The Missed Seminar opens at HKW on Oct 27

The Missed Seminar
After Eslanda Robeson. In Conversation with Steve McQueen’s End Credits
Oct 28–Dec 30, 2022
Exhibition opening: Oct 27, 2022
Auditorium and auditorium lobby
Free admission
Accreditation via presse@hkw.de

A threefold encounter with the African-American photographer, anthropologist and writer Eslanda Robeson to suggest the possibility for unsettling the legacies of the global Cold War’s extreme binarisms. Thinking with Robeson’s travels to communist Europe as well as Africa and Latin-Amercia, an archive-based exhibition mobilizes her writings, letters and images of comradeship still vibrating in the present; the installation End Credits by Steve McQueen reveals the monumental scale of the FBI’s surveillance of her and Paul Robeson; and two conversations imagine a public study for rehearsing through Eslanda’s journey’s geopolitics of memory intersectionally.

Departing from Eslanda Robeson's friendship with the German-Jewish Marxist philosopher Franz Loeser and their encounters in East Berlin in 1963, The Missed Seminar asks: What if their exchange had been the framework for a seminar to come? Combining images, scripts, files, films and Spirituals, the threefold project suggests an interracial imaginary of anti-fascism, Black feminism and technopolitics towards transcontinental worldmaking after internationalism.

In conversation, artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen presents the completed version of End Credits (2012–2022) for the first time. As a haunting monument to the threat of US anti-communism, the audiovisual installation gathers thousands of digitized files collected by the FBI during the Cold War in decades of surveillance of Eslanda Goode Robeson and her husband, the actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson.

These three different forms of transhistoric encounters with archival matter sketch the vision of what decolonizing socialism from global Cold War politics could have been and what it can still become.

Conceptualized by Doreen Mende in conversation with Avery F. Gordon, Lama El Khatib, Aarti Sunder and Katharina Warda

More information: hkw.de/en/missedseminar

Press photos: hkw.de/pressphotos

End Credits (2012-2022) by Steve McQueen

Audiovisual installation
Oct 27–31, 2022
Nov 17–21, 2022
Dec 21–30, 2022

Eslanda and Paul Robeson’s advocacy of anti-imperialism and affiliation with communism resulted in them being harassed by the anti-communist United States government. On a 9 x 6m installation screen, filmmaker Steve McQueen presents thousands of digitized pages of files, since 1941 produced by the FBI during decades of surveillance of Eslanda Robeson and her husband, the actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson.

Translating the material into almost 13 hours of film footage and a more than 67 hour-long spoken-word soundtrack, McQueen presents the completed version of the material he worked on for the last ten years for the first time. Shown on a continuous loop, the material highlights the explicitly political nature of the discrimination, marginalization and persecution that destroyed the career of the Robesons. The black and white copies of scans of every document in their recently declassified FBI files, scroll through the screen – the majority of which have been heavily redacted with black marker.

Conversations

Oct 29, 2022
Pan-Africanism Communism Antifascism: A Radical Provocation
with Charisse Burden-Stelly, Avery F. Gordon, Charlotte Misselwitz, Doreen Mende and Zoé Samudzi
In English

Nov 19, 2022
140.000.000 Women Can't Be Wrong
with Sagal Farah, Yulia Gradskova, Barbara Ransby and others
In English

Contemporary thinkers and scholars explore the political questions opened up by Eslanda Robeson and Franz Loeser’s encounter in East-Berlin in 1963 and engage directly with a historic object that appears in the display as a trans-historic material for study and thought. An official photo of Loeser and Robeson, taken at the GDR staged trial against the Nazi lawyer and then state secretary of West-Germany Hans-Maria Globke offers a point of departure to think the intertwinements of antifascism and black internationalism as they were then and today. Eslanda Robeson’s unpublished text-script 140.000.000 Women Can't Be Wrong (1953/54) provides a point of departure from which to discuss an anticolonial feminism across geo-political and historical divides.

Partners

The Missed Seminar After Eslanda Robeson In Conversation With Steve McQueen´s End Credits is part of HKW's project The New Alphabet, supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media due to a ruling of the German Bundestag, and realized in collaboration with the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD). In this constellation, it articulates a further inter∞note of the academic research project Decolonizing Socialism. Entangled Internationalism (2019-2024), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and HEAD Genève.

An earlier insight into the research process was presented in the context of The Whole Life. An Archive Project.

The project will be continued in the form of a print-publication with a conversation between Steve McQueen and Doreen Mende on End Credits, a dossier on the digital platform VOICES and a vitrine-intervention in the permanent collection in the Albertinum of the Dresden State Art Collections (SKD).

End Credits by Steve McQueen was made possible with support from Holland Festival, The Netherlands; Innsbruck International, Austria; The OCC; Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD).

Haus der Kulturen der Welt is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and by the Federal Foreign Office.