IAS Turbulence: Anselm Franke on 'Turbulence in the Museum'

In this talk, Anselm Franke will present some of his recent work on the exhibition and its theory-cum-practice. Against the backdrop of the recent “Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present ca. 1930” (HKW, 2018, co-curated with Tom Holert), he will discuss the notion of the “S/O Function” or “subobjective function” used by critique Carl Einstein in his (mostly unpublished) work of the 1930. Einstein uses the concept of “function” as a materialist, a-causal formula descriptive of the crisis-ridden remaking of subject and object alike in the hallucinatory encounter with art. What is the potential of this formula to rethink the relation between positivist reification and experiential turbulence within exhibitions? Of seizure and animation in objects and beholder alike? 

Bio

Anselm Franke has been Head of Visual Arts and Film at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) since 2013. There, he initiated and curated the exhibitions Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017/18), 2 or 3 Tigers (2017), Nervous Systems (2016), Ape Culture (2015), Forensis (2014), The Whole Earth and After Year Zero (both 2013). He previously worked as a curator at KW Berlin and as director of the Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp. In 2005 he and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus founded the Forum Expanded for the Berlin International Film Festival of which he has been co-curator since. He was the chief curator of the Taipei Biennial in 2012 and of the Shanghai Biennale in 2014. His exhibition project Animism was shown from 2009 until 2014 in collaboration with various partners in Antwerp, Berne, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Shenzhen, Seoul and Beirut. Franke received his doctorate from Goldsmiths College, London.