Veranstaltung am 22. Mai - 24. Mai

A cooperation of the Society of Artistic Research (gkfd) with the Laboratory of Art and Research (University of Cologne), Transversal Design MA (Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW) and Temporary Gallery. 

Infrastructures do not simply provide the conditions for artistic practices—they actively perform and participate in shaping them. As funding landscapes across both cultural and academic sectors contract, this performativity becomes increasingly consequential. Practices situated at the intersection of art, research, and organisation—often processual, durational, and resistant to object-based output—are particularly exposed to structural fragility. 

This symposium convenes artists, curators, theorists, and cultural producers—to engage with the critical question of how infrastructures for transversal artistic practices might be sustained, collectively built or reimagined.  

Central to the discussion are questions such as: Through which formats and spatial strategies does artistic research create a public? What tensions exist between institutional frameworks and self-organised initiatives? What mechanisms of inclusion, exclusion, and precaritization are at play? Where can we locate zones of agency or resistance—conceptual, material, or infrastructural? 

By centering these questions, we aim not only to critique existing conditions but to articulate shared imaginaries and experimental infrastructures that could support the continued unfolding of artistic research. In doing so, we recognize infrastructure as a critical terrain—one that requires ongoing maintenance, care, and collective authorship. 

Concept and organisation: Karina Nimmerfall, Lucie Kolb and Leon Filter. 

PROGRAMME 

THURSDAY 22.5.2025 

Location:  University of Cologne / Laboratory of Art and Research 

18.00 EXHIBITION OPENING

Student projects by Amira Amzough, Evin Aydin, Antoine Barras, Anna Bendomir, Charlotte Bettinger, Helena Bleicher, Elena Blumenbach, Maika Dieterich, Helena Dietz-Röthlingshöfer, Aida Fall, Jana Fuest, Sonja Halupka, Jette Hartstack, Charlotte Emma Heyer, Jana Matilda Heyer, Emma Hiller, Lilli Hirschberger, Lina Kluge, Barbara Maczka, Elias Müller, Mareen Müller, Furkan Pinar, Mara Sandbothe, Lea Schenker, Elena Schippel, Julia Seifert, Caroline Stumm, Ann Luca Weiss, Maja Antonia Welke, Jana Wodicka and Lara Venjakob. 

18.30 Kartei des Universitären Unwohlseins 

Performative reading by Jana Wodicka 

18.45 Chatty Chatty 

A student-led talk with Karina Nimmerfall, Leon Filter, and Lea Krommen on the infrastructure behind the Laboratory of Art and Research.

Handmade refreshments by Transversal Design master students.

Chatty Chatty is organised by Barbara Maczka, Maria Maddalena Lenzi, Danuka Ana Tomas, Fabian Frey-Maziarski, Vivan Atieno, Julie Jihee Seo, Klara Jeltsch & Camila Chebez.

The contributions were developed in and alongside seminars of Ian Clewe, Leon Filter, Lucie Kolb, Kit Braybrooke, Karina Nimmerfall and Isabelle Sully. 

FRIDAY  23.5.2025 

Location: University of Cologne / Laboratory of Art and Research and .theater 

13.00 – 16.00 WORKSHOPS 

Für die Utopü ist es nie zu früh (It’s never too early for Utopü) 

With Anna Bromley  

Tricke-down Epistemology: Publishing as Infrastructure 

With Eric Otieno Sumba  

Open for UzK and HGK students only 

Location: Temporary Gallery 

17.00 EXHIBITION TOUR  

With artistic director Lisa Klosterkötter 

18.00 – 21.00 PUBLIC PROGRAMME 

18.00 Welcome and introduction by Karina Nimmerfall and Lucie Kolb 

18.20 From “Functional Sites” to “Infrastructures for Life” by Sabeth Buchmann 

18.40 Semi-Formal: Stuck Between an Institution and a Self-organised Place  

by Isabelle Sully 

19.00 Bureaucracy Studies by Matthias Sohr  

19.30 Panel with Isabelle Sully, Matthias Sohr, Sabeth Buchmann,  

moderated by Lilian Haberer 

20.30 Who is You: A Letter to the Editors, performed by Leon Filter 

SATURDAY, 24.5.2025 

Location: University of Cologne / Laboratory of Art and Research 

10.00 – 12.45 PUBLIC PROGRAMME 

10.00 Welcome 

10.15 Trickle-down Epistemology, Publishing Infrastructures and the Plausible Deniability of Distributional Flows by Eric Otieno Sumba  

10.35 The Performance of Distribution, Response by Karolin Meunier 

10.45 Discussion 

11.15 Break 

11.30 Für die Utopü ist es nie zu früh (It’s never too early for Utopü) by Anna Bromley  

11.50 Response by Swantje Lichtenstein 

12.00 Discussion 

12.30 Closing Remarks by Karina Nimmerfall and Lucie Kolb 

12.45 Lunch Break 

 14.00 – 17.00 GKFD ANNUAL MEMBERS MEETING 

non-public 

CONTRIBUTORS: 

Sabeth Buchmann 

From “Functional Sites” to “Infrastructures for Life”  

The continued critique of institutional critique has contributed to its revisions from the perspectives of exploited lives as well as of socio-technical transformations. While procedures associated with institutional critique have not disappeared, they do reveal a shift from space-based to time-based practices. This shift, already briefly anticipated in the 1995 essay “The Functional Site” by US-American art historian James Meyer, continues in the essay “Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Toward Infrastructural Critique” by US-American art theorist Marina Vishmidt, published twenty years later. Through comparative views of exemplary artist collectives in the overlapping zones between cultural institutions and socio-technical infrastructures my input will explore the resonances of infrastructural thinking for its unavoidable institutionalization. 

Sabeth Buchmann (Berlin/ Vienna), teaches History of Modern and Postmodern Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. She is co-editor of PoLyPen—a series on art criticism and political theory (b_books); board member of Texte zur Kunst, Zeszyty Artystyczne, the European Kunsthalle and the documenta Institut. Recent publications: Kunst als Infrastruktur (2023), Broken Relations: Infrastructure, Aesthetic, and Critique (2022, co-ed.). 

Isabelle Sully 

Semi-Formal: Stuck between an institution and a self-organised place  

‘Semi-formal’ is a categorisation assigned to a style of clothing sitting somewhere ambiguously between dressy and casual—one often a cause for confusion when stated on an invitation. Taking this contradictory conjunction as a metaphor, this talk will plot out both the difficulties and benefits of working within spaces that are both self-organised and institutional at once. As an organisational condition endemic to the current cultural climate in the Netherlands—a country where arts funding, while now under threat, is plentiful—Isabelle Sully will speak about this through her experience as artistic director of A Tale of A Tub in Rotterdam. Key to the practices of the artists and examples that will punctuate the talk is administrative intervention as a site for artistic subversion. 

Isabelle Sully is an artist, curator and writer. Working with feminist histories in mind, she takes the mechanisms and materiality of administration as the main focus within her work, developing conceptual projects that span experimental writing, sculpture, performance, exhibition-making and publishing. Originally from Melbourne/Naarm, she now lives in Rotterdam where she is the founding editor of Unbidden Tongues, co-editor of Tangents and co-curator of Playbill, Amsterdam. Her involvement with the administrative sphere of institutional practice played out in her previous role as assistant director-curator (2020–2024) at Kunstverein, Amsterdam, and currently as artistic director (since 2024) at A Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam.   

Matthias Sohr 

Bureaucracy Studies 

The exhibitions, events, and publications shared by Bureaucracy Studies can be understood as a place of hospital-ity where a multitude of bodies and voices meet. In terms of public health, dialogue and trust are the medicines administered by Bureaucracy Studies—cures that bureaucracies rarely prescribe. 

Matthias Sohr is an artist and cultural historian. Exhibitions and easy languages are his preferred media. Sohr has shown his sculptures and performances internationally, including at the Korean Cultural Centre UK, London; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT); Museum Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; CAN Centre d’art Neuchâtel; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; La Salle de bains, Lyon, etc. He is the founding director of Bureaucracy Studies and co-director of CIRCUIT Centre d’art contemporain, Lausanne. For the Journal of Bureaucracy Studies, he was awarded the 2023 Swiss Art Award in the category “Critique Publishing Exhibition”. 

Lilian Haberer 

Panel moderator 

Lilian Haberer (Cologne), teaches history and theory aof Art with expanded concepts of material at Academy of Media Arts Cologne. In her research she works on epistemologies of materiality and movement, tactility of photography, moving image and (post-)digital media, social ecologies, the reflections of modernities such as collective and transversal practices of contemporary art. She is board member of Temporary Gallery and the European Kunsthalle. Recent Publications: “Displaced Migrant Mobility: On Reappropriating Spaces Through Embodied Materiality”, in:  Entangled Histories of Art and Migration.ed. by Bublatzky/Dogramaci/Pinther/Schieren, London: Intellect 2024; Text\Werk. Lektüren zu Hito Steyerl, Berlin: Hatje Cantz 2022; Movement | Mouvement. Handlungsfelder des Ästhetischen und Politischen in der Kunst, München: edition metzel 2022 (both co-ed.). 

Leon Filter 

Who is You? A Letter to the Editors 

Who is You? A Letter to the Editors is a performed film and nighttime correspondence between generations of queer thought, desire, and political contradictions. Set against the rural-industrial fringe of a small West German town, the piece traces a nocturnal landscape where memory, masculinity, and counterpublics are layered like the infrastructures that shape them. Blending voice-over, archival on-screen readings and off-screen presence, this letter inquires a 1970s gay liberation publication, challenging its exclusions while recognizing its revolutionary reach. The letter is a return, a revision, and a reverberation across time. 

Leon Filter is an artist and researcher working with performative reading, video and publishing. In his practice, he examines conditions and historical and political implications of personal narratives, often in collaborative forms. His research’s practical and theoretical concern for anecdotal knowledge and the connections it allows is influenced by documentary, essayistic and performative filmic practices, specifically under the aspects of pedagogy, authorship and unfitness. 

Eric Otieno Sumba 

Trickle-down Epistemology – Publishing Infrastructures and the Plausible Deniability of Distributional Flows

If publishing is considered the basic, underlying framework or feature of knowledge production, what, where and how things are published and distributed demonstrates how knowledge is produced and how it geographically and metaphorically travels. What then do distribution networks tell us about publishing as an infrastructure of knowledge production? What is the role of the publisher in this constellation? And how much can really be known about the structure of distributional flows?  

Eric Otieno Sumba is a writer and independent researcher with a background in social theory, political economy, postcolonial studies and art criticism. He is currently editor (publication practices) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. Recent editorial projects include “Destination Tashkent: Experiences of Cinematic Internationalism” (2024), and “Echos der Bruderländer: Visionen und Illusionen antiimperialistischer Solidarität” (2024). Recent curatorial projects (with Spazio Griot) include the exhibition and public programme “Riverberi” (2024) at Mattatoio in Rome. His writing has been published in Contemporary And, Africa is a Country, Lolwe, The Guardian, Griotmag, Frieze, Sleek, Monopol, Texte zur Kunst, and Camera Austria, among others. 

Karolin Meunier 

The Performance of Distribution Response to Trickle-down Epistemology 

Going public is only one step in the production of a work, and not necessarily the last. When we refer to already published material, such as a film or a text, do we consider the story of its distribution at different times? And how do we acknowledge that showing a film in a learning environment, for example in a university context, is also an act of contributing to that story? To address these questions, she will draw on my experience with feminist film distribution. 

Karolin Meunier is an artist, writer and educator based in Berlin. Her performance, text and video works explore the implications of different cultural techniques. Her research focuses on feminist strategies in film and literature, translation processes and the politics of dialogue. In 2025 she received her PhD at the HFBK Hamburg. She is a member of the collective bookstore and publisher b_books in Berlin. Her artist book “A Commentary on Vai pure by Carla Lonzi” is forthcoming. 

Anna Bromley 

Für die Utopü ist es nie zu früh (It’s never too early for Utopü). 

A workshop around sounding pamphlets and amplifying units  

“It’s never too early for utopü” writes an environmental activist in a booklet that Anna purchased with two cassettes from Radio Freies Wendland. All three protest testimonies are packed in a—now antiquarian—cardboard case in which the audio cassettes were distributed in leftist book and info stores. Live broadcasts of a clandestine radio station from 1980 can be listened to on the two audio cassettes. The case with the cassette tapes and a booklet containing texts and photos of the protesters that operated the radio station, were published a year later by the Network-Medien-Cooperative in Frankfurt am Main. It spread the voices on the cassettes and in the texts. Now they were roaming through leftist libraries, communal living spaces, inheritances—and, after all, second-hand bookshops. 

In German, “It’s never too early for utopü” is a joking rhyme whose umlauts sound comical. Does the sound of the phrase function as a sensory evocation of a new and differently imagined relationship between orality and writing within activist mobilisation media? And how do protests, strikes and occupations sound like here? The booklet claims that the voices of protest radio refuse to be squeezed through the eye of the written language needle. How can this refusal be artistically comprehended or reactivated? The workshop and talk revolve around artistic research through vocal re-enactments. 

Anna Bromley is an artist and writer. Her furtive radio listening in the disintegrating GDR forms the starting point of her artistic research on clandestine protest radio. Following an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach, she dispatches her own radio voice in search of improvised radio speech beyond state-supported broadcasters, hand-soldered amplifiers, police surveillance protocols, and polyphonic memories. In the process, she combines her auditory essays with objects and installations, performances and processual drawings. 

Bromley’s radio assemblages have recently been heard and seen in the German Pavilion at the 23rd Triennale di Milano, at Manifesta 14 in Prishtina, at beuys2021 in Düsseldorf, at Onassis Stegi Athens, at the Kolumba Art Museum and the Akademie der Künste der Welt—both in Cologne, at the Akademie der Künste and HKW—both in Berlin, and documenta14 in Kassel. She is a faculty member at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. 

Swantje Lichtenstein 

Response to Für die Utopü ist es nie zu früh  

Swantje Lichtenstein is a sound artist, musician, poet, performer. Lichtenstein’s main interests are transtextual performative amplifications of languages, sound and music, as well as researching electro-acoustic and conceptual recordings from a trans-medial and feminist perspective. They performed worldwide on various festivals and locations: Heroines of Sound Festival, Berlin, Sound-Text-Festival, Issue Project Room/Goethe Institute New York, non event, Boston, Poetic Voices Africa-Festival, Cologne, Sound Eye-Festival, Cork, International Poetry Festival, Bucarest, Istanbul, Turkey, Gundalajara/Mexico City, Salon de Poesie/Goethe Institute, European Writers Festival, Yerevan, reihe M, Cologne etc. Lichtenstein has taught as a professor for aesthetic practices in Düsseldorf and in several international universities and institutions around the world. 

Karina Nimmerfall 

Symposium co-organiser 

Karina Nimmerfall is a visual artist whose work interweaves both sculptural installation and language with various forms of photographic, computer-generated or moving imagery, blending documentary and speculative strategies that create different real-and-imagined time-space constellations. Since 2014 she has been a professor for Interdisciplinary Artistic-Media Practice and Theory at the Department of Art and Music at the University of Cologne, where she initiated the Laboratory for Art and Research. 

Lucie Kolb 

Symposium co-organiser 

Lucie Kolb is a researcher, editor, and educator whose work unfolds through long-term editorial, curatorial, and publishing projects. She is a founding editor of Brand-New-Life, an open-access journal for art criticism that fosters collective writing and critical discourse on contemporary art and its socio-political contexts. Her practice encompasses editing journals, commissioning texts, designing discursive frameworks, and curating publishing formats that traverse digital, print, and spatial mediums. Lucie teaches at IXDM, HGK Basel, where she is Professor of Critical Publishing in the MA Transversal Design programme and leads the MAKE/SENSE PhD programme.