MG+MSUM

EXHIBITION | Gal Kirn and Niloufar Tajeri | Thinking Monument to (Sub)Urban Riot
03 November 2016 — 27 November 2016
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Photo: "Work in progress: monument to riots"; Petrova Gora, Vojin Bakić, 1981; Conical Intersect, Gordon Matta-Clark, 1975

 

»Thinking Monument to (Sub)Urban Riot« is a project initiated by Gal Kirn and Niloufar Tajeri, which focuses on the phenomenon of (sub)urban riots in the West, such as those that took place in London, Los Angeles and Paris in recent decades. Even if these riots had a short durability, they rendered visible major aspects of everyday urban life: economic deprivation, political exclusion, forms of racism, and police violence. Despite their importance of making visible the marginalized groups and extremely negative structural dynamics, they simultaneously triggered a brutal police repression, media demonization and criminalization. Thus, before riots could even become a point of departure for a broader social discourse addressing the underlying issues, they dissappear, or are remembered negatively. This is why the project wants to re-frame and re-articulate the demonized image and precarious existence of riots not only by an understanding of their deeper causes, but also by connecting them to the field of monumental practices. Is there any way to commemorate riots? By taking a closer look at a number of concepts of monumental and memorial strategies of the twentieth century that attempted to either narrate or represent new political topics and groups that were »invisible« or marginalized, the aesthetics of the monument becomes less »monumental,« less stable, less controlled. Instead it turns plural, precarious, participatory: Rather than thinking about the monument as a core to the formation of »collective memory,« which has a sovereign control over the past, this project invites the participants to consider a series of monumental strategies to narrate, represent, and work through something as precarious as the riot: a dissensual monument to dissent. Project started at the Academie Schloss Solitude early 2016 and has been followed by a series of presentations and workshops that have initiated a "call for a monument to (sub)urban riots".

 

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Gal Kirn is currently an affiliated fellow at ICI-Berlin, and holds a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Nova Gorica (Slovenia). In his hometown Ljubljana he was a member of the collective Workers'-Punks' University (2003–2008), later on he was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (2008–2009), a research fellow at Institute of Cultural Inquiry Berlin (2010-2012), a fellow at Akademie Solitude, and a postdoctoral fellow of the Humboldt Foundation in Berlin (2013–2016). He is a co-editor of the books Encountering Althusser (Bloomsbury, 2012, with Peter Thomas, Sara Farris and Katja Diefenbach) and Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and its Transgressive Moments (JvE Academie, 2012, with Dubravka Sekulić and Žiga Testen). His book Partisan Ruptures and Contradictions of Market Socialism in Yugoslavia was published at Sophia (in Slovene).

 

Niloufar Tajeri teaches at the Chair of Architectural Design, Institute of Architectural Design, Art and Theory (EKuT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. She is currently working on her dissertation at the Chair of Architectural Theory and is a fellow in the architecture section of the Academy Schloss Solitude. She worked as an editor and project manager for the Berlin based architecture magazine ARCH+ (2013), as well as for the Amsterdam based Volume Magazine (2007–2008). She carried out several projects in the realm of publishing and exhibition design in collaboration with the graphic design agency onlab (2010–2015). From 2008 to 2009, she worked as project assistant on several international cultural projects at the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority. During her studies at the University of Karlsruhe, she worked as an architect and planner with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Herat and Kabul, Afghanistan.