Ha'atelier
ha'atelier - workshop for philosophy and art is an international platform for Jewish-Muslim and other cooperation in philosophy , science and art .
The workshop places a location-independent network of encyclopedic questions and topics in the room, which is embodied and documented concentrically in different metropolises around the world depending on the thematic perspective, optional occupation and location. ha'atelier operates in a nomadic structure, its “flying faculty” consists of an international network of scientists, writers and artists.
history
ha'atelier - workshop for philosophy and art was founded in 2001 by the philosopher and cultural scientist Almut Sh. Bruckstein founded with an international group of artists, scientists and writers in Berlin. The focus of the work is the public renaissance of Jewish and Islamic cosmopolitan traditions in the context of European and non-European culture, especially the fine arts.
Ha'atelier's public work so far has included:
- The organization of several international literary and artistic salons with prominent participants and guests.
- The organization of several thematic exhibitions, which at the same time saw themselves as the avant-garde of a philosophical workshop / madrasa in the museum.
- The premiere or re-performance of musical works in public places such as museums, theaters, etc. in the context of the visual arts, rabbinical literature or philosophy.
- The publication of two series of publications with a total of seven titles in two years, which so far have mainly shown work by contemporary Jewish cultural criticism.
- Placing a large advertisement No war! in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit on August 10, 2006 in cooperation with medico-international , which unites over 70 signatures from all over the world, especially from Israel, the Islamic countries of the Middle East , Europe and the USA against the war.
Encyclopedic subject areas
The following encyclopedic subject areas represent a new principle of order in the sciences and arts, across from the more classical faculties of the various universities and academies of the arts.
calligraphy
The topic of calligraphy focuses on the visual independence of writing as an art form, as a perception, as the autonomy of the pictorial. The series of workshops offer a kaleidoscope of artistic, aesthetic and philosophical approaches to the meaning of script , the typeface, the letter and the symbols against the background of Islamic and Jewish traditions. The series of workshops on this topic use selected exhibits, images and texts from various origins to show a liaison between the Jews and Muslims that has so far been neglected, which shows the genesis of European art history against the background of Byzantine and ecclesiastical theologies of the image and the icon as a representation of the divine present Christian church art from the ground up into question.
In this thematic area ha'atelier ties in with contemporary works in which scientists and poets, artists, curators, dancers and choreographers assume an autonomy of the pictorial in the phenomenon of writing itself, especially against the background of classical Jewish and Islamic theology.
Point and line
In this thematic area, the basic geometric configuration of point and line becomes the starting point for a phenomenological exploration of areas as diverse as Islamic building decor, architecture , mathematics and geometry , rhythm , music , metrics and poetry . The (political) question of the “merely ornamental” in Islamic art belongs to the horizon of this topic as well as questions of intensive and extensive infinity for Nikolaus von Kues (1401–1464), the importance of binary basic constellations for contemporary visual and musical arts or different tone and rhythm scales in European and non-European music.
Performative live representations of medieval and contemporary, Arabic and Middle Eastern music are a living part of this thematic area.
miniature
The topic of miniature explores the tension between criticism and affirmation of figurative representation against the background of visual and poetic imagination in the Islamic and Jewish world. Here goes ha'atelier of the miniature in Islamic art from (miniature from the Latin minium , Persian zinjifrah , cinnabar ), which flourished mainly in Persian and Ottoman tradition. The painterly migration of forms in hybrid adaptations to imagery from China and India are the subject of the workshop series, with ha'atelier tracing this migration of forms into the art, music and theater traditions of the 20th century. The secondary meaning miniature of minor , smaller , plays a constitutive role in the forms of representation of the workshop series.
polyphony
In the field of polyphony ha'atelier stages phenomena of musical and narrative polyphony. The workshops in this field work out intercultural lines of tradition between the musical, literary and religious traditions of antiquity and the Middle Ages, which in particular shape Europe and the Middle East to the present day. In mixed forms of performative and scientific workshops, ha'atelier asks how narrative and lyrical narrative threads between biblical, Hellenistic, Byzantine, rabbinical and Islamic traditions are negotiated and extend into modern times. What is the relationship between high literary culture and popular tradition? How do medieval narrative characters and musical lines appear in modern times?
The universal European, Jewish and Islamic scholarly traditions of the 19th century in their work on the sources of Judaism and Islam are a special focus of this topic. The performative events in this thematic area show original contemporary collages that emphasize the intercultural texture of classical musical, lyrical and theological compositions - often in the form of the processing of classical text, music or other work pieces.
Polis
The themed space Polis deals with questions of the (cultural) political coexistence of people in urban structures: drafts of urban design, mechanisms for integrating art into public spaces, the function of large metropolises and mega-cities in shaping a future agenda of projects that unite people and visions. The “big city” is the principle of integral diversity, Polis stands for the idea of touching many worlds in a narrow space, for the macrocosm in the microcosm , for the possibility of coexistence and coexistence of the diverse and different. In this sense, projects that apparently have nothing to do with the “(big) city” and rather focus on the coexistence of the diverse are an integral part of this thematic area.
East West
The topic East-West asks for the traces of the interrelationship between the “ Orient ” and the “ Occident ” in the performing arts, in literature and science. The works created here show the Orient on the one hand as a classic projection surface on which the West carries out its own political identity and on which it projects its repressed fantasies, ideal images and ideas of the “foreign”. “Orient motifs” in European art are evidence of this process. On the other hand, since the times of Abbasid Baghdad in the late 8th century , there has been a double cultural transfer between East and West, which has had a profound internal effect both in the East and in the West.
In the international series of workshops on this topic - some of which take place on the public stage - the criticism of Orientalism , which was formulated by Edward Said in the 1970s, is carried into various areas of the performing arts and contemporary research. Scientists and artists pursue the questions of criticism of Orientalism in the field of Islamic studies , literature , the visual and performing arts right up to the political rhetoric of modernity and the present . Questions of post-national and post-colonial identity are also the subject of this thematic area. Workshops in various metropolises within and outside Europe are being planned.
The naked enemy
Following on from the exhibition Islam in Cathedrals. Images of the anti-Christian in Islamic art with images and texts by Claudio Lange and the accompanying book Der nackte Feind. Anti-Islam in Romance Art (2004) asks this subject area about the complex history of the enemy image and the associated cultural, psychological and theoretical projections in its genesis inside and outside Europe. In particular, the hostile iconographies of Muslims and Jews are part of this topic. The question of the processes of violent appropriation and expropriation, collective branding, cultural contempt and the destruction of the other determine the materials of this workshop and colloquia series through all forms of art and literature.
The workshops deal with political theology , the history of enemy images, the instrumentalization of the visual and performing arts in the context of the rhetoric of war, media revolutions and media criticism .
Political utopias
The topic of political utopias includes projects and initiatives that place political counter-worlds, anticipations of peace and justice, the abolition of war and poverty as artistic or literary imperatives in public space. It shows resistance to violence and powerlessness in art, literature and philosophy, artistic or literary activism against racism , Islamophobia or anti-Semitism . The liaison of Jews and Muslims in resistance to the instrumentalization of their respective cultural areas in areas of military and violent conflict is one of the contents of this topic.
Eros
Under the topic of Eros , this workshop series works on artistic and philosophical materials that are used as building blocks for a future theory of touch, desire, the non-territorial order of things, the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, the subversion and subversion of collective boundaries, femininity, as well as the amalgam, the hybrid, the orgastic and the ecstatic.
In this workshop series, all sciences and arts are discussed.
Methods
The methodological core of ha'atelier's work is the tracing of the original connection between theoretical and artistic work, scientific and performative art forms. In doing so, ha'atelier shows innovative ways of fruitfully crossing boundaries between written and pictorial traditions and moves above all between the cultures of Europe and those of the Near Eastern and Islamic world .
Through its activities in various metropolises in the world in mixed forms of exhibitions, academic workshops, theater, film and other performance arts, informal colloquia, etc. ha'atelier combines heterotopic materials, art forms, people and cultural landscapes in the form of a variable kaleidoscope of encyclopedic questions.
ha'atelier includes the perspectives of the artists and their works in an original way in the process of finding knowledge. The “artist's studio” plays an essential role in this knowledge process. Depending on the location and topic - in the studio, in the museum, in the theater, the academy or in any other public space - the artists and scientists create a phenomenological order of things, which they continuously document through publications, videos, recordings, etc. In this way, an encyclopedic curriculum between different arts and sciences is created, which is updated in ongoing work on ha'atelier's thematic compass .
At the interface between the subjective perspective of the participating scientists and artists and the objective nature of the material, the text, the works of art, etc., unforeseen points of contact, connections and friction surfaces appear, which present themselves as ephemeral points of the thesis. Documenting the theoretical and artistic curriculum thus created is tantamount to drafting a phenomenological order of things that thinks both universal and particular, concrete and abstract, with reference to images and text.
network
Director
Almut Sh. Bruckstein, initiator and director of ha'atelier - workshop for philosophy and art , director of the international project Jewish and Islamic Hermeneutics as Cultural Criticism , held the Martin Buber professorship at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt from 2004–2006 , previously among other things visiting professor at the Institute for Philosophy at the University of Bremen (2002) and at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig (2002/2003). Bruckstein published a. a. From the uprising of images. Studies on Rembrandt and Midrash with a sketch for a future Jewish-Islamic workshop for science and art (2006) and The Mask of Moses. Studies in Jewish Hermeneutics (2001).
Web links
- Homepage of ha'atelier - workshop for philosophy and art
