With Guest Artists Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz in the exhibition Queer Sonic Fingerprint

Art Laboratory Berlin is delighted to invite you to take part in our ongoing discursive format – a reading club, curated by Tuçe Erel (next to our colloquium, curated by Regine Rapp).

Inspired by… is an event series, a hybrid format derived from reading group and artist talk formats. In each session, an invited artist will choose a specific text or excerpt from a book that was inspirational for the artist’s practice and/or a particular project that the artist will introduce.
The project follows up Tuçe Erel’s Posthumanism Reading Group, organized between 2018-2020. After co-reading and discussing plenty of seminal texts in two years, the club is transforming into a new discussion, presentation and reading program, an online and offline exchange platform that offers a non-hierarchical and non-institutional infrastructure in the fields of arts, science and technology.

Guest Artist on 5 November 2024

On 5 November 2024, Inspired by… will be an on-site session with Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz during their exhibition Queer Sonic Fingerprint. This edition of Inspired by is an ‘independent event’ at Berlin Science Week 2024 and will take place at Art Laboratory Berlin on site. The artist-research duo brings a book chapter titled “The Stuff of Kinship” by Janet Carsten in conversation with their interactive multichannel sound installation Queer Sonic Fingerprint. The artistic-research work speculatively imagines non-normative relations around cultural belongings in ethnological museums and beyond. Kinship is one of the key terms in their research and Carsten’s text has been part of the research process for this project. After reading this text collectively, Isabel and Adam will talk about their work, and we will listen to a part of the sound installation.

Isabel Bredenbröker is a social and cultural anthropologist working between art and academia. They hold a DFG Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellowship which is based between the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) and the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik at Humboldt University Berlin. Isabel’s work focusses on material and visual culture, anthropology of art and museums, queer theory and intersectionality, situatedness and autoethnography, colonialism, cleaning and waste. They have produced ethnographic films, worked with field recording and (co-)curated as well as contributed to exhibitions in museum and contemporary art contexts. Isabel’s book Rest in Plastic: Death, time and synthetic materials in a Ghanaian Ewe community has recently been published open access with Berghahn.
http://isabelbredenbroeker.com/

Adam Pultz Melbye is a double bass player, composer, and improviser working in the field of acoustic and electronic sound. Adam’s work spans live performance, sound installation, sound for dance, theatre, film, multimedia, sculpture, algorithmic design, and instrument building. They have performed and exhibited work in Europe, Australia, the US, and Japan, while appearing on close to 50 albums. Adam often performs with semi-autonomous feedback systems, such as the FAAB (feedback-actuated augmented bass). Adam holds a practice-led PhD in music technology from SARC, Queen’s University Belfast.
http://adampultz.com/

Reading Material:
Carsten, J. (2019). The Stuff of Kinship. In S. Bamford (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Kinship (pp. 133–150). Cambridge University Press.

Venue: Onsite / Art Laboratory Berlin, Prinzenallee 34, 13359 Berlin

Inspired by… reading club meetings are not recorded to create a safe space for guest artists and participants to talk about their practice.