As a 'form war', K is not only about political forms (...). The form battles are at the same time battles for meaning; they fill culture and language with living resistance (...). "The sign becomes the arena of K." (Valentin Voloshinov)
In dictionary entries, the word under discussion is represented by its initial after its first mention. Class, class struggle, class contradiction, just like crisis, catastrophe or colonialism, become K. Our K. stands for KLASSENSPRACHEN( CLASS LANGUAGES) - and thus for a terrain of antagonisms in which the political orthodoxies of the past meet the social brutalities of the present.
In this present, questions of translation, verbalization and the (physical) inscription of those divergences have become part of an all-encompassing process, the changes and intensifications of which we want to bring to the fore with KLASSENSPRACHEN, artistically, curatorially, in writing and in debate. We are not interested in passing art off as politics, but rather in examining it for the signatures, markers and forms of the deeply antagonistic relationships of which it is a material part: we are concerned with art as a class language as well as with class languages in art.
We would like to begin mapping, appropriating, occupying and expanding a terrain on which we will produce an ongoing outline of problems. In three formats - in exhibitions, magazines and debates - we want to devote ourselves from now on at irregular intervals to the confrontation with/of class languages in the visual arts of the present and examine how these can be opened up towards the joint development of a practical knowledge, a capacity for action within and outside of art. In other words, for an understanding that does not so much hope for a positive common identification, but rather wants to exist in shared negativities, in translations of antagonistic experiences to one another. For if one leaves behind the orthodox understanding of class, the grammar of productivity that adheres to it, and the exclusive ideologies of progress and freedom that it invokes, the question arises as to the possibilities of a concept of class beyond such nationally organized modernisms. KLASSENSPRACHEN aims to pursue these questions: How can practical solidarities become linguistic from forms of contemporary oppression that are shared with and divide us from one another - within art and beyond it?
As a largely class-specific institution of globalized capitalism, art itself is by no means a haven of authentic communication in the midst of the cold abstraction of the value form. Its current form is based on the very modernisms that often make the concept of class seem so unacceptably orthodox. Accordingly, KLASSENSPRACHEN is concerned with a heterodoxy of class as well as of art. As the linguist Valentin Voloshinov, quoted at the beginning, stated as early as 1929: Every form is a terrain of class struggles. The first exhibition at District, the subsequent debate weekend and the first issue of the magazine KLASSENSPRACHEN, which will be published at the end of the exhibition in September, form a broad-based prelude, a collection of material, an exemplary view of those artistic, poetic, critical, journalistic and theoretical positions in which we are looking for clues to the question of class languages. This collaborative working context aims to create a panorama of their forms and conflicts: In this, art appears as the starting point but - we hope - not the end point of our ongoing engagement.
KLASSENSPRACHEN was initiated by Manuela Ammer, Eva Birkenstock, Jenny Nachtigall, Kerstin Stakemeier and Stephanie Weber as a long-term collaboration.
A project by District
BerlinArtistic direction team: Suza Husse with Janine Halka and Andrea Caroline Keppler.
Managing director: Frank Sippel.
Production management: Naomi Hennig.
Communication: Johanna Ekenhorst.
MC Construction Site: Francy Fabritz, Josephine Freiberg, Anka Mirkin, Winnie Olbrich and Hassan Suleiman.
Assistance: Eva Storms and Yoonhee Kim.
Finances: Annett Hoffmann.