Performing Recalcitrance, a week-long public programme taking place at Kungl. Konsthögskolan | Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm between March 24 and March 30, 2012.  www.kkh.se/performing-recalcitrance

Concept and coordination:
Olav Westphalen, Professor of Fine Art at the Royal Institute of Art
Stefanie Hessler, Curator

Alexander Kluge
Film screening: 27.3, 16.00–18.00
Moderna Museet, Biografen

The filmmaker, author, philosopher, cultural theorist, and media politician Alexander Kluge is one of the most idiosyncratic and prolific figures in German cinema and television. Alongside his work as a director of such influential films as “The Power of Emotion”, “Germany in Autumn” and “Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed“, he has been a singular force in the debate around public and private Television in Germany for the past 20 years. Since 1988, he has produced more than 1500 hours of radically independent cultural programming for private broadcasting companies, thus keeping television open to what happens outside the commercial markets. Conducive digression and discourse are characteristic of his interview technique. In his dialogues about books, films and art the author’s voice is foregrounded, resulting in legendary conversations with interlocutors such as Heiner Müller, Einar Schleef or H.M. Enzensberger. In his magazine without words, in his city and music reports, and in formats such as “Facts & Fakes,” Kluge explores, stubbornly and without any concern for rating figures, what television can possibly communicate. For Performing Recalcitrance, a selection of Kluge’s productions for television will be introduced and discussed by Diana Baldon, director of Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation . The program has been organized in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Stockholm.

Alexander Kluge was born in 1932 in Halberstadt and received his doctor’s degree in Law in 1956. He became juridical adviser of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and a confidant to T.W. Adorno. Since the 1960s, Kluge became well known as author and filmmaker. In 1962, he published the “Oberhausen Manifesto” together with 25 young filmmakers, which became the forerunner of New German Cinema. Since 1988, Kluge has been active in German private television as reaction to the termination of funds for independent filmmaking by the government. With the foundation of his dctp (Development Company for Television Programme), he created a platform for an independent programme within private German television in order to assert uncommercial screenings and a pluralistic broadness.

Diana Baldon is an Italian curator and critic, and the director of Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm. She is currently co-curating the group exhibition “Counter-Production” for the Generali Foundation, Vienna, which takes inspiration from a strategy developed and implemented by Alexander Kluge in the 1970s that, over the past ten years, has been revisited by a number of contemporary artists.

For questions and inquiries, please contact stefanie.hessler@kkh.se or olav.westphalen@kkh.se

The Performing Recalcitrance public programme has been organized by the Royal Institute of Art in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Stockholm, Iaspis, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Konst-ig, Kulturhuset, Moderna Museet and DOCH, the University of Dance and Circus in Stockholm