manifesto. manifesting.
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| Admission: 8 EUR / reduced 4 EUR |
| Info: English with dubbed translation into German |
| Planning: Duration: 120 min |
| Suitable for: 14 years and older |
| Which languages: English |
| Venue: Mechanical Arena in the Foyer |
| Part of: Objects talk back |
Meena Kandasamy begins the series Objects talk back with the Mithuna couple, a 17th century ivory sculpture from Tamil Nadu (India) depicting lovers, and unfurls a multi-layered, multi-directional narrative built from images, questions and contradictions evoked by the sculpture.
“How can we look at this work and not talk about who produced it?” Meena asks, then examines how caste and class are carved into the object as indelibly as its physical details. Such knowledge complicates easy associations of ‘love’ that may be evoked by the couple. Refusing any impulse to idealize, to exoticize, Meena connects the carving to personal and political stories that expose painful realities of who gets to love whom, and how. She sets the intimate alongside the institutional to interrogate terms such as decolonize, restitution and preservation. Through an astonishing stylistic mix – Twitter, academic discourse, poetry, memoir – she talks back, forward and sideways from the object.
Meena Kandasamy (b. 1984) is a poet, novelist and translator. Her work focuses on the militant resistance against caste, gender, and ethnic oppressions. She explores this in her books of poems such as Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010), as well as her three novels, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You (2017), and Exquisite Cadavers (2019). Her novels have been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Hindu Lit Prize. The Book of Desire, her translation of the love poetry of the 2000-year-old Tamil classic Tirukkural is forthcoming early next year.
She has been a fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2009), a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent (2011) and a fellow of the Berlin-based Junge Akademie (AdK). In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL), United Kingdom.
She is a recipient of the Herman Kesten Prize for 2022 awarded by PEN Germany.
Priya Basil is an author and activist. In her book Gastfreundschaft she combines stories about her family’s Indian and Kenyan traditions, her British heritage, and life in Germany into a passionate plea for hospitality in Europe. She is co-founder of the Organisation Authors for Peace, a member of the advisory council at the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights and initiator of the campaign for an official continent-wide Europe-day holiday. Her new book, Im Wir und Jetzt. Feministin werden, was published in German in spring 2021.