unfeeling with Henrike Kohpeiß and Maxi Wallenhorst

Talk
17/10 2023 6 pm — 8 pm
Karlsplatz

A short tour through the exhibition will be followed by a conversation unfeeling with Henrike Kohpeiß and Maxi Wallenhorst at 6:30 pm.

Free admission.

The conversation will be held in English.

As disappointment with the dominant vocabulary of how to talk about one’s own as well as shared feelings is growing, unfeeling has recently been receiving more attention. What happens when, particularly in the face of social violence, feelings appear not as too much but as absent, lacking, insensitive?

In this conversation, Maxi Wallenhorst and Henrike Kohpeiß talk about provisional histories and latest trends in not feeling anything. Expanding on Maxi Wallenhorst’s work on a dissociative poetics and Henrike Kohpeiß’ book on bourgeois coldness, they aim to relate individual indifference and injury to infrastructures of unfeeling.

Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher from Berlin. Her research and teaching focuses on Critical Theory, Black Studies, Feminism, and Affect Theory. She works as a research assistant at the CRC Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her first book Bürgerliche Kälte – Affekt und koloniale Subjektivität [Bourgeois Coldness Affect and Colonial Subjectivity] was published in 2023.

Maxi Wallenhorst is a writer living in Berlin. Her most recent essays have been published in e-flux journal and in Texte zur Kunst. In progress: A PhD thesis on dissociative poetics and the concept of metabolism, a romance novella set in the transvestite circles of a half-allegorical 1920s Berlin, and a video work in collaboration with Bassem Saad.

 

Exhibition