IN FOCUS #2
HAIR POLITICS with Hélia Paukner and Prof. Dr. Alexandra Karentzos
Thursday, 1 June 2023, from 7 PM
IN FOCUS #2: HAIR POLITICS
German language event
7 PM: EXHIBITION TALK
with Hélia Paukner (Mucem, Marseille) and Rebekka Seubert (Dortmunder Kunstverein)
Together with Hélia Paukner (art historian, curator Mucem Marseille) we discover the exhibition of the Egyptian-French artist Hoda Tawakol. The power of the gaze is one of art’s inherent issues, and is turned into a protagonist in this exhibition: Loving or controlling? The female body and women's hair is subject to that gaze that is both historically and culturally constant change.
8 PM: LECTURE
Prof. Dr. Alexandra Karentzos (Chair of Fashion and Aesthetics, TU Darmstadt): Hair Politics - Decolonial Body Practices in Contemporary Art.
"Don't touch my hair
When it's the feelings I wear
Don't touch my soul",
sings Solange Knowles: "Don't touch my crown". In the music video, she plays with different hairstyles and thus also opens up a space for new designs. It is precisely such scope that will be discussed in the lecture. Hair is repeatedly integrated into resistant body practices by female artists such as Lorna Simpson, Nakeya Brown, Moshatari Hilal or Hoda Tawakol. In this way, they become a sign of empowerment and self-empowerment. The lecture will focus on how beauty concepts and discourses can also be decolonised through this.
About the guests:
Hélia Paukner is an art historian and curator at the Musée des civilisations d'Europe et de la Méditerranée (Mucem) in Marseille, France, where she is responsible for contemporary art. In this capacity, she co-curated the first retrospective of the artist Ghada Amer in France from 2022-2023. Among other things, she is currently leading a research project at Mucem on the art work of artists exiled in France.
Prof. Dr. Alexandra Karentzos is Professor of Fashion and Aesthetics at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Previously, she was a junior professor of art history at the University of Trier and a research assistant at the National Museums in Berlin. She was a fellow in the research group "No Laughing Matter. Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity" at Dartmouth College, Hanover/USA and at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald as well as a visiting scholar at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo/Brazil and at the University of Cincinnati/USA. She is co-founder and co-editor of the journal "Querformat. Contemporary, Art, Popular Culture"; a thematic issue on "Hair Politics" will soon be published by transcript. Her research focuses on art and fashion since the 19th century, postcolonial and gender studies, body aesthetics, art and fashion in the context of migration and tourism, and the reception of antiquities.
Kindly supported by
