Brooken Time

Artistic responses to counter-humanity, war and violence on 31 August 2023 at 8pm in the Lichtsaal, Hotel Elephant

That time flows like a calm stream and carries man into a happy future is little more than an illusion. Cultural and civilisational certainties, countless life paths and hopes for the future are repeatedly shattered by man-made violence, including violence justified by the state. "The terrible thing is hate after hate, war after war, contempt after contempt," sums up the Polish Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor, theatre maker and installation artist Józef Szajna. And Imre Kertész, Hungarian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and also a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald: "For if the history of the 20th century were merely a one-time slip, as pious or false prophets would have us believe, then the great catharsis should have begun long ago (...)."

Nevertheless, people everywhere are standing up against hate after hate. Imre Kertész has not stopped writing. Józef Szajna has struggled with his art against inhumanity all his life. And Boris Lurie, who said that he received his artistic education in the Buchenwald concentration camp, has spent his life fighting against the voyeuristic view of violence and the suffering of the victims, against the racism and sexism of consumer society.

The consequences of the experience of rupture for visual art and literature today, how visual art and literature today can confront violence and give stirring expression to the ambivalences of political and social developments, what social and political tasks arise, will be explored in three discussions. While two of the discussions will focus on the Nazi break with civilisation, the third will be devoted to the experiences of rupture and transformation in eastern Germany after 1989.

I. DISCUSSION WITH INGO SCHULZE AND BODO RAMELOW / IN THE PRESENCE OF GÜNTHER UECKER

Beyond the Pathos Formulas: Art against Authoritarian Rule, Fear and Violence A conversation on the occasion of the revitalisation of Günther Uecker's "A Stone Memorial for Buchenwald" on the Theatre Square in Weimar.

II. CONVERSATION WITH HENDRIK BOLZ AND CARSTEN SCHNEIDER

Smug Westerners, Racism and Blooming Landscapes? - 1989 and its consequences revisited

III. DISCUSSION WITH RUDOLF HERZ, VERENA KRIEGER, MATTHIAS REICHELT, JENS-CHRISTIAN WAGNER

Boris Lurie's No!Art - Product of "the war armies, the concentration camps and the lumpenproletariat".

As an introduction to the conversation, Kunstfest Weimar and Lichthaus-Kino will show as part of the event:

"SHOAH and PIN-UPS".
The documentary film tells of a taboo break committed by the 80-year-old New York NO!artist Boris Lurie. In his art, he brings together what should not belong together: the gassed and the naked, the Shoah and the pin-ups. A film about the timelessly topical questions of remembering and the artistic treatment of the extermination of the Jews in particular.

Further dates:
9 September 2023 at 3 p.m. in the Lichthaus Cinema

A series of talks by the Kunstfest Weimar in cooperation with the Buchenwald Memorial.