25-27 June 2021
Situated Knowledges
A parallel conference and workshop event of Shared Campus
at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong
and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich
Led by Prof. Dr. Dorothee Richter (ZHdK), Dr. Cedric Maridet (HKBU)
Organisation: Ronald Kolb (ZHdK)
Globalization does not only mean expanding production, consumptionand communication, and thus creating new collaborations. It also evokes new forms of cultural identity, distinction, coalescence, ambiguity,
projection or transformation, as well as new experiences of differenceor belonging. However, their redefinition in the face of globalization means that the cultural coordinates of the present also produce new
perspectives on histories, genealogies or traditions, as well as new designs on the future visions. These form and articulate themselves not least in contemporary arts. We want to understand and explore these
processes through situated knowledges.
The term “situated knowledges” coined by Donna Haraway is a central topic in her concept of feminist objectivity. In her much-cited essay “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988), Haraway assumes that all scientific knowledge is fundamentally conditional. For this reason, the concept of Situated Knowledge incorporates the social location and contextual advantages of the researcher into the research process.[1] Against an assumption of an apparently neutral and unmediated knowledge of the (male, white) Western idea of science and its representation through overview visualization techniques, Haraway develops her concept of embodied knowledges by drawing on a description of the eye and “vision” (in the broad real and metaphorical sense). There is no such thing as unconditional observation, she argues, because every “acquisition of knowledge” takes place in a dynamic “apparatus of bodily production”.
With this in mind the conference invites artists, curators, educators, and scholars from the Shared Campus partners and beyond to engage in this programme of public talks and discussions as well as participatory Zoom workshops.
[1] Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, in: Feminist Studies 14 (1988), 3, p. 575–599, here p. 591.