Reading Circle (Nordbahnhof) Event

Attention! The reading circle starts at 6pm, not 7pm!!!

2019 | Vienna: Reading Circle (Nordbahnhof)
event organised by Blood Mountain Projects
October to November 2019

The Nordbahnhof Project continues in autumn 2019 with a new Reading Circle, dedicated to the practice of historical research, the culture of remembrance and discursive exchange. Each session is hosted by a special guest, who selects a text of personal interest and leads the discussion in line with his or her line of current creative inquiry. The selection of various venues underpins the programme’s mission to attract diverse participants.

Format:
Free public event, conducted in English
6pm start with approximately 90 minute duration
Limited capacity, registration advised and photo ID necessary at some venues

Please register here to guarantee a seat and to receive the text in advance: info@bloodmountain.org

08 October 2019

Host: Dani Gal | artist-in-residence
Text: Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford University Press, 2009 (excerpt)
Venue: Vienna Wiesenthal Institute (research centre), Rabensteig 3, 3rd floor, 1010 Vienna, Austria

IMPORTANT: prior registration and valid photo ID at the event are essential

Abstract: Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book makes a two-fold argument about Holocaust memory in a global age by situating it in the unexpected context of decolonisation. On the one hand, it demonstrates how the Holocaust has enabled the articulation of other histories of victimisation at the same time that it has been declared “unique” among human-perpetrated horrors. On the other, it uncovers the more surprising and seldom acknowledged fact that public memory of the Holocaust emerged in part thanks to postwar events that seem at first to have little to do with it. In particular, Multidirectional Memory highlights how ongoing processes of decolonisation and movements for civil rights in the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere unexpectedly galvanized memory of the Holocaust.

Host: Dani Gal is a Berlin-based visual artist. He investigates how personal and collective histories and memorisations are produced, selected and carried through time and space by means of intense research and the examination of historical visual, written and audio documents in dialogue with current political occurrences and contemporary cultural narratives. He is Blood Mountain’s 2019 artist-in-residence.

Blood Mountain Projects is an independent research and curatorial platform based in Vienna with a mission to examine the cultural past present and potential of Central Europe. Founded in 2010 as a non-profit arts organisation in Budapest, and following many years as an international satellite, it operates since 2018 as an educational programme and curatorial practice based in Vienna. Core activities: research-based curatorial projects, artists-in-residence, public events, education and publications.

Future events, which take place:

24 October - Dani Gal: Guest Lecture at Angewandte

30 October - Nina Prader: Reading Circle at Academy of Fine Arts

18 November: Zsuzsi Flohr: Reading Circle at VIenna Wiesenthal Institute / Singer Bookshop

15 November: Dani Gal: Screening at Le Studio Molière

29 November: Gabu Heindl: Reading Circle at Packhaus

www.bloodmountain.org