Circle of Looks (2019)

2 channel video and artist book with Adwoa Adjei, Carol Pilars de Pilar and Thyra Schmidt at NRW Forum, Düsseldorf, DE

Circle of Looks by Adwoa Adjei, Carol Pilars de Pilar, Thyra Schmidt and Anne Schülke showed autobiographical texts and images from the summer of 2018: drawings, watercolors, an artist's book, an experimental video and a project documentation. The material was created in collaboration with women from Bangladesh, Germany, Ghana, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, Romania, Somalia and Chechnya.

In this process, an attempt was made to deal constructively with contradictions: Women living in a precarious situation were invited to talk to artists who were also living in a precarious situation. Hierarchies seemed to dissolve here. They were re-established as soon as the process was documented in a book and exhibited in a museum. In the foreword to the book ‘Circle of Looks. A dream', a dream narrative tells of this conflict.

A transdisciplinary panel at the FFT Düsseldorf also attempted to reflect on this conflict:

Text by Laura on Feminismus im Pott

In 2019, I was invited by Diederich Diederichsen to the conference Love and Ethnology. Starting from "Circle of looks", I commented on Hubert Fichte’s practices, drawing on Trinh T. Minh-ha’s feminist and postcolonial perspective.

English version