Image caption: Allan Sekula, Waiting for Teargas (white globe to black), 1999-2000, MACBA collection, Barcelona, installation view, Rewinding Internationalism, Van Abbemuseum, 2022-23
INVITATION - Talk with Nick Aikens
Rewinding Internationalism: Exhibitions and the Political Imaginary
Tuesday, January 16 // 6pm Lichtbrücken HfG, Lorenzsstraße 15, 76135 Karlsruhe
What affordances to exhibitions have as sites of inquiry and as means to engage the political? How might the operations of exhibitions – the trajectories that lead to their realization, the strategies of analysis they deploy as well as their physical instantiation – be foregrounded when considering their capacity for meaning making? In his talk curator Nick Aikens discusses his recent project Rewinding Internationalism, a major research-exhibition project staged at multiple venues (Netwerk Aalast, Van Abbemuseum and Villa Arson) across 2022-23. Through the form of a close reading, he discusses the capacity of exhibitions to bring ideas and concepts into view that are not fully resolved before its realization. The talk describes, and reflects on, explorations and understandings of internationalism, the political imaginary, and exhibitions themselves as emerging through the unfolding of the project and its manifold operations, informing and inflecting one another as they appeared.
About Nick Aikens: Nick Aikens is a curator, editor and educator. He is currently Managing Editor and Responsible for Research for L’Internationale Online, the research and publishing platform for L’Internationale, the European confederation of museums, universities and arts organisations. He recently completed his PhD at HDK-Valand University of Gothenburg and from 2012-2023 was Research Curator at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. He is Guest Professor in the department of Exhibition Design and Scenography at HfG Karlsruhe where he is teaching the two part seminar ‘Antennae to feel-think-know’.
