Prof. Dr. Almut Shulamit Bruckstein

Winter Semester 2022/23 and 2021/22

Photo: Copyright Linda Rosa Saal

Prof. Dr. Almut Shulamit Bruckstein


Prof. Dr. Almut Shulamit Bruckstein is the founder of the Taswir Project, international curator, cultural theorist, art critic and author.

Ha’atelier / Taswir Projects is an international platform for the renaissance of cosmopolitan Jewish and Islamic traditions; a platform for artistic research and diasporic forms of thinking that deals with the dynamics of post-colonial criticism by means of various formats such as exhibitions, publications, image films, research dossiers in public art magazines. Taswir Projects combines contemporary discourses on phenomenology, visual cultural studies, psychoanalysis and gender studies with classical literatures of antiquity such as the Talmud, literatures of the Kalam and more. The artistic research of Taswir Projects and their wide network, which extends to Istanbul, Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Tehran, consists in the continuous connection of contemporary and premodern (ancient) materials, images, texts, poetry, theories.

Bruckstein has already held numerous visiting professorships in Hamburg, Philadelphia, Jerusalem, Berlin and Istanbul, but in recent years has concentrated on artistic-practical, curatorial work and the authorship of corresponding publications.

Fellowship in the Winter Semester 2022/23 at FTSK Germersheim

In Germersheim, Bruckstein invites you to take part in an artistic project between translation studies and exhibition performance. The relationship between originality and secondaryness, the mimetic character of translation and questions of the psycho-poietic conditions of transcripts play a central role. Concepts such as "rewriting" (Lefevere) and "palimpsest" (Arrojo) are explored performatively and post-essentialist discourses of translation are deepened in the discourse. Bruckstein invites the students of the Germersheim faculty to open up unusual perspectives of translation studies through artistic research. Together with Prof. Dr. Dilek Dizdar, Bruckstein will give a seminar on translation theory and art and will take part in the Germersheim project week. From October to December she invites you to an artistic-translational workshop in three sessions, the concept of which is presented here.

Workshop Project

Translations take place simultaneously and orally. They are negotiation, understanding, mediation between parties. But translation is also a performance- one that produces deviations, ambivalences, ambiguities, indeterminacies, differences, disruptions, mistakes, misunderstandings. The project imagines a performative process of artistic research in which these deviations, disruptions, misunderstandings become the basis of a poetic collection of material. What is usually of interest in the rapid process of spontaneous translation is what is usually pushed aside, repressed, passed over and forgotten. The idiosyncratic deviation of the translators working monadically in the booths becomes the key to an unwritten work for which the project presented here provides the material. The concrete steps leading to such a collection of material consist of three workshops to be held by the end of 2022, led by Shulamit Bruckstein a.k.a. House of Tas will take place in the large Translations studio in Germersheim.

The protagonists of the first workshop are three writers. They sit at the front of the podium and present the "Urtext" of the material collection. “Scribes”, i.e. faculty, foreign scholars, but also interested friends and students, record their own thoughts and make notes and remarks on what the protagonists say. The translators sitting in the booths translate the presentations of the three protagonists (the "Urtext") and everything that is exchanged and spoken among the "Scribes". They also note down observations on body gestures, voice pitches, mood fields of the speakers. In the second workshop, participants develop a multilingual synopsis of the entire material. The result is a multi-layered collection of material that is brought together in a large document, or “score” of the project. In a third workshop, this large "score" will be viewed from the perspective of artistic creativity and scenarios for a wide variety of artistic work ideas will be designed. The artistic possibilities include sound installations, contemporary compositions, choreographic works as well as dramaturgical scenarios. The basic idea of ​​the project is the dissemination of the translation process in the most diverse areas of artistic production and research.

Bruckstein's fellowship in the Winter Semester 2021/22 at Kunsthochschule Mainz

During the winter semester 2021/2022, Bruckstein opened an exhibition space in the "Orangerei" as part of her fellowship at the Kunsthochschule Mainz. The exhibition took the form of a public, performative think tank for artistic research. Bruckstein worked together with the Transculturalization Forum, an experimental platform for criticism of Eurocentrism and artistic-theoretical interventions in postcolonial contexts led by Prof. Dr. Linda Hentschel and Prof. Parastou Forouhar. In the Orangerei, Bruckstein developed performative speech and writing apparatuses, which she will take up and further develop artistically together with the FTSK students in the newly launched Translations project in Germersheim.

Lecture on October 28th, 2021
Wie bauen wir ein Haus aus Nichts. Die Orangerei als Kleine Mnemosyne.


Her most recent projects are:

2021

Author and Editor (ctd), Wednesday Society Dossier I-IV, edited by House of Taswir in collaboration with Art Unlimited Istanbul. With authors A.S. Bruckstein Çoruh, Julia Gyemant, Özgür Öğütcen, Ceren Korulsan, Simone-Weill Denk-Kollektiv, and artists Rebecca Horn, Ali Kaaf, Rebecca Raue,Shaqayeq Ahmadian, Thomas Hirschhorn, a.o.

Audio-Performance, Audio-Performance Salon der Leerstellen. Die Gespräche Podcast Series from Meine Kleine Mnemosyne, WDR, June 2021.

Author and Performance, How (not) to speak shadows. For Walid Raad.Performance Lecture at Kunst-Station St. Peter, Cologne. Forthcoming in Art Unlimited Istanbul, September 2021.

Author, The Talmudic War Machine. A Shadow's Dream.” Forthcoming in Protocols no. 8, Los Angelos, June 2021.