Broaden the Narrative

This conversation between the curator for international media and performance art at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, and research assistant at the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities, Lieselotte Schinzing, is based on their common interest in the methodological approaches of Donna Haraway and Ursula Le Guin on Narration and Embodiment. Their conversation takes as a foundation the curatorial practice of Anna-Catharina Gebbers in specific anticipation for her upcoming exhibition, Nation, Narration, Narcosis, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, part of the research and exhibition project Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories. Initially from their own work environments, later together between artworks, they are opening up questions surrounding an art historical canon and ways to perhaps disrupt its exclusive rigidity through a cross-conceptual way of thinking, bringing together many influences and approaches. Anna-Catharina Gebbers explores the process of conceiving the exhibition as an example of such thinking and talks through two artworks by Joseph Beuys, as one of the starting points for the exhibition, but not its centre, embodying different stories by means of their materiality. Coming back from the detailed to conceiving an entirety, Ursula Le Guin and Donna Haraway come up as sparks to broaden this linear narrative of art history, towards a pluri-vocal exhibition, and staying calm through stirring up trouble.