The Knight's Move: Ursula Biemann

The registration of the full lecture can be viewed on dvd in the library Stroom Den Haag.

Thursday 22 January 2009, 8 pm
Location: Hogewal 1-9
Spoken language: English

Stroom Den Haag starts the year with 'The Knight's Move', a series of lectures by eminent international speakers who stand out by their unusual, enlightening and inspirational visions concerning the city, urbanity, the public domain, and community. Just as the knight moves in an atypical and unusual way across the chessboard, Stroom likewise wants to cut across all disciplines and thus stimulate rethinking the city.

First in line is the Swiss artist, theoretician and curator Ursula Biemann, who will talk about her artistic practice. Best known for her video essays, she has developed a unique aesthetic language for topics of migration, mobility, technology and gender. Biemann will give insight into her newly published monograph 'Mission Reports' covering ten years of video research which the artist has conducted throughout contested trans-national territories of the world.

Ursula Biemann's artistic practice examines contemporary forms of migration, mobility, technology and gender in relationship to space. In a series of internationally exhibited video projects, as well as in several books ('Geography and the Politics of Mobility', 2003; 'Stuff It - The Video Essay in the Digital Age', 2003; ‘The Maghreb Connection, 2006') and her new monograph 'Mission Reports' (2008) she has focused on the gendered dimension of migration, from smuggling on the Spanish-Moroccan border to migrant sex workers in the global context. Insisting that location is spatially produced rather than pre-determined by governance, she made space and mobility her prime category of analysis in the art and research projects 'Black Sea Files' on the Caspian oil politics (2005, Berlin) and 'Sahara Chronicle' (2006, Cairo/Geneva) mapping out the transit migration in the Maghreb. The most recent video essay 'X-Mission' (2008) is an analysis of the Palestinian refugee camps as a zone of exception, which premiered at the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008). All of her projects are research oriented and carried out in complex forms of collaborations with academics, NGO members, and other practitioners.

'Mission Reports. Artistic Practice in the Field - Ursula Biemann Video Works 1998-2008 | 2008'
208 pages, illustrated, color, English
Publisher: Bildmuseet/Arnolfini Bristol
Distributor: Cornerhouse Publishers
€ 29,00
ISBN  978 0 907738 91 6

www.cornerhouse.org

The Knight' s Move
The move of the knight in chess is often used as a metaphor for the unexpected - and illogical- connections between ideas, thus leading to surprisingly new insights.

This series of lectures is made possible by the financial support of the Netherlands Architecture Fund.


Archive 'The Knight's Move' 2009-present

Ursula Biemann during her lecture at Stroom
photo: Henk Augustijn