June 6, 2014, 7 p.m. (German)
A lecture by Ulrike Grossarth

BEING is the central projective figure in Western thinking. The linguistic guises in which this phenomenon is shrouded are prodigious, curious, sometimes terrifying.

I am interested in the status granted to the body, or more precisely, in the schemes, constructions, and ideas of bodies that serve as “transitional potentials” in abstract models of the world and so are effectively embodiments and stations in the intellectual layout.

I am fascinated by objects that originated in philosophical systems but now haunt the popular knowledge of society as phantoms: Kant’s “thing in itself,” for example, Leibniz’s “monad,” or in this instance, BEING. How far does the physical reach into the construction of ideational systems, and which form, shape, figure plays a part in this interaction?

To approach these questions, I have developed representatives of the different aggregate phases of bodies that correspond to different mental fields. In my contribution, I will introduce some of them.

Ulrike Grossarth was born in Oberhausen, Germany, in 1952 and lives and works in Dresden and Berlin. She studied Artistic Dance at the Else Lang-Schule, Cologne (1969–72), and at Folkwang University (1972–74). In 1974 and 1975, she attended the Palucca Hochschule für Tanz Dresden. In 1980, she set up the Essen branch of the Free International University initiated by Joseph Beuys. Grossarth has been professor of Expanded Concepts of Art / Mixed Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden since 1998. In 2009, she received the Käthe Kollwitz Award of the Berlin Academy of Arts.