Nightmares, Colonial, Neocolonial

“Nightmares, Colonial, Neocolonial” re-visits filmic strategies that lay bare the longevity of the colonial condition through neocolonialism today. The biggest lie we were ever told was not that god, but colonialism is dead. As the long centuries of European hegemony came to a close, its successor imposed new rules, which included the dramatic end to direct military occupation—though exceptions were permitted. The system that the US empire has imposed in its place is what Frantz Fanon astutely predicted in his 1961 manifesto Les damnés de la terre, as a system in which power is shared between local and outside forces. Fanon redefined the term neocolonialism to describe this condition; this understanding of the term is rarely used today. This film series takes place during the 140th anniversary of the 1884 Berlin Conference, which highlighted German culpability in the colonial nightmare, in the hopes of grappling with a past maintained in the nightmare that is the neocolonial present.

This film series is hosted by the Kunstraum and the DFG Research Training Group “Cultures of Critique” of the Leuphana University Lüneburg and is curated and organized by Philip Rizk and Raphael Daibert, with additional support of Jana Paim.

Further more, Kunstraum is pleased to announce the launch of Kunstraum.p2p, a new format at Kunstraum that aims to support independent and collaborative study by students. “Kunstraum peer to peer” provides space and resources for groups of students to collectively develop a project beyond or within the framework of a seminar. The exhibition Dis/b/orderly with Sudabe Yunesi, Robert Bostantzis Diamantopoulos, Georg Juranek opens December 3 and runs until December 12, 2024. Organized and curated by Sophie McCuen-Koytek, the exhibition engages with the construction of a Fortress Europe as a “European gated community” (Pichl 2024). No longer just the goal of a pan-European New Right and self-appointed, neo-national socialist border guards, it has found its way into the agendas of supposedly progressive and moderate parties. The EU´s migration and asylum policies reflect the hatemongering imagery—that of the migrant or refugee as enemy—of authoritarian movements. Dis/b/orderly formulates a critique of territorial demarcations in the form of modern, naturalized borders that serve to establish imagined, separate communities. The exhibition exposes the intertwined processes within nationalist, capitalist, colonialist and racist relations of power and domination as the cause of border demarcations, questioning the hegemony of the cultural “inside” and the constitutive “outside” formulated through borders and softened by migration (Hall 2018). The works point to the absurdity of a homogeneous European identity and the intertwined responsibilities not only for the causes of flight and migration, but also for the deadly and brutal consequences within and beyond European borders. On December 19, 2024, the Kunstraum will host a Non-Human Rave with Daria Melnikova and organized by Litha Sabelfeld. The concert draws out the sonic and musical potential of human and non-human improvisation. Using a musical instrument designed to read electrical impulses, Daria Melnikova connects the electrodes to plants, liquids, fruit and the human body. As the objects change, the style of the music changes with them, allowing visitors to tune in to different non-human harmonies. Opening on January 21, 2025 and running until February 4, 2025, the exhibition Sapphic Entanglements with Ruxin Liu, ana zeno de courcy, Sasha Levkovich and Clara Mannott. Queer studies scholar Kadji Amin calls for “fuck[ing] with the universalizing presumptions of the taxonomical method from within by generating idiosyncratic interpretations and translations that explode the epistemological and ontological foundations of taxonomy Itself.” (Amin 2023) Sapphic Entanglements answers this call by facilitating and creating community discussions that detangle and retangle sapphic dimensions of intimacy, connection, longing, dreaming and being. While sapphic as a term derived from Sappho, an ancient Greek poet exploring lesbian desire and love, it has evolved into an umbrella term for a spectrum of sexualities and genders. The works displayed in this exhibition explore sapphism as embodied knowledge, friendship, community, shame, desire, failing, falling, envy, self and something always in motion evading meaning.

Event details
November 28, 6:30–9pm: Screening of White Man’s Country by David Koff, narrated by Msindo Mwinyipembe (1970) and The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting by Assia Djebar (1982). Location: Kunstraum, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Universitätsallee 1.

December 12, 7–9:30pm: Screening of Bon Voyage, Sim by Moustapha Alassane (1966) and Lumumba, la mort du prophète by Raoul Peck (1991). Location: Scala Kino, Apothekenstraße 17, 21335 Lüneburg.