Luisa Ungar & Juana Awad Meet Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln

Luisa Ungar and Juana Awad have worked together on various projects, most recently with a contribution for the publication „Künste Dekolonisieren“ (2023). Individually, they explore how histories are constructed, looking for stories that have been marginalised, and opening space for embodied forms of socio-political remembrance. With this artistic endeavour, they come together to explore the archive as a repository of clues and gaps, looking for influences of the Global South on the North.

Juana Awad (Berlin) is a Colombian-Canadian curator, artist, and researcher, working at the intersections of aesthetic theory and artistic practice. She studied theatre, fine art media, semiotics and cultures of the curatorial in Toronto, London, and Leipzig. Her interests lie in decolonial curatorial practices, institutional processes, and the political potential of arts and culture presentation. She was most recently an artistic research fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg inherit.heritage in transformation at Humboldt-University Berlin, with her project Transcultural Heritage: Curating Time-based Arts, the Werkstatt der Kulturen and the Making of the Postmigrant Nation, and acts currently as Visiting Lecturer for Time-Based Media and Performance at the Institute of Art at Berlin University of the Arts.

Luisa Ungar (Bogotá) is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator. She experiments with strategies that reveal colonial structures embedded in our ways of learning and communicating; through her methodology Rehearsed Spontaneity, her work investigates the dislocation of specific narratives using performative tools. Process, participation, and collective memory are key to her practice. She was most recently a guest professor at the IPKB at HBK University of the Arts in Braunschweig. Her work has been shown among others at MHKA (Antwerp), Spring Workshop (Hong Kong), Ar/Ge Kunst (Bolzano), Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm), Liverpool Biennial (UK), Mercosul Biennial (Brasil), BienalSur (Argentina).

Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln

The Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln (German Dance Archive Cologne) is an internationally affiliated centre for information, documentation and research in the field of dance and, with its unique holdings, has a place among the world’s most important archives on the art of dancing. Its outstanding photography collection gathers together original prints by renowned artists such as Hugo Erfurth, Germaine Krull, Albert Renger-Patzsch or Umbo. In addition, it houses extensive archives of famed dance and ballet photographers. The holding is complemented by subsidiary archives arranged into themes and special holdings – along with an impressive collection of around 3,000 historical photo postcards. More than 600 bequests and collections also comprise numerous photographs that bring to life the history of dance and its visual interpretation through the medium of photography.

Usually, exhibitions are only experienced in their finished form – visitors rarely get an insight into the creative production process. The Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln intends to change this with an unusual format: as part of Artist Meets Archive #5 the archive is opening its exhibition space in the form of an “open lab”. In this context, for Photoszene Festival 2027, an exhibition’s developmental process is to be turned into a publicly visible and tangible experience. The conclusion of this open experiment will be formed by the exhibition’s opening, which will take place simultaneously with the Festival’s finissage. Subsequently, the exhibition will be on show in the Dance Museum of the Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln for a duration of ten months.

Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln
Im Mediapark 7
50670 Köln
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