‘Haptic’ surfaces: pedagogy and entanglement

Natascha Sadr Haghighian represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and in January 2020 she will be in Cyprus for a public talk. The talk, moderated by curator Ryan Inouye, is taking place in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Cyprus as part of the hypersurfacing forum, organised on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of NiMAC [Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre,Associated with the Pierides Foundation].

Natascha Sadr Haghighian changed her name to Natascha Süder Happelmann for the project at the Venice Biennale. Though her personal spokesperson, Helene Duldung, she explained how her alias is a computer-generated amalgamation of autocorrected and misspelled variants of her name drawn from 30 years of correspondence with various government agencies. In her highly political work, the multidisciplinary artist uses performance, installation, sound, and text to explore the themes of culture, identity, and belonging.

The public talk will be followed by the listening set Death in Everyday Life… Is this the Bardo? by Ayios Loizos (20’) and the performance How to: Happy Acid by Panayotis Mina (20’).

hypersurfacing is curated by Marina Christodoulidou. Participating artists are: Raissa Angeli, Peter Eramian, Stelios Kallinikou, Lito Kattou, Phanos Kyriacou, Orestis Lazouras, Nayia Savva, Constantinos Taliotis, Maria Toumazou, Leontios Toumpouris, Marina Xenofontos and Natalie Yiaxi.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian is an artist living in Berlin. Her research-based practice encompasses a variety of forms and formats, among them video, performance, installations, text, and sound. In place of a biographical note, Haghighian wishes to draw the readers’ attention to www.bioswop.net. On www.bioswop.net artists and other cultural practitioners can borrow, exchange, and compile CVs for various purposes. The site went online in October 2004 and is a work in progress. The aim is to have more and more people exchanging their CVs for representational purposes, like in catalogues, etc. The project aims to render that particular section of an artist's production even more ‘redundant’. Bioswop hopes to undermine the purpose of art CVs and résumés or at least to make them a bit more of an entertaining read.

Ryan Inouye is an associate curator of Sharjah Biennial 12. From 2010 to 2013, he worked as an assistant curator and curatorial assistant at the New Museum, New York, where he focused on the 2012 New Museum Triennial, The Ungovernable, and the Museum as Hub initiative. He has organised the projects: Museum as Hub: Center for Historical Reenactments: After-after Tears (2013) and Museum as Hub: Steffani Jemison and Jamal Cyrus: Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet! with Ethan Swan (2011). He has also organised residencies with Chimurenga, Cape Town (2013) and the Desire Machine Collective, Guwahati, India (2013). Between 2006 and 2010 Inouye was curatorial assistant at REDCAT, Los Angeles. He has written on the work of Abraham Cruzvillegas, Iman Issa, Invisible Borders, Lee Kit, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, among others. He lives and works in Sharjah.