Enacting Prefigurative Politics through Art: Afterthoughts on ruangrupa’s documenta fifteen

IAS Alumni Fellow Professor Anne Ring Petersen delivers a seminar on their research - 

This presentation centres on documenta fifteen, a globally influential quinquennial exhibition curated by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa and held in 2022. It delves into how ruangrupa's curatorial concept of 'lumbung' served as a generative methodology and infrastructure, pointing towards future collective practices grounded in principles of sustainability, cooperation and redistribution.

A notable aspect of Documenta fifteen was its unprecedented involvement of 1,500 participants, comprising both individuals and collectives, in the formation of a 'lumbung community'. This presentation zooms in on one of the contributing collectives, the Trampoline House – a welcoming community centre for asylum seekers and local citizens in Copenhagen – to shed light on how members of the 'lumbung community' embraced ruangrupa's principles in their contributions to documenta fifteen. It further explores how they developed and enacted a transversal and prefigurative approach to art, addressing the challenges of an era marked by accelerating crises that transcend national borders.

Anne Ring Petersen is Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research explores transcultural and migratory approaches to and forms of cultural production, focusing especially on the transformative impact of migration, postmigration and globalization on contemporary art practices and identity formation. Her most recent research project is ‘Togetherness in Difference: Reimagining identities, communities and histories through art’ (2019-2023). It develops topics from her publications Migration into art: Transcultural identities and art-making in a globalised world (2017) and the co-authored book Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition (2019). She is also co-editor and contributor to the volume The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories (2015) and the author of a major study on installation art Installation Art: Between Image and Stage (2015).

Arrivals from 11:45 am for a 12:00 noon start. For those joining in-person, lunch will be served from 1:00pm.

This event is hybrid format, please use the required booking button at the bottom of the page to choose either in-person or online attendance.
(Please note that in-person spaces are limited and booking is required, so we can manage numbers for catering and also the space inside International House)

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