2-3 September, Historically free African Americans in visual and spatial representation

Workshop at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, LMU Munich, organised by Andrea Frohne (Fellow Alumna, Käte Hamburger Research Centre and Professor, Ohio University)

This workshop focuses on free African American people through art, visual culture and studies of space. It investigates circumstances of freedom and the disconnection from slavery prior to the Civil War, representations of free people of colour and descendants in visual culture and studies of space into the 21st century, and 17th and 18th-century White European immigration into Black America.

Presentations may focus on artworks made by free people of colour, such as sculptor Edmonia Lewis, portrait photographer J.P. Ball, landscape artist Robert S. Duncanson, and painters Henry Ossawa Turner and Edward Mitchell Bannister. How did their status as free play a role in their artistic careers or impact the content of their artworks? Papers may also focus on mobility and migration into free Black settlements across the United States and Canada. Topics include visual and spatial analyses of Black churches and schools, ownership of property shown in land surveys, rural roads named after free families of colour, or cemeteries.

With our location in Germany for the workshop, we seek to explore European migration into enslaving territories. What are the through lines of White families who become Black in the new world? They may have become enslavers who bore liberated children of colour. Or they may be indentured servants who bore free children of colour. Some free people of colour in the United States descended from German, British, Irish and Scottish forebears. What are the global ramifications of such disrupted, disconnected genealogies?

Overall, the workshop seeks to contribute new scholarship to the underrecognised subject of free African Americans and descendant populations in visual and spatial representation.

Please click here for the programme.

23-26 July, gdc summer school

global dis:connect summer school 2024  

22 July, gd:c annual lecture

19 July, Wissenschaftliche Utopien und Bildsprachen –  Neue Perspektiven auf (und mit) Otto Neurath

21-29 June exhibition global Munich. in perspective

Vernissage: 21 June, 18:00-22:00, Habibi Kiosk, Münchner Kammerspiele, 

Processes of globalisation, their effects and their constraints affect each of us every day. Still, the media, politics and academia tend to shape what globalisation means to us. Headlines and political spin reduce our perception of it to sound bites, like ‘Millionendorf’ (a village of millions) or ‘Weltstadt mit Herz’ (a global city with a heart).

The Global Munich. In Perspective exhibition starts from the assumption that globalisation means something very different for many of us. Hence, artists Hêlîn Alas, Aydin Alinejad, Jeanno Gaussi, Sofia Dona, Nikolai Gümbel, Narges Kalhor and Franziska Windolf will tell us their stories of globalisation in the city of Munich.

Hêlîn Alas charts and analyses economies and approaches of the art system, with its implicit privileges based on class, origin and gender. In diversity work LIVE (Lenbachhaus), she invites visitors to playfully retrace the intra-institutional contrast between the outward image of the art system, which emphasises diversity, and its internal homogeneity.

Where can I feel at home in a globalised world? In Gis (‘wisp of hair’ in Persian), their short film, screenwriter Aydin Alinejad and screenwriter-director Narges Kalhor tell the story of Faezeh, who is about to return to Iran from Germany.

Jeanno Gaussi’s art deals with mechanisms of remembrance, the search for identity and attendant processes of social and cultural appropriation. In her work entitled Salaam Kâkâ Bilkâ (‘Hello Uncle Bilkâ’) Jeanno Gaussi reflects on the world of global goods and the markets where they’re exchanged, identifying supermarkets as meeting places for various communities in her own experience.

Nikolai Gümbel’s work is characterised by multimedia and highly contextualised pieces. In his video piece Schichten, die wir sehen (Abschnitt I, Ausgrabung und Modell) (The Layers We See (Part I, Excavation and Model), the artist obliquely treats the emergence of Freiham-Nord, a new subdivision in Munich, to investigate the past and future realms of possibility of a seemingly ahistorical, post-global place that, according to the brochures, is supposed to be open to all.

Franziska Windolf’s art deals with the question of how sculpture and the body can take on personal-political meanings and how they move through speech, history and social relations. In her works, she recollects stories of exile in Munich, begging the question whom or what we actually remember.

Moreover, the exhibition will present a video from the site-specific installation APPLAUS by artist Sofia Dona. The work treats the Starnberger wing of the main train station in Munich as a location of arrival. Combining various stories of mobility, Sofia Dona’s work presents the station as a place that incorporates forgotten stories of various actors in the city’s globalisation narrative.

From their diverse perspectives and biographies, these artists cast a critical gaze on gaps in our knowledge about Munich as a locus of globalisation. As part of the What is the City NOW? Festival, we celebrate diverse perspectives on Munich along with the city’s inhabitants and ask: what does globalisation mean to you?

The Festival What is the City NOW? is an initiative by global dis:connect, Münchner Kammerspiele (MK), the TUM Center for Arts and Culture, Habibi Kiosk, balkaNet e.V., Cine Vélo Cité, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, MK:Mitmachen, Refugio Kunstwerkstatt, MK: Musik, Cozy Sound Sytsem, Mittelschule am Gerhart- Hauptmann- Ring, Hochschule München (Faculty of Architecture), EU Horizon Projekt, NEBourhoods: PEARL Creating Cultural Places for Young People in Neuperlach Curated by Martín Valdés-Stauber with Andrea Benze, Elke Bauer, Sophie Eisenried, Mona Feyrer, Julia Lena Maier, Gina Penzkofer, Marvin Scheler, Janina Sieber und Clara Valdés-Stauber, Jakob Weiß

26-28 June, constitutional history on trial

Date: 26-28 June 2024

Venue: Historisches Kolleg, Kaulbachstraße 15, 80539 Munich

22 April-8 July, Deutsches Museum, Monday Colloquium

Deutsches Museum, Monday Colloquium: Global Envirotech Histories - Knowledge and Artifacts in Motion

All lectures start at 16:30 and take place in room 1402, library building, Deutsches Museum, Museumsinsel 1, 80538 Munich

20-21 June, Mountains dis:connect

Workshop at the Paris Lodron University Salzburg, organised by Martin Knoll (Salzburg), Eva-Maria Troelenberg (Düsseldorf) and Roland Wenzlhuemer (Munich)

Please register here by 12 June .

To download the programme, please click here.

3 June, Munich History Lecture with Glenda Sluga

In 2023, the appointment of an 'oilman' to lead one of the most important climate change conferences of our time, COP28, raised some controversy. But it was not the first time that oilmen have taken the lead in international environmental governance. In this lecture, Professor Glenda Sluga returns to this lost history of the involvement of 'oilmen' in the earliest examples of international environmental governance in order to recover the extent and significance of early 1970s' debates focused on the 'planetary'.

Prof. Dr. Glenda Sluga, European University Institute, Florenz/ The University of Sydney

Place &. date: LMU Hauptgebäude, Hörsaal M118, 3 June 2024, 6:30-8 pm

Organisers: Department of History, LMU and global dis:connect