14 h
Eva Kraus, Kolja Reichert
WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION
Why is postmodernism topical again? The curators of the exhibition Everything at once: Postmodernism, 1967-1992 formulate the stakes of the symposium.

Eva Kraus is a trained designer, art mediator with a doctorate, curator and artistic director of the Bundeskunsthalle. Read her essay Everything at Once. What Do We Learn from Postmodernism Today? in the exhibition catalogue.

Kolja Reichert is an art critic and curator for discourse at the Bundeskunsthalle. He co-curated Everything at Once with Eva Kraus. Read his essay The Second Postmodern Turn in the exhibition catalogue.

14:30 h
Gertrud Koch, Diedrich Diederichsen, Oliver Elser, Eva Kraus, mod. Kolja Reichert
POSTMODERNISM IN GERMANY

What was postmodernism apart from talking about postmodernism? And what consequences did it have in Germany?

Getrud Koch is a film scholar. She taught at Freie Universität, Berlin and Brown University. Recent publications include The Return of Illusion (Suhrkamp 2016) and The Take is the Take. On the visual construction of Judaism (Suhrkamp 1992). Read her essay Aesthetic Reification. Operations of Postmodernism in the exhibition catalogue.

Diedrich Diederichsen ist Kritiker, Kurator und Professor am Institut für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften an der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. Zu seinen Veröffentlichungen zählen Sexbeat (Kiepenheuer & Witsch 1985) und Über Pop-Musik (Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2014). Read his essay Re-Make/Re-Model. Appropriation, Deconstruction, Reconstruction: How Pop Music Became Postmodern in the exhibition catalogue.

Oliver Elser is a curator at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt. He organised numerous exhibitions, including Protest/Architecture. Barricades, Camps, Superglue (2023), and Mission: Postmodern. Heinrich Klotz and the Wunderkammer DAM (2014). He co-founded the Center for Critical Studies in Architecture (CCSA) in 2017. Read his essay Explosive charges from the past in the exhibition catalogue.

15:15 h
Break

15:30 h
Henrike Naumann
ON POSTMODERNISM

What does political radicalisation have to do with taste? The artist Henrike Naumann grew up in East Germany in the 1990s and experienced neo-Nazis as the dominant youth culture. In her installations, she arranges used furniture into constellations of the social unconscious - often including hardware store versions of postmodern design. In her lecture, Naumann provides an insight into her research against the backdrop of current political crises and conflicts.

16:15 h
Break

16:30 h
Neville Brody, Johannes Conrad, Sebastién Millot, mod. Eva Kraus, Kolja Reichert
ON MEDIA SINCE THE 80s AND THE BUNDESKUNSTHALLE

Graphic designer and typographer Neville Brody created iconic designs for Depeche Mode and Cabaret Voltaire album covers and magazines such as The Face and Arena. He thus left his mark on graphic design and journalism worldwide.

Brody, Conrad and Millot talk to Director Eva Kraus and co-curator Kolja Reichert about journalism then and now, the history of the Bundeskunsthalle and Brody's current redesign of the Bundeskunsthalle. Neville Brody also created the design for the exhibition Everything at Once: Postmodernism, 1967-1992.

17:30 h
Break

18 h
Diedrich Diederichsen
ON STYLE

Around 1980, style suddenly became political: the smallest decisions made all the difference. The cultural scientist Diedrich Diederichsen wrote about this as early as 1983 in Schocker. Styles and Fashions of the Subculture (with Dick Hebdidge, Rowohlt). From 1985 to 1990, he was editor-in-chief of the influential music and pop culture magazine Spex. In his lecture, Diederichsen recapitulates the social role of style and when it ended and why.

18:30 h
New Models, Diedrich Diederichsen
ON STYLE

With their media platform New Models, art critic Caroline Busta and music producer Lil Internet have drawn the consequences of the end of the age of mass media. Together with their community, they follow the latest changes in technology, music, fashion, politics and online culture in podcasts and Discord debates - including the changing meaning of style in today's youth cultures.

Read a conversation about early online culture between New Models and media historian Kevin Driscoll in the exhibition catalogue.

19 h
Sophie Parkin, John Maybury, Derek Ridgers, Nigel Coates
ON THE BLITZ CLUB

Bored by the nihilism of punk, London squatters and art students dressed up every Tuesday evening between 1979 and 1981 for Blitz Night. Men and women alike outdid themselves in ever new costumes and make-up. Mick Jagger was turned away at the door because he wasn't dressed up. David Bowie chose performers for his music video for Ashes to Ashes here. The Blitz Club was the nucleus of the New Romantic scene and shaped British pop and fashion in the 1980s.

Among its regulars were: artist and writer Sophie Parkin (All Grown Up, Headline Review 1998, Mad Rich and Famous, Picadilly Press 2006, et al.); architect and designer Nigel Coates, who designed the exhibition Everything at Once. Postmodernism, 1967-1992; director John Maybury, who produced hundreds of music videos, including Nothing Compares to You by Sinnead O'Connor; and Derek Ridgers, who captured the Blitz Nights in unforgettable portraits that can be seen in the exhibition. Together they look back on a time when style seemed able to take you anywhere.

20 h
End of event

12 h
Sylvia Lavin
ON HELICOPTERS

How the typewriter or the camera changed the way we think and act has long been researched. But not the helicopter, which Sylvia Lavin analyses as the postmodern device par excellence: It not only transports individual passengers, but also interdisciplinary thinking, and it transformed art-making. The influential theorist of postmodern architecture is travelling from Princeton for her lecture Suspended in Mid-Air; Acclimatizing the Helicopter Imaginary.

Sylvia Lavin is a Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. Her publications include Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (MIT Press 1992) and Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (MIT Press 2004). She curated the exhibition Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernization Effects at the Canadia Centre for Architecture in Montreal (2018), among others. She is currently working on her new book Building Sylvan Media. 

Read Sylvia Lavin's essay Helicoptering over the Present, or Who Has Never Been Postmodernized? in the exhibition's catalogue.

12:30 h
Reinhold Martin
ON COUNTER-REVOLUTION

It did not take long for the new freedoms of postmodernism to be utilised by conservatives: The British writer Roger Scruton, for example, complained in the 1980s in the Salisbury Review, which he founded, about an alleged dominance of postmodern tendencies such as multiculturalism, feminism and disarmament. In his lecture Street Fight: Classicism and Counter-Revolution, Reinhold Martin from Columbia University, New York, explores the relationship between postmodernism and conservatism, which is virulent again today.

Reinhold Martin is Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. His influential publications include The Organisational Complex (MIT Press 2003), Utopia's Ghost. Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (University of Minnesota Press 2010) and Knowledge Worlds. Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (Columbia University Press 2021).

13 h
Noah Barker, Sylvia Lavin, Reinhold Martin
FEEDBACK

The artist and author Noah Barker, born in 1991, translates postmodern transformation phenomena into sharp conceptual works, such as Toy Machine (2018), which takes up the colour code of the Centre Pompidou. Barker discusses their theses with Sylvia Lavin and Reinhold Martin against the backdrop of his generation's newly awakened interest in postmodernism.

13:30 h
Break

14 h
James Wines (via screen)
ON THE ECONOMY OF MEANS

James Wines is an environmental artist, architect and designer of landscapes and community spaces.  He founded the group, SITE, together with Alison Sky in 1970. The studio came to fame with a series of American ‘big box’ merchandising stores, treated as public art works, for the BEST Products Company during the 1970s and 80s. In addition to the BEST Stores, the exhibition Everything at Once also presents James Wines' design for the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main. In his lecture Re-Thinking It All: Post-Modernism in a new Critical Context, James Wines highlights the legacy of postmodernism for today's architecture and art, including principles of re-use and dealing with the existing.

Read an interview with James Wines in the exhibition catalogue.

14:45 Uhr
Simon Denny, James Wines
IN CONVERSATION

Born in 1982, Simon Denny is one of the most influential artists of his generation. He captures global upheavals of knowledge and power in sophisticated installations and sculptures, such as for the New Zealand Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale in 2015. He also draws on his in-depth knowledge of postmodern art and theory. Simon Denny talks to James Wines about the relevance of Wines' thinking for the present day and commonalities in their art.

15:30 h
Break

15:45 h
Léa-Catherine Szacka
ON MTV

MTV brought the nightclub into the living rooms of suburbia. Cable and private television permanently changed the relationship between centre and periphery and created streams of images, affects and spaces that anticipated today's social media. The expert on postmodern architecture Léa-Catherine Szacka presents her latest research on the architecture of the studios of MTV and the British breakfast television programme TV-AM in the 1980s.

Léa-Catherine Szacka is Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at University of Manchester and member of the Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARG). Among her writings are Exhibiting the Postmodern: the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale (Marsilio, 2016) and Paolo Portoghesi: Architecture between History, Politics and Media (with Silvia Micheli, Bloomsbury 2023)

Read Léa-Catherine Szacka's essay TV and architecture in the 1980s in the exhibition's catalogue.

16:15 h
Break

16:30 h
Peter Pomerantsev (via screen)
ON POSTMODERNISM IN RUSSIA

Around the turn of the millennium, it became fashionable among Russian Duma deputies to quote Jacques Derrida or Jacques Lacan. The philosopher Alexander Dugin, who is close to the Kremlin, has taken the end of the grand narratives diagnosed by Jean-François Lyotard as the occasion for a new grand narrative: Russian imperialism. Leading Russia expert Peter Pomerantsev provides an insight into the influence of postmodernism on contemporary Russian politics.

Peter Pomerantsev is a journalist, author and television producer. His publications include Winning the Information War (CEPA's Information Warfare Project in Partnership with the Legatum Institute 2016) and Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (PublicAffairs 2014)

17:15 h
Break

17:30 h
Nikita Dhawan
ON TRUTH
Existential hiccups: Aesthetics, Politics and Truth

Nikita Dhawan is Chair holder of Political Science with a focus on Political Theory and the History of Political Thought at the Dresden University of Technology. In her lecture Existential Hiccups: Aesthetics, Politics and Truth, she decodes the complex relationship between postcolonial theory, critical theory and postmodern thinking. Dhawan's recent publications include Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (with María do Mar Castro Varela, transcript 2020). Her next book Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans: Critical Theories of Decolonization will come out summer 2024 with Campus.

18 h
Nikita Dhawan, Gertrud Koch, Martin Saar, mod. Kolja Reichert
TOWARDS A PLURIVERSAL ETHICS

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas turned in horror against the challenges that postmodern thinking posed to the project of enlightenment. Habermas' theory of domination-free discourse aimed to create consensus through the exchange of arguments. Jean-François Lyotard and others showed that there is no discourse free of domination and that even the agreement on a language in which conflicts are resolved excludes other languages and suppresses legal claims. Habermas' successor to the chair at the Frankfurt Institute for Philosophy (after Axel Honneth) Martin Saar discusses with the political scientist Nikita Dhawan and the film scholar Gertrud Koch what solutions postmodern thinking can offer for the polarised culture wars of the present.

Nikita Dhawan is Chair holder of Political Science with a focus on Political Theory and the History of Political Thought at the Dresden University of Technology. Dhawan's recent publications include Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (with María do Mar Castro Varela, transcript 2020). Her next book Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans: Critical Theories of Decolonization will come out summer 2024 with Campus.

Gertrud Koch is a film scholar. She taught at Freie Universität, Berlin and Brown University. Recent publications include The Return of Illusion (Suhrkamp 2016) and The Take is the Take. On the visual construction of Judaism (Suhrkamp 1992). Read her essay Aesthetic Reification. Operations of Postmodernism in the exhibition catalogue.

Martin Saar is Professor of Social Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. His publications include The Immanence of Power. Political Theory after Spinoza (Suhrkamp 2013) and Michel Foucault. Aesthetics of Existence. Writings on the Art of Living (ed., Suhrkamp 2007)

Kolja Reichert is an art critic and curator for discourse at the Bundeskunsthalle. He co-curated Everything at Once with Eva Kraus.

19 h
End of event