"Curating Worlds"

Bernd Scherer, Director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), one of Berlin's premier international cultural institutions, will be in conversation with Ravi Agarwal and Ranjit Hoskote, co-curators of the State of Nature project in its current, 2022 iteration. They will discuss Scherer's contribution to the transformation of the HKW from an earlier, relatively more ethnographic platform for the understanding of the world's varied regions to a dynamic forum for the discussion and performative articulation of transcultural themes and urgencies. This shift has been carried out through a number of long-term projects that have unfolded in a collaborative manner, as experiments in ensemble-making, such as The Anthropocene Curriculum and The New Alphabet. Scherer will discuss, with his interlocutors, the importance of such durational and polyphonic commitments to contemporary cultural production.

Speakers:

© Foto: S. Bolesch

Dr. Bernd Scherer has been Director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, since 2006 and has held an honorary professorship at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin since 2011. His central areas of work lie in philosophy, semiotics, aesthetics and intercultural questions. He has initiated and headed a series of international cultural projects, including “Über Lebenskunst” (2010–2011), an initiative project of the German Federal Cultural Foundation in cooperation with HKW. Since 2012, Scherer has headed “The Anthropocene Project” and, since 2014, the project “100 Years of Now,” both at HKW. He is curating the Dictionary of Now as part of the latter project. Parallel to this, he is overseeing the conceptual development of HKW’s third large scale project, “The New Alphabet.” In his tenure at HKW, Scherer has guided its conceptual development from an institution that presented non-European cultures into one dedicated to the “curating of ideas in the making,” in a world that is changing not only globally, but also in planetary terms.

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Ravi Agarwal is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, environmental campaigner, writer and curator. Bridging the divide between art and activism, he addresses the entangled questions of nature and its futures using photography, video, text and installation. His work ranges from the long documentary to the conceptual and performative. He has regularly published photobooks and diaries, has curated large Indo- European public art projects (Yamuna-Elbe — twin city project — 2011, and Embrace our Rivers — 2018), and has edited books (The Crisis of Climate Change, Routledge, 2021; Embrace Our Rivers – Kerber, 2017), journals (Marg- Art and Ecology issue – April 2020, IIC journal Spring 2020). He is the curator of ‘New Natures; A Terrible Beauty is Born,’ organised by the Goethe Institute Mumbai (Feb 2022) and was the photography curator for the Serendipity Arts Festival (2018 and 2019).

© Ranjit Hoskote, Photo: Nancy Adajania

Ranjit Hoskote is a leading Anglophone Indian poet, and has also been acclaimed as a seminal contributor to Indian art criticism. His books include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), and Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2018). His poetry has appeared in German translation as Die Ankunft der Vögel (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006) and Feldnotizen des Magiers (Editions Offenes Feld, 2015). His translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). Hoskote was a Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, and has been writer-in-residence at Villa Waldberta, Munich; Theater der Welt, Essen-Mülheim; and the Polish Institute, Berlin. He has been researcher-in-residence at BAK/ basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. He has received the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award for Translation, and the S H Raza Award for Literature. Hoskote was juror for international literature for the 2015-2017 fellowship cycle at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.

All three speakers will be present at Library MMB


Video recording: