Film screening & discussion 

Comrade Where Are You Today (dir. Kirsi Liimatainen, 2016, 1h 52m)

@GWZO (Specks Hof, staircase A, 4th floor; Reichsstr. 4-6, 04109 Leipzig

About the film: What did we believe in back then? Filmmaker Kirsi Liimatainen seeks answers to this question. She studied Marxism-Leninism at East Germany’s FDJ Youth College “Wilhelm Pieck” in 1988. More than twenty years later, Kirsi sets out to find her one-time comrades. She wants to know what is left of the great dream of revolution in a globalised world. This mission takes her to Bolivia, Chile, Lebanon and South Africa. 

Rewriting American Modernism: Hale Woodruff, Mildred Thompson, and the Black Atlantic, 1958-68

public talk by John J. Curley

@ERIAC: European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture Reinhardtstraße 41-43, 10117 Berlin

John J. Curley’s talk will address notions of the transatlantic in Black American art of the late 1950s and 1960s. First, Curley will explore Hale Woodruff’s Africa and the Bull (c. 1958) as an Abstract Expressionist painting that counters typical narratives of the centrality of European-American artistic exchange through introducing references to Africa, cultural theft, and the slave trade. Secondly, Mildred Thompson and the prints and sculptures she makes during her self-imposed exile in West Germany (1958-60 and 1964-74)will be considered as emblematic of a “counterfactual modernism”–a practice of forging alternative artistic genealogies that foreground mobility, diaspora and barbarity.

John J. Curley is Core Faculty of the Linking (Art) Worlds seminar series. In “reallife” he is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. He has published widely on postwar American and European art, and is currently at work on a new book project provisionally titled “Critical Distance: Black American Artists in Europe 1958-1968.”