S.W.E.A.T.

In this new season of S.W.E.A.T. we will dive more deeply into questions around how we organize, vision and dream new strategies for work care and survival. Starting off is a very fresh conversation with two artists and activists Jara Nassar and Joshua Schwebel, recorded on the 7th of January, just one day before a demonstration in front of Berlin's Abgeordnetenhaus, where inside was being discussed the adoption of the IHRA WDA as a prerequisite for the reception of cultural funding from the Senat. Jara and Joshua work in the collective Arts and Cultural Alliance Berlin, who organized the demonstration because the IHRA WDA has notoriously been utilized to silence and cancel pro-Palestinian voices in the arts. Jara Nassar is a German-Lebanese-US-American writer, performer and anthropologist interested in boundaries and blurring them. She writes poetry, plays, and prose in German and English, interwoven with Levantine Arabic. Her writing haa been published in NEVER WAKE Anthology, Tangle and Fen, and Glitter. She is also the host of the annual memorial to Sarah Hegazi. As Drag King Angelo Dynamo he hosts the show Border Ctrl. You can follow her work on Instagram under the handle @jaramachtsachen and on her blog dasreisekind.wordpress.com. https://www.instagram.com/jaramachtsachen/ https://www.instagram.com/angelodynamo/ https://www.instagram.com/border_ctrl_show/ Joshua Schwebel is a Canadian conceptual artist based in Montreal and Berlin. Working in conceptual art and institutional critique, Schwebel has presented his work internationally and across Canada. He has held residencies in Paris, Berlin, Beijing, Gdansk, Krakow, Marseille, and Perth, Western Australia. He holds an MFA from NSCAD University (2008), and a BFA from Concordia University (2006). Schwebel’s work has been supported by both the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. Joshua Schwebel's artistic practice responds to sites and situations, looking at the neoliberal infrastructures that precondition the exhibition and valorization of art. Schwebel is interested in the art exhibition complex as a productive, material, politically and financially situated context. His work augments the already-ongoing institutional performances that correlate contemporary art and capitalism. In examining the framing of art as a construct that both confers and protects value, his work reflects what we expect art to be and how these expectations veil systemic problems plaguing contemporary art including the intensely hierarchized and stratified work culture in art institutions; the instrumentalization of artists and art institutions in the gentrification of neighbourhoods; and the effects of austerity politics on cultural funding, which have effectively entrenched institutional dependence on donors and established the already-wealthy as the arbiters of taste and legitimacy in art. https://joshuaschwebel.com/home.html https://linktr.ee/arts_culture_alliance_berlin