Contradiction Studies

Für Widerspruch sorgen. Impulse and Talk

Carolin Zieringer (RTG Contradiction Studies)

03/14/2024 7:00 pm

Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst | Teerhof 21, 28199 Bremen

It is almost a commonplace that we live in contradictory times. But what does it mean to take social contradictions seriously? Which contradictions must be endured – and which not – in a democracy? Is every form of contradiction already emancipatory, and if not, where do we draw the line? How does contradiction become a collective, democratic practice that is not limited to a “yes, but…”?

Carolin Zieringer investigates these and similar questions from a radical-democratic and queer-feminist perspective. Taking Jala Wahid’s play with ambiguities and emotions as a starting point, Carolin Zieringer sets out to discuss how we can remain open to contradictions and uncertainties in a world permeated by exclusion and violence, what role care plays in this, and when it is structurally impossible to care.

As part of the exhibition
Jala Wahid: I Love Ancient Baby

Please find more details at the GAK Homepage

Back to overview
space

“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.

Julia Lossau
paradox

“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
diversity and plurality

“Join us to create more diversity and plurality in knowledge production.”

Gisela Febel
problem to be solved

“Contradiction is not primarily a problem to be solved but a motor we cannot do without.”

Martin Nonhoff
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