Contradiction Studies

Exhibition Opening „Wir wollen Demokratie, Marktwirtschaft und Pluralität“

Klaas Anders (GRK Contradiction Studies)

11/15/2024 6:00 pm

Galerie am schwarzen meer

On November 17th 1989, students protested peacefully in Prague. On the National Street, in the middle of the city, the demonstration was brutally beaten up by the police. This was the beginning of a social upheaval that reached its climax on Human Rights Day on December 10th 1989. On this day, the dissident Vaclav Havel spoke to 300,000 people who had gathered on Wenceslas Square. Less than three weeks later, he was elected president. Today, these events are known as the “Velvet Revolution”. This year, Czech society is commemorating important milestones in modern history: 35 years since the Velvet Revolution, 20 years since joining the European Union.

We are also commemorating this period with an exhibition of images and audio documents, talks and readings.

Welcoming Adress: Dr. Hermann Kuhn, Forum Eastern Europe, Europa-Union Bremen e.V.

Introduction: Libuše Černá and Klaas Anders

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driver

“Contradictions are an important driver of scientific practice and knowledge.”

Norman Sieroka
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
Is contradiction eurocentric?

“Is contradiction a eurocentric concept, operational phenomenon, and instrument of power?”

Kerstin Knopf
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf
articulate

“Contradictions need to be articulated in order to exist.”

Martin Nonhoff