Symposium Day Two - Resounding Archives: The Politics of Listening to The Moving Image

Thursday, September 19, 2024

10:00–11:30
Panel 3
Cinephilia as Sonophilia

The cinephile, a social figure of France’s postwar culture that soon emerged in similar fashion in other parts of the world, found its sonic complement in the “mélomane,” the melody-maniac or passionate music lover. In cinema, passion for sound and image are interrelated. How can we understand film as an archive of these two entangled loves?
Diedrich Diederichsen (Berlin) will talk about Jack Smith’s record collection and film performances.
Pavitra Sundar (Hamilton College) will discuss feminist approaches to the history of Bombay film sound.
Moderation: Marc Siegel

12:00–13:30
Panel 4
Archive Work as Artistic Practice

With the project Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice (2011–2013), Arsenal paved the way to an open archive not only for research, but also for production. Archival Assembly #3 will present installations which resulted from work in audiovisual archives or which created new archives.
Artist talk with Saodat Ismailova (Tashkent/Paris), Dana Iskakova (Almaty), and Susanne Sachsse (Berlin).
Moderation: Asja Makarević (Frankfurt am Main/Vienna/Sarajevo)

Diedrich Diederichsen was an editor and publisher of music magazines (Sounds, Spex) in the 1980s and, in the 1990s, a university teacher and visiting professor in cities including Pasadena, Offenbach, Munich, Weimar, Gießen, and Los Angeles. From 1998 to 2007, he was Professor for Theory of Art & Design at Merz-Academy, Stuttgart, and since 2006, he has been Professor for Theory and Mediation of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. His recent publications include Das 21. Jahrhundert (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2024), (Über) Produktion und Wert/(Over)Production and Value (Kunsthalle Bern/Sternberg Press, 2018), Körpertreffer – Zur Ästhetik der nachpopulären Künste (Suhrkamp, 2017), and Über Pop-Musik (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2014).

Pavitra Sundar is Associate Professor at Hamilton College, where she teaches courses on film, literature, and sound, with a South Asian focus. Her most recent publications include Listening with a Feminist Ear (University of Michigan Press, 2023), which was long-listed for the Kraszna-Krausz award, and the co-edited volume Thinking with an Accent (University of California Press, 2023), which won the American Comparative Literature Association’s René Wellek Prize for best edited essay collection.

Marc Siegel is Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. His research focuses mainly on questions of queer studies and experimental film. His book A Gossip of Images⁠ is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Recent publications include the co-⁠edited volume Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia (meson press, 2024). He is a member of the Berlin-⁠based art collective CHEAP and the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne.

Saodat Ismailova is an Uzbek filmmaker and artist who graduated from Tashkent State Art Institute and Le Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts. Her research encompasses Central Asia’s ancestral knowledge and traditional spiritual practices as well as the modern history of Uzbekistan, manifested in her interlacing of archival footage from the country’s film history. She initiated DAVRA research group in Central Asia in 2021. In 2022, she participated in the 59th Venice Biennale and presented a work at documenta 15. Her new film Melted Into the Sun was presented in the group exhibition Nebula and was commissioned by Fondazione In Between Art Film for the 2024 Venice Biennale. Her works are in the collections of Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and others.

Dana Iskakova is an artist and cultural practitioner born in 1997 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She studied finance at the International IT University and liberal arts at Smolny College. As part of the project initiated by Saodat Ismailova, she took part in the public program and contributed to the publication of the DAVRA research group at documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany (2022). In 2023, Iskakova presented the printed magazine on fictional contemporary art called “If” and its first issue, created in collaboration with the MATA collective. Her practice mainly focuses on participatory ‘imaginary’ art and explores human perception and imagination. 

Susanne Sachsse is a Berlin-based actress. Her artistic work has developed along three main axes: as a solo performer in art, theater, performance, dance, and film; as a musician; and in collaborative performance and installation projects as part of the art collective CHEAP as well as with many other international artists. Sachsse was awarded the Premio Maguey Queer Icon Award at the Guadalajara International Film Festival in Mexico and is the star of five films by Canadian queercore filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. She is featured in works by Yael Bartana, Zach Blas, Vaginal Davis, Ligia Lewis, and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, among many others.

Asja Makarević currently works as a post-doctoral fellow in the research program AGE-C Aging and Gender in European Cinema at Goethe University Frankfurt, where she obtained her PhD after researching non-representational images of war in post-Yugoslav cinema. Between 2009 and 2017, Asja managed Talents Sarajevo, the Sarajevo Film Festival’s networking and training platform for emerging film professionals. She is a member of the Berlinale Forum selection committee.