Collaboration: Real Life and Mediated Experience Artist Talk with Phil Collins, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Sabine Eckmann ______

Saturday, June 28th, 2014, 5.30 to 7.30 pm Vierte Welt, Berlin-Kreuzberg (Kottbusser Tor) Adalbertstr. 96, first floor gallery accessible via exterior staircase

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The University of Potsdam’s Graduate Program Visibility and Visualization: Hybrid Forms of Pictorial Knowledge invites you to an artist talk with Phil Collins, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Sabine Eckmann. Collaboration: Real Life and Mediated Experience takes Collin’s practice of engaging various local subjects and communities as its point of departure to discuss the artistic yet also social meaning and political valence of collaborative practices in art, theory, and everyday life. Be it that Collins invites people to develop their rolls of 35mm film free of charge in exchange for the right to incorporate select images into his Free Fotolab, or that he sets up a phone booth in one of ’s homeless shelters allowing everyone to make free calls based on the condition that the conversations be recorded and potentially appropriated anonymously for the artist’s work, Collins often draws on collaboration as a means for artistic engagement. In doing so, he is very aware of the potentially exploitative and exposing quality of such practice; yet, he deliberately pushes this effect in order to further reflect upon the power dynamics at hand. Important aspects of his works further concern processes of mediatization, the specifics of different media formats and their place in .

Talks and discussion will be in English.

Phil Collins makes use of music and pop culture such as film melodramas, reality TV, talk shows and karaoke to explore social situations and transcend definitions of language, social status and locality. Over the past decade, Collins has developed projects in Iraq, Palestine, Serbia, Turkey, Indonesia, Colombia and for which he has cooperated intensively with local communities. Complicating both the myth of aesthetic autonomy and the fantasy of art as in itself political, his films, photographs, installations and live events employ the documentary tradition and elements of popular culture to establish an immediate and at times humorous connection with participant and viewer. Collins is based in Berlin and Cologne, where he is a professor of video art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien. His works are held in significant public collections such as, among others, Tate Gallery, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013); Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2012); British Film Institute, London (2011); Tramway, Glasgow (2009); Dallas Museum of Art (2007); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Tate Britain, London (both 2006). http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artists/phil-collins/series-video-and-installations Diedrich Diederichsen is professor of theory, practice, and mediation in contemporary art at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in . His research interests include pop music as a model for conceptualizing contemporary culture, the ‘third culture industry’, net cultures and entertainment architectures, neo formalism as well as Martin Kippenberger and his time. He writes frequently for Texte zur Kunst, Artforum, and other journals. Among his most important book publications are Sexbeat (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1985), Eigenblutdoping (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008), The Whole Earth (Sternberg, 2013) and Über Pop-Musik (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2014): http://diedrich-diederichsen.de

Dr. Sabine Eckmann is William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests are 20th and 21st century art, art and politics, medium aesthetics, and critical theory. Her exhibition catalogs and publications include, among others, Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break I,II,III (2010, 2011, 2014) Ghost: Elizabeth Peyton (Hatje Cantz, 2011), Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures (Abrams, 2009), Reality Bites: Making Avant-garde Art in Post-Wall Germany (Hatje Cantz, 2007) and Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (LACMA, 1997). Her latest exhibition and catalog In the Aftermath of Trauma: Contemporary Video Installations (2014) investigates semi-documentary formats as they relate to trauma in contemporary video art: http://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/exhibitions/9156

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The event is organized by the Graduate Program (DFG-Graduiertenkolleg) Visibility and Visualization: Hybrid Forms of Pictorial Knowledge at the University of Potsdam in cooperation with the collaborative space Vierte Welt. www.sichtbarkeit-sichtbarmachung.de | www.viertewelt.de