Invitation to Defense of Ana Hoffner

To move or operate together, to standardize times of accidental occurrence are agreements necessary for present-day social, economic and political systems that depend on the availability of all resources at all times. What happens very obviously on the level of technology is crucial for social processes as well: the synchronization of data on technical instruments from laptop to smartphone indicates in what way individual life should be represented or assigned to a place in society and historical writing. Searching and scanning events, places and bodies in order to include them into one main, general temporality are organized around this obsession with the error or failure of synchronization. An integrative part of synchronizing forces is therefore to transform desynchronization into a positive, representable modus operandi in order to avoid that that which can’t be synchronized disappears from the global screen. Can desynchronization become something like a slippage rather than a negative counterpart, a coincidence rather than a technique producing coinciding temporalities? Is it possible to think of desynchronization as a process of wandering, as a queering of togetherness and belonging? The research project explores if and how de/synchronization could possibly signify a search for forms of appearance and disappearance, presence and absence, which are only selectively perceptible and/or representable in official calendars and can be found in artistic practices.

Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic* is an artist, researcher and writer. She* works within and about contemporary art, art history, cultural studies and critical theory. She is interested in queerness, displays of global capital, coloniality and the East, forms of escape, early psychoanalysis as well as politics of memory and war. Hoffner works with video, photography, installation and performance. She* employs means of appropriation such as restaging photographs, interviews and reports, and searches for ways to desynchronize normative belongings of body and voice, sound and image. She* works explicitly against the current domination of corporate aesthetics, images of disgust and horror and the right-winged establishment by insisting on analysis, contextualization and reflection. Hoffner seeks to introduce temporalities, relations and spaces in-between iconic images and highly performative events of our totalizing contemporaneity.

* on the crossroads of those who were born 1980 in Paraćin (Yugoslavia), who were moved in 1989, and received capitalist citizenship (Austria) with a new name in 2002.

Please join us for the defense presentation. The event will take place online.

Zoom Meeting Link: https://akbild-ac-at.zoom.us/j/99860914783
Meeting-ID: 998 6091 4783

We are looking forward to welcoming you to the defense.