Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft

In a body of work produced over the past decade, Silvia Kolbowski has explored strategies of “re-animating” the past to pose questions about politics in the present. In dialogue with Alain Resnais’ “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” (1959) written by Marguerite Duras, Kolbowski’s short film, “After Hiroshima Mon Amour” (2008), weaves parts of the original dialogue and visual sequences into a new version that includes anonymous online footage of the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina – sites of violent state incursion and neglect. Imagery that has become readily available with the advent of digital cameras and search engines facilitates the viewing of the present through the lens of history. On Saturday the 5th of June, Kolbowski will take part in an online screening at the Kunstverein Nürnberg, with subsequent conversation about the film with Milan Ther, touching on topics such as collective memory, digital image technology, and the mediatization of war. 

Silvia Kolbowski is a New York-based artist working with time-based media, whose scope of address includes questions of historicization, political resistance, and the unconscious. Her work has been exhibited in many venues and contexts, including the Villa Arson, Nice, The Whitney Biennial, New York, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, or the Secession, Vienna. Kolbowski has taught at The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, the CCC program of the Ecole Superiéure d’Art Visuel, Geneva, the Architecture Department of Parsons The New School for Design, NY, and the School of Art at The Cooper Union. 

Screening and Talk by Silvia Kolbowski are part of the project Initiative for Questioning Innovation (I?I), which is initiated by the Academy of Fine Arts and the Technical University of Nuremberg with the Kunstverein Nürnberg and supported by the LEONARDO Center for Creativity and Innovation.