The Body That Moves
Performance & Lecture Program

Platform 82 | Goethestraße 82, 10623 Berlin

15.05.2024, 20h
performance
Judith Raum
Rock and Clay Improvisations (2024)

Platform 82 is proud to present in the context of The Body That Moves a lecture performance by Judith Raum. Rock and Clay Improvisations tells of British secret agent Gertrude Bell and her field photography in Mesopotamia. 

British historian and diplomat Gertrude Bell (1884-1926) had early discovered the Eastern parts of the Ottoman Empire – nowadays Syria, Jordan, and Iraq – as well as Arabia as a passion. She spoke Arabic fluently and travelled the region extensively, leaving behind more than 6000 photographs. Nevertheless, for a long time, public attention was focused less on her photographic work and more on the different roles she took on: as an author, as an early woman-traveler, as a British secret agent in Mesopotamia, and as a central figure in the foundation of modern Iraq (1921).

Bell’s movements in the Middle East as an archaeologist and European woman were part of a problematic intersection of colonial powers and interests. The lecture performance looks at her photographs as an impossible site for disturbances and distortions in related attitudes. The visual language Bell chose in her photography indicates a readiness to get close up and let herself be affected, especially when compared to ways in which Bell’s contemporaries in archaeology used the medium. Do Bell's photographs challenge the regime of the gaze and the scientific conformism of the time? In the course of the performance, the notion of the shadow becomes the central formal and narrative element.

Judith Raum adapted her lecture performance piece, consisting of a dense interplay of text, image projection, and sculptural action originally produced for the Live Works Performance Act Award in Dro, Italy in 2018, for the spaces of Platform 82. 

Language: English
Duration: 40 Min

Judith Raum’s artistic practise is marked by a strong research-based and interdisciplinary approach. Raum works in installation and lecture performance with a focus on abstract and figurative painting and drawing to be included into her space- and time-based work. She builds detailed narratives that reference economic and social history, postcolonial critique, medium specificity, and conditions of artistic production. After extended artistic research into German economic colonialism in the Ottoman Empire as well as projects connected with notions of textility, she lately concentrated on the textile workshop at the Bauhaus. 

Judith Raum (b. 1977) studied painting and fine arts at the Staedelschule, Academy of fine Arts, Frankfurt/Main, and at the Cooper Union School of Art & Parsons School of Design, New York. Raum was awarded the first prize in the competition to design the entrance area of the W. Michael Blumenthal Academy at the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2023 and the Villa Romana Prize in 2015. She was artist-in-residence at Villa Massimo Rome / Casa Baldi in 2021. Her performances and video works were recently presented at Villa Romana, Florence; MoMA, New York; The Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; House of World Cultures (HKW), Berlin; Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Salt, Istanbul; ifa Gallery Berlin, among others. Raum publishes extensively, most recently: Otti Berger: Weaving for Modernist Architecture (Hatje Cantz, spring 2024), edited for Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung; Bauhaus Space (ifa Gallery, 2017); eser (Archive Books, 2015). She lives and works in Berlin.

Program by: Marjolein van der Meer & Nazlı Yayla

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