Identitecture Event

Johannes Paul Raether Artist, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf

Chair: Gabrielle Cram Cultural theorist, dramaturge, Vienna

The lecture ?Identitecture? of Berlin based artist Johannes Paul Raether will introduce three of his ?SelfSisters? as ?Potential Identities?. Through their bodies and their language the corresponding performance system, which he has been continuously developing since 2008, will be described. The system of ?Identitecture? deals with a transformed body in different ?skins? where schizological and political analysis of society collapse with language mutations and site-specific surveys.Identitektur provides scalable platforms manifesting themselves through infiltrations, teach-ins, lecture-adventures, selfie-wars, appearances, processions, and rituals. ?To engineer oneself into community? or ?communeering? act as prerequisites for the speaking in digitally fractured identities, in techno-alchemic tongues; leading to the resolution of the audience body into a new collective formation, such as the ?Repro Tribe? or the ?Communitymaschine?. The process of ?Identitecture” dramatizes aesthetic politics and artistic intervention techniques beyond itself. Thereby taking an exodus from the narrowly circumscribed field to question the occasionally simple reading of political art and negotiation of its themes. Rather, the aim is to place experiments on the own body against triumphal politicality and heroic subjectivities, finding the fragile moments of ?drag? and the residing blurred surfaces and ways of speech in order to be able to expose the vulnerability of non-normative social actions.

Johannes Paul Raether lives and works in Berlin.
His practice traverses various platforms in Performing and Visual Arts as well as in the Humanities by the way of his SelfSisters (alter egos), which emerge at various sites in public and corporate spaces. His works and performances were shown in Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017), transmediale, Berlin (2017) the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016) Berliner Festspiele (2016), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016), Fridericianum, Kassel (2015) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2013). Recent Solo exhibitions include Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf (2017), Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2015) and Ludlow 38, New York City (2014). Raether publishes in Texte Zur Kunst and co-edited the book Zeig Her, Führ Vor, Tausch Ein. Performance?Art?Academy (2013) He received the Villa Romana Price (2015) and was Artist in Residence at the Leuphana University Art?s Program (2016). Since 2016 he is Professor für Freie Kunst at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Gabrielle Cram, born in Falkirk/Scotland, is a cultural worker based in Vienna, Austria. The engagement in transdisciplinary fields and practices of translation - between genres, spaces, times, locations, languages – takes an important role in her work. Her practice is marked by diverse forms of mediation such as the creation of spaces for negotiation and contact zones for still open processes. She works as a dramaturge, curator and cultural mediator. Until recently she was working as head of dramaturgy and research at choreographic centre and venue for contemporary dance and performance at Tanzquartier Vienna. She worked as translator, artist and as curator amongst others for performance and performative expressions at electronic music and progressive performance festival donaufestival Krems and as a project curator for Vienna based art foundation Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Her research focuses on the fields of unlearning in the context of de-colonial practices, narrative hacking and transculturality. She studied a combination of Romanistics, Art History and Theatre, Film and Media Studies at University Vienna as well as Conceptual Art and Cultural Studies at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien
Room IKA Forum / 1st floor, core N
Augasse 2?6, 1090 Vienna