Catalogue > At random

The video installation "Hugging Angela Davis" is a filmic, performative investigation of a spontaneous hug between Angela Davis and a young East German. The woman, Erika Berthold, was the daughter of communist functionaries and married to the son of the famous communist dissident Robert Havemann, and was active in oppositional circles herself. The work probes into the potentiality opened by this encounter between the two figures and their political struggles. It weaves the narrative questioning of this encounter with a filmic and performative examination of the motif of the embrace as a somatic, affective, political gesture. What can be made of the two women's mutual recognition, their shared departure from protocol? How does their momentary complicity cross or complicate cultural and political differences and ascriptions? What might a - dissident - politics of the hug look like? "Hugging Angela Davis" is part of the long term project "A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures" – which looks at the body as the site and archive of historical experiences.

Elske Rosenfeld, born 1974 in Halle/S.(GDR), works in different media and formats. Her primary focus and material are the histories of state-socialism and its dissidences, and the revolution of 1989/90. Documents and archives are starting points for organising spaces in which these hi/stories can come to be present. Her ongoing project “A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures” investigates how political events manifest and come to be archived in the bodies of their protagonists. Her works have been featured in international exhibitions, among others at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2020; Goethe Institute Moscow (2020), “Palast der Republik, Haus der Berliner Festpiele (2019), f/stop Leipzig (2018), Gorki Herbstsalon III (2017), mumok kino, Vienna (2016), steirischer herbst festival, Graz (2015), Devi Art Foundation, Delhi (2013) and “Former West”, Utrecht (2010). In 2018 together with Suza Husse she organized the project “wild recuperations. material from below. Artistic Research in the Archive of the GDR Opposition”. In 2019 she co-curated the festival “Palast der Republik” at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.