readings / Vis Art / 04-05 December 2019

INES SCHABER: THE WORKHOUSE

Public Talk and Workshop

Public Talk: 6–7.30 pm on 4 December 2019
Venue: Visual Artists Ireland Head Offices
Windmill View House, 4 Oliver Bond Street, The Liberties, Dublin 8
The event is free but booking is essential. Register here.

Workshop with Ines Schaber and Lívia Páldi
4–7 pm on 5 December
Venue: Studio 6, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios
5 – 9 Temple Bar,Dublin 2, D02 AC84, Ireland
The event is free but booking is essential. Register here.

In recent decades, artists, photographers, curators, and critics have caught archive fever, and archives and their processes have often come to dominate discussions in and around photography. This has particular consequences for documentary and artistic practices. In response, Ines Schaber has conducted a series of works that begin with the assumption that an archive is not only a place of storage, but has become a place of production, where our relation to the past is materialised, and where our present writes itself into the future.

In her work, Schaber has examined a set of questions that underlie archival practices. The projects, case studies, writings, and artistic works she has produced seek to trace new or alternate archival practices. The aim of the work has not been to find or create another institutional archive per se, but to develop a practice in which the set of problems that are produced is part of the process we engage in when encountering archives.

Schaber’s presentation in Dublin will focus on The Workhouse (Breitenau Room), a project that was produced by curator Lívia Páldi in the context of dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012, and conducted in collaboration with sociologist Avery F. Gordon. The piece engages with the history of the former monastery, workhouse, concentration camp, Gestapo camp, and girls’ reformatory of Breitenau, a small village in the vicinity of Kassel, Germany. Over time, Breitenau has confined many people considered extraneous and disposable, subjecting them to a regime of punishment and correction. Consisting of photographs, a curtain, text, and audio files, The Workhouse (Breitenau Room) presents glimpses of ‘fugitive knowledge’ that emerges in and around the site. This knowledge, what Foucault named ‘subjugated knowledge’, contains two aspects: repressed by official knowledge on the one hand; and marginalised or discredited on the other. Searching for traces of this contested knowledge, that might be present in any archive, Gordon and Schaber suggest a different reading of a place like Breitenau.

The Workhouse is also the name for a series of activities and projects (called ‘rooms’) that were organised by Ines Schaber and Avery F. Gordon between 2010 and 2012. Overall, The Workhouse’s activities are broadly concerned with the cultivation of ways of living and working that are independent of, autonomous of, outside of, in opposition to, as an alternative to, or, alongside of but not entirely inside of, the dominant terms of social order. The traditional workhouses, first developed in the late 16th century and reaching their peak in the 19th century, were prisons where (predominantly poor) people, who refused to work or stay put or behave like ‘good’ workers and obedient social subjects, were confined, punished, and corrected. By contrast, the Workhouse activities proposed by Schaber and Gordon were designed to provide a hospitable space for the critical and imaginative thinking/practices of ‘bad’ workers, idlers, strikers, collaborators, runaways, and other individuals who do not want and need conventional ‘correction’ or ‘re-education’.

The Workhouse (Breitenau Room), the second iteration of the series, was installed at dOCUMENTA (13) in the Handwerkskammer (Chamber of Crafts) in Kassel. Parts of it now permanently reside at the Gedenkstaette Breitenau, a memorial, study centre and archives in Guxhagen which engages with the site’s complex history of violence, exclusion and discrimination. The third iteration was presented as a 3-day workshop led by Gordon and Schaber and organised by Pip Day and el instituto for Spatial Practices in Revolution in 2011 in Mexico City.

The workshop will consist of three parts: a general introduction in which participants will introduce themselves and pose questions in relation to archives and archiving; a collaborative discussion of three texts that relate to the notion of subjugated knowledges;* and a conversation in which Lívia Páldi and Ines Schaber will address artworks such as The Workhouse, collaborative work, the challenging exchange between institutional and artistic research and different types of archives and records management, as well as the questions and problems faced by archival/research-based practices today.

*Texts will be provided for participants and should be read in advance if possible.

For more information and availability of texts please contact Lívia Páldi at livia@projectartscentre.ie

 

 

Credits

Image:
The Workhouse wall (detail)
Photo and courtesy Ines Schaber

Biographies

Ines Schaber is an artist and writer based in Berlin and Los Angeles, and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts in the program of Photography and Media. Her artistic work addresses the complexity of image-making by investigating the hidden layers of historical evidence. Since 2004 she has been engaged in the working archive, a series of case studies, texts, and artistic works through which she examines and tests notions of the archive. Usually triggered by a photographic record, her often collaborative projects explore the construction of memory and how new readings are generated over time. Often constructed as mixed-media environments, her installations are designed to offer different positions from which an image can be viewed and analysed as visual and social documents. Recently, she published a series of five books named Notes on Archives (published by Archive Books and Camera Austria Graz).

Ines Schaber studied Fine Art at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin, architectural theory at Princeton University as a DAAD fellow, and received her Ph.D. from the Visual Cultures/Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her dissertation entitled, Obtuse, Flitting by and Nevertheless There – Image Archives in Practice, examined a set of questions that underlie archival photographic practices, seeking to trace new or alternate modes of archival practice, in order to meet contemporary needs and methods of knowledge production.
Schaber has taught at many European art schools and also at CalArts as visiting faculty for the Program in Photography and Media in 2014/15 before joining its core faculty.

Her work has been been shown, among other places, at: dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin; Camera Austria / Steirischer Herbst, Graz; Graham Foundation, Chicago (with Mathias Heyden); 6. Werkleitz Biennale; Brussels Biennial; Belfast Exposed; nGbK Berlin; Centre d’art Passerelle, Brest; Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao; Bundeskunsthalle Bonn; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Schaber participated in the Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice, Arsenal–Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V., Berlin. Her more recent shows include When the Present is History, depo, Istanbul; Prisoners of Love, Mohammad and Mahera Abu Ghazaleh Foundation, Amman; Protest!, Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (Oder) and MOS Art Center Gorzów Wielkopolski, Gorzow (all in 2019) and a solo exhibition Notes on Archives, Camera Austria / Steirischer Herbst, Graz (2018).

Schaber has contributed to numerous publications and exhibition catalogues, including: Topos Raum – Die Aktualität des Raumes in den Künsten der Gegenwart (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 2005) with the architect Jörg Stollmann; No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Occurs at Night (Cologne: Walther König, 2006); Who says concrete doesn’t burn, have you tried?, with Mathias Heyden (Berlin: b_books, 2008); Nancy Holt: Sightlines (Los Angeles: California University Press, 2010); and, with Avery Gordon, The Workhouse–Breitenau Room (Cologne: Walther König, 2014).

In 2010, Schaber joined the art action group Haben und Brauchen [‘to have and to need’], which addressed the position of the visual arts in relation to economy and funding as well as the role it played in cultural advertisement of the city. She is also a co-founder of the Berlin Journals–On the History and Present State of the City (www.berlinerhefte.de) with Valeria Fahrenkrog, Joerg Franzbecker, Erik Göngrich, Heimo Lattner, Katja Reichard and Florian Wüst.

Born in Budapest, Lívia Páldi is the Curator of Visual Arts at Project Arts Centre in Dublin. Previously she was director of BAC – Baltic art Center, Visby between 2012 and 2015 and curator chief curator of the Műcsarnok / Kunsthalle Budapest between 2007 and 2011. She has organised talks, discussions, workshops and numerous exhibitions and edited several books and exhibition catalogues. Páldi was one of the curatorial agents of dOCUMENTA (13). During 2016 she was member of the OFF-Biennale Budapest curatorial board. She lives and works in Dublin.

 

Funding

The events are supported by Visual Artists Ireland and presented as part of VAI’s preparations for their 2020 40th Anniversary Lifelong Learning Programme.

Project Arts Centre is proud to be supported by the Arts Council Ireland and Dublin City Council.

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