Future Ancestry
PhD School at the Faculty of Humanities at University of Copenhagen
Dates and time: 28-30 April + 16-18 June 2025 from 9 am - 4 pm.
Impactful Storytelling in the Visual Arts
Reframe the Past. Change the Future. In this practise-based art studies seminar Future Ancestry (Fremtidige Forfædre), we look at how speculative storytelling, hybrid identities, and interdisciplinary research and artworks can engage with and reframe the past and by doing so address pressing questions of our time. This practice-based academic seminar and forum, invites participants to reflect on what it means to highlight or reframe the past in order to stimulate the readiness for the future, creating a space for imagination, transformation, and ultimately, critical hope. Can we shape the future by re-Imagining the past? How do artists, curators, researchers and even AI support each other in mediating these stories to the public? We will look at select artworks and artistic practices by for example Eli Cortinas, Josefa Ntjam, Yael Bartana, Justin Kennedy, Kristy Nataraja, Ersan Mondtag, Jacob Kudsk Steensen, Melanie Bonajo, Clara Sika Helbro, Kadar Attila, Lawrence Lek, and/or Mikey Woodbride
By weaving together research, visual art, performance, and critical inquiry on speculative pasts and futures, Future Ancestry becomes an exchange about new relevant narratives, their distribution, and ways of seeing the world through art—past, present, and future. As Ursula Le Guin suggests in The Carrier Bag, what if we stopped telling stories about heroes killing other living beings? Instead, could we tell stories to hold living beings?
Academic Aim
- To better understand a field of contemporary artistic practices centered on notions of past and futures. We will explore 10 examples of visual artworks that significantly alter our perception of both our ancestors and our current and future lives with the help of diverse research and creation methods like forensic architecture, social design, collage, Machine Learning, and performative activation.
- The syllabus prepares for critical engagement with the intersections of AI and art, technology, ecology, mythology, facts, and identity, examining how these elements are used in impactful storytelling and influence and converge across time. The course thus intellectually investigates the role of AI and advanced technologies in shaping our engagement with both the future and our rethinking of the past.
- To promote interdisciplinary dialogue through text based seminars, presentations by participants, public lectures, screenings, and studio visits in both Copenhagen and Berlin.
- By exploring contemporary research-based artistic practices to foster a deeper understanding of storytelling and its impact on how we can reimagine the past, history, and thus take a different stance in matters of e.g. colonialism, ecology and equity today and towards the future.
Target group
PhD candidates and other advanced practitioners within Art History, Cultural Studies, Visual Culture, Media Studies, Anthropology, Curating, as well as Artists doing doctoral (or comparable) research. PhD at all stages of their research project dealing with interdisciplinary and practise-based approaches to art studies.
Course lecturers
- Clara Herrmann, Junge Akademie
- Mykola Ridniy, Akademie der Künste
- Eli Cortiñas
- Kristy Nataraja
- Thomias Radin
- Justin Kennedy
- Maya Indira Ganesh, Cambridge University
Course organizer: Mikkel Bogh (mibo@hum.ku.dk) and Solvej Ovesen. The course as a collaboration between PASS - Center for Practice-based Art Studies, University of Copenhagen and Die JUNGE AKADEMIE, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
Programme:
Copenhagen 28.4 – 30.4 2025
During the three seminar days in Copenhagen, taking place at the University of Copenhagen, we will read texts and discuss presentations from teachers, participants, and invited speakers such as Clara Sika, Eli Cortinas, and Josefa Ntjam. We will both look at and analyze artistic practices and build a theoretical and conceptual frame of reference to help us navigate a current field of artistic and curatorial investigations of connections and narratives between past and future.
28.4.25 University of Copenhagen.
Future Ancestry - Accessing the past through research, art and social design:
09.00-12.00 Introduction round of participants and thematic introduction Future Ancestry by Solvej Ovesen
13.00-15.00 Clara Sika Helbro, Nicholas Korody (Forensic Architecture) presentation of “Uncovering an Iceberg” archive and artwork case study as well as forensic architecture research method.
29.4.25 University of Copenhagen
Future Ancestry - Tidalectics, Futurism, Humanist Practices with AI and Machine-Learning:
09.00-12.00 Josefa Ntjam Futuristic Ancestry & Eli Cortinas presentation Maschine Monologues and Dialogues
13.00-14.00 Screening Eli Cortinas
14.00-16.00 Open Forum Open forum for presentation/discussion/feedback of participants inquiries, reflections on theoretical text and artwork case studies (participants)
30.4.25 University of Copenhagen
Future Ancestry - Repairs, Monuments, Spaceships:
09.00-12.00 Yael Bartana, Ersan Mondtag on “Thresholds” and their individual works, their relation to the activation and archival of the past “Monument of an Unknown Man” and “Generationship”
13.00-16.00 Open Forum for presentation/discussion/feedback of participants inquiries, reflections on theoretical text and artwork case studies
Berlin 16.6 – 18.6 2025
In Berlin, there will be more focus on specific and current artistic and curatorial practices through studio visits (located in the UDK), presentations, and discussions based on encounters with an active and diverse local art scene amongst others dealing with art and AI (Junge Akademie), and as an add-on we visit the newly opened Berlin Biennale on the last day.
16.6 Universität der Künste, Studio Visits - BER
Artists working with Future Ancestry through all media (Mykola Ridnyi, Justin Kennedy, Sarah Ama Duah, Thomias Radin, Kristy Nataraja, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Melanie Bonajo, Oscar Atanga)
17.6 Junge Akademie - BER
Discourse producing sessions on “Training the Archive - AI, Contemporary Art and Archives”: Clara Herrmann (Akademie Der Künste Berlin, AI Anarchists Book), or Maya Indira (AI Anarchists Book, Transmediale), Tiara Roxanne (Artist and Researcher on Datamining practices), (evt. also Paz Guevara (HKW))
18.6 Studio visits and Berlin Biennale - BER
Artists working with AI and Archives
Language: English
ECTS: If you are a PhD student, full participation will give you 3.4 ECTS points, while participation with a 20-minute presentation will give you a total of 4.9 ECTS.
Max. numbers of participants: 20.
Deadline for submission of abstracts: Please mention in your application whether and if so on which related subject you would like to do a 20-minute presentation. Deadline 15 April 2025.
Registration: Please register by e-mail to pass@hum.ku.dk no later than 1 April 2025.
Further information: For more information about the PhD course, please contact Mikkel Bogh (mibo@hum.ku.dk)
Coffee/tea and meals during all seminar days will be provided and if participants do not have project funding, travel and accommodation costs in and between Copenhagen and Berlin will be covered by PASS.
Literature
(545 SP)
Daniela Agostinho (ed.), Solveig Gade, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Kristin Veel: (W)ARCHIVES: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art, Sternberg Press 2021 (20 p)
Interview with Kader Attila: Injury and Repair: Kader Attia, Mousse 2018 (10p)
Jem Bendell: BREAKING TOGETHER – a freedom-loving response to collapse, Good Works 2023 (30 p)
Ruha Benjamin: Race After Technology, Polity 2019 (40 p)
Ruha Benjamin, Imagination - A Manifesto, W. W. Norton & Company 2024 (30 p)
Sharon Blackie: If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging, September Publishing 2017 (optional)
David Burrows, Simon O'Sullivan: Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, Edinburgh University Press 2019 (15 p)
Joseph Campbell: The Power of Myth, Anchor 1991 (30 p)
Kate Crawford, Trevor Paglen: Excavating AI - The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets 2019 (10 p)
Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, Yale University Press 2022 (20p)
Kanta Dihal, Stephen Cave (ed.): Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, Oxford University Press 2023 (50 p)
Emma Enderby: Jakob Kudsk Steensen. Berl-Berl: Light Art Space, Walther König, 2021 (8 p)
Kari Grain: Critical Hope: How to Grapple with Complexity, Lead with Purpose, and Cultivate Transformative Social Change, North Atlantic Books 2022 (30 p)
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Carrier Bag Theory Of Fiction, Ignota Books 2019 (15 p)
Donna J. Haraway: Staying with The Trouble, Duke University Press 2016 (40 p)
Clara Herrmann, Hunchuck and Ganesh (Editors): The Al Anarchies Book, Akademie der Künste 2024 (30 p)
Saidiya Hartman: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, WW Norton & Co 2019 (30 p)
Sunny Kerr (ed.): Drift: Art and Dark Matter. With contributions by Emelie Changur, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sunny Kerr, Nadia Lichtig, Art McDonald, Josèfa Ntjam, Anne Riley, and Jol Thoms. Design by K. Verlag with Wolfgang Hückel & Katharina Tauer, KVerlag 2023 (10 p)
Steph Kretowicz (ed): The Chronologies of Creamcake, Distanz 2024 (10 p)
Damon Krukowski, Emily Thompson (Foreword): Ways of Hearing, MIT Press 2019 (10 p)
Daniel Muzyczuk, Anna Remešová, Mykola Ridnyi: /Mykola Ridnyi, Verlang Walter und Franz König 2023 (20 p)
Solvej Helweg Ovesen (ed. and author), & Kathrin Becker (ed.): POLY. A Fluid Show, Distanz 2023 (15 p)
Søren Rud og Søren Ivarsson: Globale og Postkoloniale Perspektiver på Dansk Kolonihistorie, Aarhus Universitetsforlag 2021 (20 p)
Holger Schulze: Sonic Fiction (The Study of Sound), Bloomsbury Academic 2020 (20 p)
Isabel Stengers: An ecology of practices, (Cultural Studies Review), University of Technology Sydney 2005 (7 p)
Eyal Weizman, Susan Schuppli, Shela Sheikh, Francesco Sebregondi, Thomas Keenan, Anselm Franke Forensic Architecture: Forensis - The Architecture of Public Truth, Sternberg Press 2014 (40)
Optional:
Osei Bonsu: African Art Now: Fifty pioneers defining African art for the twenty-first century, Ilex Press 2022 (optional)
T.J. Demos: Decolonizing Nature - Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Sternberg Press 2016 (reprint 2024) (optional)
Charles Eisenstein: The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (Sacred Activism), North Atlantic Books 2013 (optional)
Andreas Huyssen: Twilight Memories - Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, Routhlege 2015 (optional)
Fred Morten: A Poetics of The Undercommons, Sputnik & Fizzle 2016 (optional)