Margareta Kern

Margareta Kern: ‘Dream State: hugs, dreams and British psychopolitics’
Journal of Visual Culture & Harun Farocki Institute, 2020

In the first dream I had at the start of the UK COVID-19 lockdown, I hugged a stranger. She was wearing some kind of uniform, maybe she was a nurse, or a care-worker, maybe not. I don’t know why I hugged her. I felt an enormous sense of fear, joy and pleasure as we hugged. Did I initiate the hug and she reciprocated? My dream was pervaded by anxiety. Why was I taking such a risk? I was fearful of getting infected, fearful that the police would see us hugging, or someone else would see us hugging and report us to the police. Our hug lasted a few seconds and then it was over.

This week I had two distinct dreams on two separate nights. In the first dream, I was in London and everyone was acting strange, keeping their distance, manoeuvring around each other. A close friend of mine appeared in the dream, distant, not just in terms of her keeping physical distance, but perhaps a more literal expression of ‘social distancing’. She did not smile at me, there was no warmth in her look, she was socially distant. We did not hug.

CONTINUE READING: “Dream State: hugs, dreams and British psychopolitics”.

GUESTures I GOSTIkulacije
Published by Balkanet e.V Munich and Margareta Kern, with the kind support of Kulturreferats der Landeshauptstadt München and in collaboration with Red Min(e)d and Galerie Kullukcu & Gregorian, Munich and Myrdle Court Press, London, 2014. 
82 pages, paperback, full colour, June 2014. 

The publication GUESTures draws upon Margareta Kerns’ long term project and engagement with the overlooked histories of women “guest workers”, who came to West Germany from the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia during the wave of mass migration from the late 1960s, for (temporary) work. This publication documents the genealogy of the project, and is accompanied with texts by Natalie Bayer, Nanna Heidenreich, Katja Kobolt and Branislava Kuburović that further raise questions about the visibility of precarious histories and feminist migration archives; the politics of display and regimes of knowledge on migration; and the role of fiction in the stories of migration.

+

Download new text by Margareta Kern, How to Speak Precarious Histories from a Precarious Position? in The Gastarbeiter: In Search of an Afterlife (published by eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2017).

Which Side is Art on? Dean Kenning and Margareta Kern, 
Art Monthly Feature, September 2013

In the face of government austerity measures which have squeezed artists and public arts provision more than any other sector, an elite art world has continued to prosper. Isn't it time that, in order to develop political agency in their work, artists begin to acknowledge this glaring dichotomy?

Talk Show on Resonance FM, 9th September 2013
Presented by Chris McCormack
Dean Kenning, Margareta Kern and Sophie J Williamson discuss art’s collusion with unquestioned capital. Listen to the podcast here.

To Whom Does the World Belong?
Exhibition catalogue (Serbian, English)
Published by the Cultural Centre Belgrade, 2015.

'The existential impulse – beatings of the heart – prevails over the stock exchange sound of the bell with its life force, while internalised contradictions of capitalism activate an affective space in which an emerging political articulation can be discerned as a demand for the construction of a different world. The politics of glitch in stopping the machinery of capitalism, the politics of hope in the universal dystopian image of an alienated world, movement of the revolution- body which lies motionless on the street – these are the red exhibition threads that the aesthetics of bare/scratched images are leading us through.'
Exhibition text by Jelena Petrović, Endowed Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.