upcoming: Seminar Series

Militancy and Care: Artistic Perspectives on Motherhood and Resistance in the Context of the Anti-Authoritarian Kinderladen Movement

Bildcredit: Filmstill Komplizinnen - Margit Czenki

Can care be a form of resistance, or can resistance be an act of care? With this series of events, we explore this question through the films and writings of three artists: Margit Czenki, Helke Sander and Ulrike Edschmid. All three were active in the anti-authoritarian collective child care movement in West Germany after 1968, and this experience resonates in their work in very different ways. Through film screenings, a reading and discussions, we trace the historical attempt to politicise motherhood and care in solidarity with children, and thereby contribute to an anti-fascist society.

The series is organised by Antonia Rohwetter and the participants of the seminar “Care and Resistance: Practices of Care in the Arts”, in cooperation with Jordan Troeller’s project “The M/Other Project: Creativity, Procreation, and Contemporary Art”. The project is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation as part of a Freigeist Fellowship.

Nov. 26, 2026. 6pm with Margit Czenki

Komplizinnen (1987), one of the first German films about women’s prisons. The protagonist, Barbara, has been sentenced for bank robbery. Rather than simply serving her sentence, she wants to live her time in prison, resisting the institution’s repressive measures while constantly seeking out relationships of solidarity with her fellow inmates. The film is partly autobiographical: in the 1970s, Czenki herself was imprisoned following a bank robbery intended to help cross-finance political projects, including the children’s daycare centre she had founded herself. In the film, this daycare centre serves as a counter-image to the prison as an institution of discipline and confinement. Using selected scenes as a starting point, we will talk with the artist, whose practice continues to span multiple disciplines (including “Park Fiction” in Hamburg), about the relationship between political, artistic and caring practices.

the event will be held in German

Dec. 17, 2026. 6pm on Helke Sander

In a collective reading, we will explore texts from Ulrike Edschmid’s books Frau mit Waffe and Das Verschwinden des Philip S. Through precise and poetic observations, Edschmid portrays the student and Kinderladen movements in all their lived contradictions. Her writing conveys a keen sensitivity to the ambivalences of political hope and militancy, avoiding the conventional glorification and demonisation associated with the events surrounding 1968. The reading will take place without the author in attendance, but will be developed by students in dialogue with her.

the event will be held in German

Jan. 14, 2027. 6pm on Helke Sander, with Bojana Kunst

Together with philosopher and performance theorist Bojana Kunst, we will watch and discuss Helke Sander’s short film Nr. 1 – Aus Berichten der Wach- und Patrouillendienste (1985). The film reconstructs the politically charged and daring action of a mother facing housing insecurity who climbs a construction crane with her two young children. Filmmaker Helke Sander is regarded as a leading figure of West-Germany‘s New Women’s Movement. In the late 1960s, she co-founded the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen (Action Council for the Liberation of Women), which established the first Kinderläden in West Berlin. Drawing on Sander’s filmmaking practice, we will speak with Bojana Kunst about her book The Life of Art: Transversal Lines of Care and the ambivalent concept of care, which cannot be understood as existing outside relations of capitalist violence.

the event will be held in English

Events Archive

  • Re/production: Motherhood and Artistic Practice

    Screening and Book Launch, Jan. 14, 2026, Kunstraum Leuphana Universität Lüneburg

    How is our understanding of artistic practice challenged, when motherhood is no longer positioned as art’s outside? Following this question, the event brings filmmaker Katharina Pethke and art historian Jordan Troller together for a joint screening and discussion on the relationship between maternal experience and artistic work.

    In the essayistic documentary Reproduktion, Katharina Pethke examines the architectural spaces of Hamburgs Academy of Arts in relation to her own family history. Tracing three generations of women who passed through this institution, the film reflects on how tensions between artistic subjectivity and maternity have shifted or persisted across time.

    In her recent book Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury, Jordan Troeller situates the sculptor within her community of Bay Area women artists. Troeller shows, how Asawa’s use of non-toxic materials, raising six children, and her engagements in community arts education shaped her artistic practice, while fundamentally challenging modernism’s myth of the autonomous artist.

    Following the screening, Katharina Pethke and Jordan Troeller will discuss the entanglements of reproductive and artistic labor, and how family archives can bring forward histories that often remain unwritten. Books available for purchase.

  • A Workshop on Mothering as Method

    Symposium, Oct. 17- 18, 2026, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg

    The concept of the workshop is to explore how our own, individual encounters with motherhood, from whatever perspective, have shaped our methods as artists and writers. The emphasis, in other words, is not on an iconography of motherhood, but rather on the approaches, structures, and conditions that the maternal opens up. Furthermore, we will be as interested in individual works-in-progress as we are in how such projects have broader ramifications for challenging longstanding paternalisms in art and academia.

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