The one-day symposium
Contested Bodies: Navigating Control, Resistance, And Technological Impacts expands on the themes explored in
The New Subject. Mutating Rights and Conditions of Living Bodies, the final exhibition in a series investigating the evolving challenges of human and non-human bodies within the context of global biopolitics and technological advances.
Through a series of dynamic presentations and discussions, the symposium will investigate the legal, somatic, and cognitive dimensions of bodily rights, spotlighting tensions between control, resistance, and technological influence.
Curators, artists, and researchers, including
Anna Bitkina and
Maria Veits (Curators, TOK),
Micha Frazer-Carroll (Writer and researcher, London),
Ulrika Flink (Curator, Stockholm),
Clara Sika Helbo (Artist and designer, Copenhagen),
Caitlin Berrigan (Artist, filmmaker and writer, Berlin and Vienna),
Anan Fries (Artist and Performer, Berlin), and
Avi Feldman (Curator and lawyer, Director of Wannsee Contemporary, Berlin), will share their insights on the intersections of bodily autonomy, legal frameworks, and technological innovation.
Symposium Programme12:00Doors open
12:15Welcome and introduction
Kathrin Becker(Artistic Director, KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art)
Anna Bitkina and
Maria Veits (TOK Curators)
12:30Keynote speech by
Micha Frazer-CarrollMicha Frazer-Carrol addresses normativity, conventionality, and transgression of bodily and mental standards, in line with the exhibition section
Self-Perception and Practices of Recognition, followed by a discussion and Q&A, moderated by
Anna Bitkina and
Maria Veits.13:30 – 14:00 Break14:00 Conversation between curator
Ulrika Flink and artist and designer
Clara Sika HelboThe conversation focuses on embodied resistance and corporeal struggles, as explored in the exhibition section
Legalised Violence and Embodied Resistance. Clara Sika Helbo’s talk,
Uncovering an Iceberg: The Coil Campaign in Greenland and the Forces of Danish Colonialism, examines a covert sterilization campaign (1966–1976) in which 4,500 Greenlandic women were fitted with IUDs without consent. She situates this program within Denmark’s colonial history and global patterns of reproductive control, uncovering mechanisms of oppression and the resistance they ignited through archival research and multimedia.
14:45 Caitlin Berrigan,
Atmospheres of the Undead: Living with Viruses, Loneliness and NeoliberalismIn her pre-recorded talk, artist, filmmaker, and writer Caitlin Berrigan reflects on how living with a virus exposes the structural inequalities of profit-driven biomedicine. Drawing from her 2020 essay, published before COVID-19 vaccines were available, she critiques how vaccine producers profited billions while developed nations upheld patent protections, exacerbating global health inequities and mass death. Berrigan argues for ending patents and the privatization of biomedicine, challenging both the romanticization of mutual aid and the state's failure to ensure equitable care.
15:15 Anan Fries, Hacking Human Reproduction: A Posthuman and Xenofeminist Exploration In their talk, artist and performer Anan Fries examines human reproduction through the lenses of posthumanism and xenofeminism, envisioning speculative technologies that challenge traditional conception and the ideal of the normative nuclear family. They discuss their works
Posthuman Wombs (2022) and
Ecto Bag (2024), as well as advancements in biotechnology, opening a conversation about rethinking reproductive rights and possibilities in a world where science fiction increasingly becomes reality.
15:45 Break
16:00 Legal Matters?Presentation by
Avi Feldman (curator and lawyer, Director of Wannsee Contemporary, Berlin) on legal shifts and artistic responses to bodily rights, with a focus on reproductive rights, gender transition, and future technological advancements affecting bodily autonomy.
16:40 - 17:00Closing notes, discussion and Q&A
Contributors Micha Frazer-Carroll is a writer based in London. She published
Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health with Pluto Press in 2023. She has written about politics, disability, and the arts for publications including The Guardian, The Independent, Novara Media, and HuffPost. She is a trustee of the National Survivor User Network, a members' organization for people with experiences of mental distress, ill health, and trauma. While at university, she founded
Blueprint, a mental health magazine. She has been nominated for the Bread and Roses Award for radical publishing and the Anthony Burgess Award for arts criticism.
Ulrika Flink is an independent curator based in Stockholm. She has held roles including artistic director at Konsthall C, curator at SETTINGS and Konstfrämjandet Stockholm, curator of
Momentum 9 – Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art in Moss, Norway, and producer at Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm. She completed the MA Curating Contemporary Art (CCA) programme at the Royal College of Art in London and is the co-founder of the curatorial collective Parallelogram.
Clara Sika Helbo is a Danish-Greenlandic-born researcher and designer committed to exposing and challenging systemic inequalities through the lens of social design. Graduating cum laude from Design Academy Eindhoven with an MA in Social Design, she pushes the boundaries of traditional design to advocate for systemic change. Previously she worked as a researcher at the BBC and as a designer at the United Nations in Copenhagen.
Caitlin Berrigan is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose recent work explores poetics and queer science fiction as world-making practices. Her speculative cosmology,
Imaginary Explosions, has been featured in a book (Broken Dimanche Press, 2018), solo shows at JOAN Los Angeles (2023) and Art in General (2019), reviewed in Artforum, and premiered at the Berlinale Forum Expanded Exhibition (2020). She has exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum, Henry Art Gallery, and La Casa Encendida. Her writings appear in e-flux, Georgia, MARCH, and Duke University Press. Currently, she is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.
Anan Fries works at the intersection of digital and performing arts. They were the artistic director of the media-art collective machina eX, where they designed immersive experiences and a co-founded of the experimental feminist performance collective Henrike Iglesias. Anan Fries' latest work,
RIP - Resurrect in Peace, a funeral for an extinct bird, is a techno-spiritual hybrid dance performance set in a digital ecosystem.
Avi Feldman is a curator and lawyer with a global interest and expertise in contemporary art, dance and performance. With a degree in law and a doctorate in curating, he forms an interface between art and law. For example, he was guest curator for the MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 in New York and founded the independent organization The Agency for Legal Imagination for exchange and collaboration between institutions, artists, activists and scholars in the fields of art, law and politics. Avi Feldman currently runs the Berlin gallery Contemporary Wannsee.
The exhibition
The New Subject: Mutating Rights and Conditions of Living Bodies is on view from 15.9.24 – 26.1.25 at the Maschinenhaus M2.
Admission is free for symposium guests.
The entire building is wheelchair accessible.
Please note that there have been adjustments to the programme due to organisational reasons.
Funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation), the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media).
