With José B. Segebre (Berlin) and Ashkan Sepahvand (London)
(in English)

Bodies can be mute witnesses to violence and oppression. Their postures and gestures and their sheer persistence bear witness to a struggle against the discriminatory forces that seek to shape the contours of their lives. Against this backdrop of trauma and displacement, artists and activists have developed strategies that foreground bodily resistance to violence. This talk will highlight waiting and dying bodies in historical and contemporary film, video and performance. José B. Segebre will reflect on the aesthetics of waiting in queer, feminist, Black and decolonial artistic practice. He will foreground waiting as a central dimension of sumud (steadfastness), a practice of resistance that defines Palestinian daily life, both inside and outside historic Palestine. Ashkan Sepahvand will address performances and rituals of death in the context of the AIDS pandemic, which arose in the 1980s and continues in the present, focusing both on the historical transmission of knowledge between queer dancers and choreographers and on the theater of director Reza Abdoh, whose work cites the Iranian-Islamic performance tradition of ta’ziyeh.

• Programm Programme: Bodies