Margareta Kern, ‘Thursday War’ (2024) Work-in-development. Courtesy of the artist.
Read about THURSDAY WAR HERE.
Very exciting news! I have been awarded an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice Grant 2023/2024.
The grant will enable me to develop skills in creating ambitious works that cross disciplinary boundaries between performance and film, and help me gain confidence using my voice & autobiography to amplify marginalised stories, including migrant, feminist & pacifist perspectives.
I feel very grateful to have been awarded this opportunity, which will allow me to work with amazing mentors: cellist & composer Julia Kent, performance artist Natasha Davis, writer & performer Caroline Bergvall and soprano Ljiljana Winkler.
Please join my mailing list or drop me a line, if you are interested in following my work.
Law & Performance
The Westminster Law & Theory Lab, University of Westminster, London
November 2023
As part of the ‘Law & Performance’ day of performances and presentations, I presented a new lecture-performance on the use of migrant labour in the British military (p)re-enactments. This is a new body of work and research, part funded by the DYCP grant from the Arts Council England.
London Migrant Film Festival
November 2023
It was a pleasure to contribute towards a panel discussion following the UK premiere of a brilliant, new film from Bosnia-Herzegovina “The Happiest Man in the World” (2022, dir: Teona Strugar Mitevska).
T-ERROR UN-CLASSIFIED 00-XX
6. October – 29. January 2023
VBKO, Austrian Association of Women Artists, Vienna
Artists: Lana Čmajčanin, Marina Gržinić & Aina Šmid, Flaka Haliti, Ana Hoffner *ex-Prvulovic, Margareta Kern, Katalin Ladik, Svetlana Maraš, Red Mined, Milica Tomić. Curated by Jelena Petrović.
The T-Errors Un-Classified 00-xx exhibition deals with art geographies and politics of non/belonging created through contemporary systems of classifying and curating art within the geopolitically shaped archives.
As part of T-Errors Un-Classified 00-xx Margareta Kern is showing ‘The Body State’ (2013) accompanied by two drawings on acitate, remainders and reminders of the animation process for the video of the same title. Further information about the exhibition here.
‘This is all for now…’
Material: Giclee Print on Baryta paper
Size: 20 x 16 inch / 508 x 407 mm
Edition: 10, signed by the artist
Price: £150
The photograph ‘This is all for now…’ shows personal letters of the ‘guest workers’ I interviewed for my long-term project GUESTures (GOSTIkulacije) that maps the links between labour migration, gender and representation. Women make up a large proportion of migrant workers, yet their stories are still largely absent from the official histories and archives. All the women I interviewed migrated from Yugoslavia to West-Berlin in the late 1960s to work in the factories producing video and television equipment (the official term in Germany for those workers was ‘Gastarbeiter/innen’ – a guest worker). They gave me access and permission to scan the letters which they exchanged with their families at the time of their arrival to Germany. Letters were printed onto transparencies, and exhibited as part of my touring exhibition GUESTures | GOSTIkulacije (2011-2019). In the photograph shown here the transparencies are layered on top of each other, so that just some of the personal content and sentences like ‘this is all for now, next time I will write more’ are visible. For more info about the project and the associated art-works please see: https://www.margaretakern.com/works#/guesturesproject/
Journal of Visual Culture’s (JVC) has launched a fundraiser to support those worst-hit and most neglected by the official response to the earthquakes of 6 February whose epicentres were in southern Turkey. As part of the fundraiser, special editions of artworks and signed publications are available, including my photograph ‘This is all for now…’ (Margareta Kern, 2023).
Proceeds will be divided equally between two organisations: the Diyarbakır Bar Association (based in Turkey’s largest predominantly Kurdish inhabited city) and The White Helmets (also known as the Syria Civil Defense).
Margareta Kern: Thursday War
31st May, 2022 at 17.30h.
Studio Building / Lehárgasse 8 / 1060 Vienna /2. floor, Multi-Purpose Space
Part of Spring Curatorial Program 2022: Art Geographies
Thursday War, a lecture-performance by Margareta Kern, combines the autobiographical, the fictional and the factual to explore the representational possibilities of unravelling the militarist frame. Located somewhere between Anglia and Fantasia, the narrative takes us through the events witnessed from a kitchen window: ships training for a future war, Chinook helicopters flying low, submarines named after sea mammals collecting secrets. Choreographed to fictional scenarios, these war-game (p)re-enactments have been named by the British Navy as a ‘Thursday War’. In assembling the material collected and recorded over the past six years - documentary and archival footage, correspondence letters, local news reports, military tweets - Kern raises a series of representational questions and problems around the (im)possibility of images to resist the militarised logic, and a potential of (auto)fiction to produce oppositional images that confront it.
Spring Curatorial Program 2022: Art Geographies explores the relationship between art, theory and politics by dealing with borders, maps, myths, landscapes, wars, territories and other planetary phenomena of today’s geographies. Following emancipatory ways of social subjectivation (the politics of belonging) rather than representative modes of geopolitical identification (the politics of identity), the program focuses on critical, decolonial, feminist and material dimensions of planetary co-existence. Further information here.
Further information about the talk and the venue: here.
NEW BOOK: Pause. Fervour. Reflections on a Pandemic
Text by Margareta Kern: ‘Dream State: hugs, dreams and British psychopolitics’
Journal of Visual Culture & Harun Farocki Institute, 2022
“Dream State: hugs, dreams and British psychopolitics” a text by Margareta Kern, has been published by the Journal of Visual Culture & Harun Farocki Institut as part of the book Pause. Fervour. Reflections on a Pandemic.
Download the book here.
Contributors: Danah Abdulla; Elisa Adami; Alexandra Délano Alonso; Edinson Arroyo; Arts Catalyst with Gary Zhexi Zhang and Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak (Pirate Care); Oreet Ashery; Nika Autor; Daniel A. Barber Jordan Baseman; Dave Beech; Sara Blaylock; Katarzyna Bojarska; Kimberly Juanita Brown; Eray Çayli; Teresa Cisneros; Tom Corby; David Dibosa; Death Class; Ruth Ewan; Alessandra Ferrini; Janine Francois; Lina Hakim; Juliet Jacques; Helene Kazan; Dean Kenning; Margareta Kern; Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam Yve Lomax; Laura U. Marks Shannon Mattern; Jordan McKenzie; Joel McKim; Vladimir Milandinović and Stephenie Young; Philip Miller and Marcos Martins; Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot; Bahar Noorizadeh; The Partisan Social Club; Andreas Philippouloulos-Mihalopoulos; Pil and Galia Kollektiv; Plastique Fantastique; Amit S. Rai John Paul Ricco; Vanessa Schwartz; Jelena Stojković; Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead; Atej Tutta and Valeria Cozzarini; Isobel Wohl; and Andrea Luka Zimmerman.
Pause. Fervour. Reflections on a Pandemic is co-published by the Harun Farocki Institut and Journal of Visual Culture, designed by Simon Pavič, and edited by Manca Bajec, Tom Holert, and Marquard Smith, 245 pages, self-published (by JVC and HaFI), ISBN 978-1-5272-9544-5
Margareta Kern: Guestures, Solo exhibition at the Kreuzberg Museum, Berlin, May - July 2019
Margareta Kern: GUESTures
Solo exhibition at Kreuzberg Museum, Berlin
23 May - 28 July 2019
In discussion with Bosiljka Schedlich and Katja Kobolt, Monday 27th May 2019, 6pm.
GUESTures, a project that I started 10 years ago in Berlin, has come full circle! I am especially pleased that it will be shown at Kreuzberg Museum, where I started my initial research into labour migrations of the women who came from the socialist Yugoslavia to West-Germany, in the late 1960s as ‘guest workers’. Women made up a large proportion of migrant workers, yet their stories are largely left out of the official histories and archives.
GUESTures, a solo exhibition by Margareta Kern critically questions historical and gendered constructions of the figure of ‘guest-worker’, opening up themes of migration, precarisation of work and visibility of women’s labour. Displayed as an installation of connected works, the exhibition contains personal photographs, interview excerpts and letters from the women the artist interviewed in Berlin, who arrived from Yugoslavia in the late 1960s to work in factories making televisions and radios. Central to the exhibition is a two-channel film, a re-enactment that weaves in interviewed women’s narratives, archival footage from a Siemens factory and artist’s own labour of creating a film-set. Thus, there is a constant doubling-up at play: of memories and narratives, of time, of home, and of the image.
GUESTures opens up questions about the role of Museums in archiving migration, its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and its potentiality as a counter-archive.
Further information here: https://www.fhxb-museum.de
More about the project and research: From Guests to GUESTures: 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).
Forces/Fields: three works on conflict, militarism and their legacies
Margareta Kern, Rachel Garfield and Anne Robinson
7th November, 2019 at 7.30pm, the Star & Shadow Cinema, Newcastle
Examining the persistent and pervasive presence of war in all of our lives, each artist engages with the complexities of militarism and conflict: Robinson ‘listening to the past’ through fragmented intergenerational memory, Garfield asking questions about 20th century certainties through subjective experiences in military outposts and Kern interrogating the presence of ships and war games too close to home. Followed by a discussion with Professor Rachel Woodward (Newcastle University).
Further info and free tickets: here
About Thursday War: here
Margareta Kern, ‘bodies (that) can’t take anymore. images (that) can’t take anymore’, HD video, loop, 2013
The Unknown Knowns
29 March - 22 May 2019
The Levinsky Gallery, Plymouth, Free admission
In a world where data is as valuable as land, how vigilantly are we protecting our most prized assets, and how much of ourselves is available on the open market?
By sharing our personal preferences, thumbprints and 3D face scans how easily can we be tracked and influenced and who is watching on the other side of the telescreen?
In 'The Unknown Knowns', Plymouth-based curator Vickie Fear brings together artists using appropriated material to expose hidden truths and ask questions about the world we live in. Responding to the work of three filmmakers commissioned by the Arts Institute in partnership with the South West Film & Television Archive in 2018, 'The Unknown Knowns' makes connections between artists who draw from a range of sources, including public archives and popular culture. Contained in these works are conversations about privacy, media influence, propaganda, colonialism and truth.
Are we living in a science fiction? What are we really scared of? And if the known unknowns are the things we know that we don’t know, what don’t we know that we know?
The following artists will be exhibiting in this exhibition: Chris Bailey and Ieuan Jones, Richard Broomhall, Margareta Kern, Tabita Rezaire, Marcy da Silva Saude, Erica Scourti.
Margareta Kern is exhibiting ‘bodies (that) can’t take anymore. images (that) can’t take anymore.
This is a partnership exhibition delivered by The Arts Institute and The Box, Plymouth.
Margareta Kern: Are You Ready?
Friday 22nd March 2019
Doors open at 7pm, performance starts 7.30pm
Ocean Studios, Plymouth, UK
Are You Ready? performance-lecture by Margareta Kern speculates on possible future scenarios where imaginaries of sovereignty and freedom have taken the shape of a sprawling, privatised ‘city-state’ on the ocean.
Presented as a Ted-talk style business ‘pitch’ of a fictional tech-conglomerate named Ocean Global that is building its first island in Plymouth Sound, the performance confronts us with a privatised world where governments compete for ‘seatizens’ by becoming ‘service providers’ in a floating world whose only organising principle is free market and competition. Drawing on a range of existing libertarian proposals for the new floating ‘city-states’ or ‘seasteads’ that promise techno-social freedom on the ocean (imagined as the ultimate ‘terra nullius’) the performance explores how narratives of ‘freedom’ promulgate crypto-fascist tendencies and neoreactionary imaginaries, from the tech industry of Silicon Valley into our everyday.
Are You Ready? is a provocative meditation on our contemporary moment where fantasies of exit continue to disrupt and fragment. It is also a powerful and hopeful search for a resistant algaerithm pulsating under the surface of our vision.
The first wireless communication sent by Marconi over the open sea asked ‘are you ready’?
Supported by the Arts Council England Project Grant, 2018-2019 and Real Ideas Organisation. Commissioned as part of Whitstable Biennale 2018.
The Megascope, Fig. 24, in A. E. Dolbear: The Art of Projecting. A Manual of Experimentation in Physics, Chemistry, and Natural History with the Porte Lumière and Magic Lantern, 1877.
Friday 15th March 2019, 6-8pm
Margareta Kern and Susan Kelly: Nobody But Us
Centre for Law & the Humanities, School of Law, Birkbeck - Room 101
Birkbeck School of Law 2018-19 Artist in Residence Margareta Kern and artist Susan Kelly will share research from their new collaboration entitled Nobody But Us. The event is an open 2-hour seminar which assembles images and material that explore the connections between positive psychology, technology, governance and soft military power.
Nobody But Us looks at the techniques of persuasion, instruction, coercion and prediction used by companies who specialize in big data ‘behavioural change’ and ‘influence operations’ (SCL, Cambridge Analytica, Google etc.), and the history of ‘dual use’ civilian and military research that enabled them. The project interrogates histories of dual psychological and military practice in counter-insurgency struggles in the former British colonies where ‘rehabilitation’ techniques were used to ‘cleanse’ and re-constitute compliant colonial subjects.
The project begins to assemble documentary images, didactic images, instructional visuals, archives and diagrams that piece together a story that traces continuities between seemingly soft power and violence, then and now. Who are the main protagonists? How can we see the subtle techniques through which subjects are governed, made and re-made today? How are ‘technologies of the visual’ imbricated in these processes of subject-making and persuasion?
This project probes at how psychological discourse and techniques provide acceptable cover for often deeply violent practices of subjugation, control and extraction. It seeks to intervene in the complex knot of processes that are today producing a society that is increasingly riven by protectionist, segmented and fascistic formations and is increasingly controlled by techniques of counter-insurgency and surveillance.
‘Nobody But Us’ (or NOBUS) was a phrase used by the NSA (National Security Agency) in the US to refer to security vulnerabilities that they believed only their agencies can exploit (Zeynep Tüfekçi, 2018). NOBUS evokes an image of an exclusive collectivity, where the ‘us’ is made up of those who are the same as ourselves: a unified collectivity that must not be breached.