“F(r)ictions of Art” will be the topic of the final conference of the InterArt interdisciplinary doctoral program. The conference will be hosted by InterArt’s home institution, the Freie Universität Berlin, in collaboration with the partner institutions that have supported the program over its nine-year existence: the Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies and Goldsmiths College of the University of London. The dual notion of f(r)iction in the arts imaginatively captures the central concerns of this research framework, which included works on the various interconnections between the different genres, ideas, and traditions of art as well as the connections between art and other social fields.

Art evolves out of frictions between different practices, materials, and ideas, between capacities, constraints, and freedoms. What we perceive, claim, or reject as art through such frictions is also always a kind of fiction—a fiction of art that motivates and legitimizes institutional structures and individual and collective actions. Art can be seen as fiction as it transgresses and expands social realities. But art can also be understood as fiction because the ideas we have about the status, the possible effects, and potential reach of art are historical fictions about the world of art. By invoking the notion of f(r)iction, we would like to invite contributions on the relationship between fictions and frictions of art and, in particular, on the productive moments in which art’s fictions are produced through frictions. Our point of departure is not an emphasis on the boundaries between distinct fields, or on their transgression and permeability. Rather, we want to focus on the current processes through which distinctions between art and non-art, and between different arts, become visible and manifest—moments of friction that lead to particular fictions of art. Friction can be seen as a metaphor or as an aesthetic experience based on the f(r)ictional interaction between different entities—entities which do not necessarily merge or dissolve through their encounter but rather define themselves against each other and unleash new dynamics and synergies through the interactions between, for example, art and science, art and politics, or art and law.

frictions(at)zedat.fu-berlin.de

Detailed Program

THURSDAY 25. JUNE

 

14:00 Opening:

Erika Fischer-Lichte (Freie Universität Berlin)

 

14:45 – 15:30 Keynote

Christoph Wulf (Freie Universität Berlin): IMAGES OF THE HUMAN BEING. IMAGINARY AND PERFORMATIVE BASICS OF CULTURE

 

15:30 – 16:00 Coffee

 

16:00 – 16:45 Keynote

Christoph Lindner (Universit y of Amsterdam): TRANSNATIONAL RUIN AESTHETICS: DETROIT-LONDON-AMSTERDAM

 

16:45 – 18:00 Panel I: Media Interferences

 

Julie Gaillard (InterArt, Freie Universität Berlin / Emory Universit y): Fictional cities, real networks. F(r)iction of spaces in the application FlashInvaders

 

Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld (University of Copenhagen): Leap into Colour … Notes for a Video-Cartography

 

Comment: Christoph Lindner

 

18:30 Keynote

W.J.T. Mitchell (University of Chicago): SALVAGING ISRAEL / PALESTINE

 

19:30 Reception

 

 

FRIDAY 26. JUNE

 

10:00 – 10:45 Keynote

Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmiths , Universit y of London): ART PRACTICE AS FICTIONING (OR MYTH-SCIENCE)

 

10:45 – 11:15 Coffee

 

11:15 – 13:00 Panel II: Art & Speculation

 

Emily Rosamond (Goldsmiths, Universit y of London): All Data is Credit Data: Art and Character in the Age of Fintech

 

Tina Turnheim (InterArt , Freie Universität Berlin): It’s (still) about time: Star-commodities, capitalist retroactivity and (pre-)scripted future(s)

 

Runa Johannessen (University of Copenhagen): Yet Unborn Realities: Speculative Art and Cunning Spatial Practice in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

 

Comment: Simon O’Sullivan

 

13:00 – 14:15 Lunch

 

14:15 – 15:00 Keynote

Simon Sheikh (Goldsmiths, University of London): THE INSTITUTING OF ART BETWEEN FICTION AND MYTH: A PROPOSITION

 

15:00 – 16:15 Panel III: Anachronistic F(r)ictions

 

Maria Iñigo Clavo (Universit y of São Paulo / University of the Arts London / FAPESP): What happens when you rub up a work of contemporary art against one of the colonial era, or against an ethnographic artifact?

 

Guido Santandrea (Goldsmiths , University of London): F(r)ictions, anachronisms and the politics of visibility

 

Comment: Simon Sheikh

 

16:15 – 16:45 Coffee

 

16:45 – 18:00 Panel IV: Documenting Fictions

 

Daniela Hahn (Freie Universität Berlin): Disassembling Documentary Art. Allan Sekula’s Concept of “Critical Realism“

 

Sophie Hardach (Goldsmiths , Universit y of London): Historical F(r)iction: Should Novelists be Historians? The Case of Emil Nolde and Siegfried Lenz

 

Comment: Peter Osborne

 

18:00 Keynote

Peter Osborne (Kingston University London): IS IT INTERESTING?

 

 

SATURDAY 27 JUNE

 

10:00 – 10:45 Keynote

Lydia Goehr (Columbia University): MUSIC DE-TUNED AND WORKS DIS-COMPOSED

 

10:45 – 12:30 Panel V: Intermediality

 

Andrew Campbell (University of Strathclyde):Intertextual Friction / The Fiction of Now: W.H. Auden, Hauntology and the BFI Archive

 

Martin Andris (InterArt , Freie Universität Berlin): „con espressione e semplice“. Versatility and Neue Sachlichkeit in Music

 

Markus Rautzenberg (MECS, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg): Cultivating Images. Roland Barthes and Andrej Tarkovsky on Transmedial Iconicity

 

Comment: Lydia Goehr

 

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch

 

13:30 – 14:45 Panel VI: The Politics of Fiction

 

Frauke Surmann (InterArt, Freie Universität Berlin): Performing Communities – F(r)ictions of the Political between Invention and Production

 

Theo Reeves-Evison (Goldsmiths, University of London): Deception and Fiction as Forms of World-Making in Contemporary Art

 

Comment: Frederik Tygstrup

 

14:45 –15:15 Coffee

 

15:15 – 16:00 Keynote

Frederik Tygstrup (Universit y of Copenhagen): SPECULATION AND THE END OF FICTION

A Conference organized by the International Research Training Group 'InterArt'.

 

Venue:

 

Freie Universität Berlin

Seminarzentrum, Silberlaube

Habelschwerdter Allee 45

14195 Berlin-Dahlem

 

U3: Dahlem Dorf or Thielplatz

Bus 110 or M11: Hittorfstraße

 

This conference is open tot he public and free of charge.