Sanja Iveković "Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein"!

About

With her proposal to reconstruct Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s monument for Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and the revolutionaries of the workers’ movement from today’s vantage point, Iveković challenges the dominant politics of remembrance and harks back to the monument’s heavily-contested history, echoes of which could be heard long after the monument was destroyed in 1933.

In the exhibition “Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein!” (“I was, I am, I shall be!”), Iveković presents the conceptual foundation of the historic “Monument to the November Revolution” by Mies van der Rohe as a research object within the context of left-wing revolutions. She uses the original monument as well as her own proposal as a vehicle to examine and shed light on latent conflicts and contradictions.

The central question of the accompanying symposium, “Memorial For(u)ms – Histories of Possibility” which will take place in HAU on 3–4 July, 2015 is: what kind of discursive and aesthetic form can be attached to a (failed/ unfinished) revolution and what would a reconstruction of the monument stand for today? Rosa Luxemburg’s canonical question ‘Reform or Revolution?’, together with contradictions surrounding the November Revolution of 1918/19 will serve as points of departure for an inquiry into the contradictory nature of revolutionary memory and its form, which merges martyrdom and heroism, optimism and melancholia.

Memorial For(u)ms – Histories of Possibility
Symposium mit Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen,
Boris Buden, Ekaterina Degot, Jodi Dean,
Gal Kirn, Bojana Pejić, Gerald Raunig,
Milica Tomić, Jelena Vesić, Siegbert Wolf,
Ross Wolfe u.a.

kuratiert von Antonia Majaca

Eine Produktion des Berliner Künstlerprogramms
des DAAD in Zusammenarbeit mit dem
HAU Hebbel am Ufer.
3.–4. Juli 2015, 16–21 Uhr
HAU 1