Lecture by Roger M. Buergel
Curator; Curator Documenta 12, Director Johan Jacobs Museum Zurich

The migration of form
Certain things can be regarded as prisms in which the world reveals itself in the play of their global refractions. Seventeenth-century Persian ceramics, for instance, which imitate Chinese porcelain. Or the „Black Madonnas“ that travelled to Haiti with Polish mercenaries at the end of the 18th century.
Objects like these need to be regarded in a way that places less emphasis on their discreteness than on their place in the design of things: they are parts of a historical and political network of relations. This relational network – a tableau comprising colonial wars, Oriental fantasies, a genuine love of special items and trading monopolies – has still to be examined in depth.

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jörg Huber

Cultural Theory
One of the most unsettling challenge in the experience of transculturality is the task of self-awareness. As a consequence quite a number of fundamental questions and problems arise concerning the terms and phenomenon of the individual, subject, person, artist or author… in the context of global politics. The lecture will expose some aspects and questions as “the subject between west and east”; “the self and identity”; “the individual, power and politics”; “the artist as a migrant” etc.

Lecture by Dr. Mark Terkessidis
Journalist, Author, Migration Researcher, Berlin