Society in Transformation - Lecture Series, Hochschule für Musik Basel

Ulf Aminde works as an artist and filmmaker. His productions often engage with public space — and are frequently shown there too. He understands filmmaking as a social practice rooted in collective interaction and ongoing negotiation.

Many of his works focus on collective learning environments, or even initiate them. They are based on close collaboration with the participants and shaped by experimental settings.

His recent works concentrate on commemoration as a practice. In this context, he seeks to make the political structures that shape places of remembrance visible and transparent, and to transform them by focusing on the perspectives of those directly affected.

He is currently co-developing, together with survivors, solidarity initiatives, and experts, a film-based and, through the use of Augmented Reality, also participatory monument in memory of the racist attacks carried out by the terrorist NSU network in Probsteigasse and Keupstraße in Cologne, Germany.

Aminde increasingly describes his practice, especially through projects like this, as a form of infrastructure art — one that aims to build social, institutional, and technological frameworks to sustain artistic, commemorative, and participatory processes over the long term.

Ulf Aminde is also Professor of Performative Spaces at the weissensee school of art berlin, where he initiated in 2016 the *foundationClass for artists who have fled their home countries.

His exhibitions include the 4th Berlin Biennale, Havana Biennale, KW Berlin, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlinische Galerie, NGBK Berlin, ZKM Karlsruhe, MARTa Herford, Steirischer Herbst, Schirn Frankfurt, Kästner Gesellschaft Hannover, MoCA Taipei, Kunstverein Heidelberg, Staatstheater Mannheim, Kunstverein Wolfsburg, and Galerie Tanja Wagner.

He studied at the Universität der Künste Berlin with Lothar Baumgarten, graduating in 2004.

In his presentation, Ulf Aminde will use examples from his own work to describe how his attempts to describe creative work in relation to social spaces have led him to various key questions, which he will then discuss with the students.

Ulf Aminde understands his artistic practice as a continuous movement between symbolic appropriation of the social and the real construction of power-critical infrastructures. The starting point for his work is the question of how artistic means can be used to make social categories, institutional conditions and forms of collective action visible, to question them and to change them concretely in certain situations.

Early works from 2001 onwards move in the field of performative, cinematic and discursive explorations of participation, public sphere and self-criticism. The social appears here as a symbolic space: as something that is performatively produced, appropriated and at the same time examined for its exclusions. The works deliberately operate in a tension between participation and distance, engagement and critical self-observation.

Over the past ten years, the focus of artistic practice has shifted significantly. Projects are increasingly emerging in long-term, real-world contexts, such as at a central memorial site or within a specially initiated class for refugees at an art college. Artistic practice is no longer understood primarily as symbolic intervention, but rather as the construction of real structures: teaching formats, institutional spaces and infrastructural conditions geared towards care, accessibility and criticism of power. In this sense, the work can be understood as a form of anti-fascist education – not as didactic teaching, but as a practical counter-movement to authoritarian, exclusionary and fascist tendencies through the creation of counter-spaces.

The presentation makes these shifts visible and, along the lines of a structurally critical synthesis, presents the artistic practice of student Ulf Aminde as an invitation to discussion.