Didem Pekün, Jan Verwoert

Didem Pekün (1978, Istanbul) combines research and practice. Previously in her films, she addressed how violence and displacement define and destroy life. Currently she researches on a roaming art education platform titled “Elemental Lab”. Her documentaries and video installations have been shown internationally and received different awards. She is a founding member of Center for Spatial Justice (MAD). She holds a BA in Music from SOAS, an MA in Documentary from Goldsmiths, and a practice-based PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London.

She is currently a visiting lecturer at Kadir Has University, Istanbul. (on leave 2022-23) and  the recipient of Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme (2022-3). She loves cats, very dark chocolate, and Istanbul.

Jan Verwoert teaches at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, and the de Appel curatorial programme, Amsterdam. Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory. He is a contributing editor of frieze magazine and his writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs. He is the author of «Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous» (MIT Press/Afterall Books, 2006), the essay collection «Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want» (Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute, 2010), «Animal Spirits—Fables in the Parlance of Our Time» together with Michael Stevenson, (Christoph Keller Editions, JRP, Zurich, 2013) and a second collection of his essays «Cookie!» published by Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute (2014). His work is focussed around the desire to develop concepts that redescribe the role of emotion, motion, action, intuition and sentience in the practice of art and thinking. His criticism is directed against a new system of control in which the pressure to perform (imposed by ourselves on ourselves, at all times) goes hand in hand with the demand to produce events, deliver results, represent identities and surrender to evaluation.

Work Group

Objective Enactive
This online lecture-demonstration unfolds the term ´Poetic Materiality´ within the context of designing and choreographing with Somatic Costumes. Through critiquing and applying the somatic practice of Skinner Releasing Technique, the poetics of philosopher Gaston Bachelard and the materiality of anthropologist Tim Ingold, this talk begins to map poetic and material agencies between bodies-costumes within the design-performance encounter.

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Artist Talk

Objective Enactive

This talk will focus on the first outcome of Glitsch(ening) Ci(rculari)ty, a tripartite site-specific, where I am pursuing a speculative exploration of the ecology of the city, between the urban and the biological, unfolding its layers and materiality of time. The talk will end in a conversation between fellow researchers and artists in the collaborative project Urban Ecologies, where Glitsch(ening) Ci(rculari)ty, is generated from.

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Presentation

Polyvocal Tongue The presentation will focus on relational ethics and polyvocality in performative text. It will also explore the use of plural languages in a play, looking at how a polylingual praxis can open up new aesthetic potential in playwrighting and in artistic research in general.
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Conversation

TRANSPOSITIONS— JAR, Mette Edvardsen and modular diaries At the start, the idea for an artistic research conversation with Mette Edvardsen did not spring out of the topics shortlisted for the conference—hospitality, vulnerability and care—but a book that she had co-edited, and dropped in my shelf.
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Panel Discussion

The Ethics of Vulnerability and Artistic Research

Any ethical framework must take account of the vulnerability of the human condition. This is significant in all creative endeavours – especially in artistic practice and the teaching of it – since the very act of creating something and putting it out into the world is an expression of vulnerability.

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