Future Ancestry - Impactful Storytelling in the Visual Arts

Reframe the past. Change the future. This two-part seminar for artists, curators, academics, and other practitioners and PhD candidates by curator and author Solvej Helweg Ovesen looks at how speculative storytelling, hybrid identities, and interdisciplinary research and artworks can engage with and reformulate the past to address pressing issues of our time.

The seminar invites participants to reflect on what it means to highlight or reframe the past to stimulate readiness for the future and create a space for imagination, transformation, and ultimately critical hope. Can we shape the future by re-imagining the past? How do artists, curators, researchers, and even AI support each other in communicating these stories to the public? We will look at selected artworks and artistic practices by for example Eli Cortinas, Josefa Ntjam, Yael Bartana, Justin Kennedy, Kristy Nataraja, Ersan Mondtag, Jacob Kudsk Steensen, Melanie Bonajo, Clara Sika Helbro, Lawrence Lek, Mykola Ridnyi, and/or Mikey Woodbridge and delve into relevant theories and discuss conceptual tools that can help arrive at a more refined understanding of the questions raised.

The overall aim of the seminar is to bring together a group of committed academics, artists, and practitioners to build a shared understanding of an emerging area of curatorial and artistic practice centered on imagining pasts and futures. We will explore 10 examples of visual artworks that significantly alter our perception of both our ancestors and our present and future lives using various research and creative methods such as forensic architecture, social design, collage, machine learning, and performative activation.

Target group

PhD candidates and other advanced practitioners within Art History, Cultural Studies, Visual Culture, Media Studies, Anthropology, Curating, as well as Artists doing doctoral (or comparable) research. PhD at all stages of their research project dealing with interdisciplinary and practise-based approaches to art studies.

 

  • To better understand a field of contemporary artistic practices centered on notions of past and futures. We will explore 10 examples of visual artworks that significantly alter our perception of both our ancestors and our current and future lives with the help of diverse research and creation methods like forensic architecture, social design, collage, Machine Learning, and performative activation.

  • The syllabus prepares for critical engagement with the intersections of AI and art, technology, ecology, mythology, facts, and identity, examining how these elements are used in impactful storytelling and influence and converge across time. The course thus intellectually investigates the role of AI and advanced technologies in shaping our engagement with both the future and our rethinking of the past.

  • To promote interdisciplinary dialogue through text based seminars, presentations by participants, public lectures, screenings, and studio visits in both Copenhagen and Berlin.

  • By exploring contemporary research-based artistic practices to foster a deeper understanding of storytelling and its impact on how we can reimagine the past, history, and thus take a different stance in matters of e.g. colonialism, ecology and equity today and towards the future.

 

 

Copenhagen 28.4 – 30.4 2025

During the three seminar days in Copenhagen, taking place at the University of Copenhagen, we will read texts and discuss presentations from teachers, participants, and invited speakers such as Clara Sika, Eli Cortinas, and Josefa Ntjam. We will both look at and analyze artistic practices and build a theoretical and conceptual frame of reference to help us navigate a current field of artistic and curatorial investigations of connections and narratives between past and future.

28.4.25 University of Copenhagen – South Campus, Auditorium 4A-0-56

Future Ancestry – Accessing the past through research, art and social design:

09.00-12.00 Introduction round of participants and thematic introduction Future Ancestry Solvej Ovesen

12.00-13.00 Lunch

13.00-16.00 Clara Sika Helbro, Manuel Correa (Forensic Architecture) presenting “Uncovering an Iceberg” archive and artwork case study as well as forensic architecture research method.

29.4.25 University of Copenhagen –South Campus, Auditorium 4A-0-56

Future Ancestry – Tidalectics, Futurism, Humanist Practices with AI and Machine-Learning:

09.00-12.00 Josefa Ntjam Futuristic Ancestry & Eli Cortinas presenting Machine Monologues and Dialogues

13.00-14.00 Screening films by Eli Cortinas and Josefe Ntjam

14.00-16.00 Open Forum for presentation/discussion/feedback on participants inquiries, reflections on theoretical text and artwork case studies (participants) with Josefa Ntjam and Eli Cortinas

30.4.25 University of Copenhagen – South Campus, Auditorium 4A-0-56

Future Ancestry - Repairs, Monuments, Spaceships:

09.00-12.00 Yael Bartana on “Thresholds” (German Pavilion, Venice Biennial 2024), including “Generationship”

13.00-16.00 Open Forum for presentation/discussion/feedback of participant inquiries, reflections on theoretical text and artwork case studies with Yael Bartana

Berlin 16.6 – 18.6 2025

In Berlin, there will be more focus on specific and current artistic and curatorial practices through studio visits (located in the UDK), presentations, and discussions based on encounters with an active and diverse local art scene amongst others dealing with art and AI (Junge Akademie), and as an add-on we visit the newly opened Berlin Biennale on the last day.

16.6 Universität der Künste, Studio Visits – BER

Artists working with Future Ancestry through all media (film, performance, painting, installation) present their work and methods in the classroom of Class Ridnyi

09.00-12.00 Introduction and first studio visit, Mykola Ridnyi (UDK Guestprofessor Klasse Hity Steyerl and co-host)

12.00-13.00 Lunch

13.00-17.00 Studio visits at UDK with Sarah Ama Duah, Thomias Radin (tbc), Kristy Nataraja, and Justin Kennedy

19.00-20.00 Studio visit with Ancestral Memory Lab by Safiya Yon & hn.lyonga (tbc)

17.6 Junge Akademie - BER

Discourse session “Training the Archive - AI, Contemporary Art and Archives” at Akademie der Künste. Artists working with AI in combination with other media tools:

09.00-12.00 Clara Herrmann introduction to curatorial work with artists working with AI (Akademie Der Künste Berlin, AI Anarchists Book), and lecture on training the archive Dr Maya Indira Ganesh (University of Cambridge, Associate Director (Research Partnerships) and Senior Research Associate Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, AI Anarchists Book)

12.00-13.00 Lunch

13.00-14.30 Open Forum Presentation of Participant Papers and Feedback with Maya Indira Ganesh, Clara Hermann and Solvej Ovesen

14.45-16.00 Presentation by Tiara Roxanne (ADK, Artist and Researcher on Datamining practices)

17.00-18.00 Studio visit with Kira Xonorika

18.6 Studio visits and Berlin Biennale – BER

Visit Berlin Biennial 2025 (independent activity, self-organized)

 

Daniela Agostinho (ed.), Solveig Gade, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Kristin Veel: (W)ARCHIVES: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art, Sternberg Press 2021 (20 p)

Interview with Kader Attila: Injury and Repair: Kader Attia, Mousse 2018 (10p)

Jem Bendell: BREAKING TOGETHER – a freedom-loving response to collapse, Good Works 2023 (30 p)

Ruha Benjamin: Race After Technology, Polity 2019 (40 p)

Ruha Benjamin, Imagination - A Manifesto, W. W. Norton & Company 2024 (30 p)

Sharon Blackie: If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging, September Publishing 2017 (optional)

David Burrows, Simon O'Sullivan: Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, Edinburgh University Press 2019 (15 p)

Joseph Campbell: The Power of Myth, Anchor 1991 (30 p)

Kate Crawford, Trevor Paglen: Excavating AI - The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets 2019 (10 p)

Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, Yale University Press 2022 (20p)

Kanta Dihal, Stephen Cave (ed.): Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines,  Oxford University Press 2023 (50 p)

Emma Enderby: Jakob Kudsk Steensen. Berl-Berl: Light Art Space, Walther König, 2021 (8 p)

Kari Grain: Critical Hope: How to Grapple with Complexity, Lead with Purpose, and Cultivate Transformative Social Change, North Atlantic Books 2022 (30 p)

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Carrier Bag Theory Of Fiction, Ignota Books 2019 (15 p)

Donna J. Haraway: Staying with The Trouble, Duke University Press 2016 (40 p)

Clara Herrmann, Hunchuck and Ganesh (Editors): The Al Anarchies Book, Akademie der Künste 2024 (30 p)

Saidiya Hartman: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, WW Norton & Co 2019 (30 p)

Sunny Kerr (ed.): Drift: Art and Dark Matter. With contributions by Emelie Changur, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sunny Kerr, Nadia Lichtig, Art McDonald, Josèfa Ntjam, Anne Riley, and Jol Thoms. Design by K. Verlag with Wolfgang Hückel & Katharina Tauer, KVerlag 2023 (10 p)

Steph Kretowicz (ed): The Chronologies of Creamcake, Distanz 2024 (10 p)

Damon Krukowski, Emily Thompson (Foreword): Ways of Hearing, MIT Press 2019 (10 p)

Daniel Muzyczuk, Anna Remešová, Mykola Ridnyi: /Mykola Ridnyi, Verlang Walter und Franz König 2023 (20 p)

Solvej Helweg Ovesen (ed. and author), & Kathrin Becker (ed.): POLY. A Fluid Show, Distanz 2023 (15 p)

Søren Rud og Søren Ivarsson: Globale og Postkoloniale Perspektiver på Dansk Kolonihistorie, Aarhus Universitetsforlag 2021 (20 p)

Holger Schulze: Sonic Fiction (The Study of Sound), Bloomsbury Academic 2020 (20 p)

Isabel Stengers: An ecology of practices, (Cultural Studies Review), University of Technology Sydney 2005 (7 p)

Eyal Weizman, Susan Schuppli, Shela Sheikh, Francesco Sebregondi, Thomas Keenan, Anselm Franke Forensic Architecture: Forensis - The Architecture of Public Truth, Sternberg Press 2014 (40)

Optional

Osei Bonsu: African Art Now: Fifty pioneers defining African art for the twenty-first century, Ilex Press 2022 (optional)

T.J. Demos: Decolonizing Nature - Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Sternberg Press 2016 (reprint 2024) (optional)

Charles Eisenstein: The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (Sacred Activism), North Atlantic Books 2013 (optional)

Andreas Huyssen: Twilight Memories - Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, Routhlege 2015 (optional)

Fred Morten: A Poetics of The Undercommons, Sputnik & Fizzle 2016 (optional)

 

Course organisers and lecturers

Solvej Helweg Ovesen, Organiser.

Clara Herrmann (Junge Akademie), Mykola Ridniy (Universität der Künste Berlin), Eli Cortiñas, Kristy Nataraja, Thomias Radin, Justin Kennedy, Maya Indira Ganesh (Cambridge University).

The course is a collaboration between PASS - Center for Practice-based Art Studies, University of Copenhagen and Die JUNGE AKADEMIE, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

ECTS credits

If you are a PhD student, full participation will give you 3,4 ECTS points, while participation with a 20-minute presentation will give you a total of 4,9 ECTS.

Workload

Presence: 36 hours. 
Preparation literature (545 p.): 30 hours.
Preparation feedback/discussion session: 28 hours.

Participation is free of charge, but there are a limited number of places at the seminar. Coffee/tea and meals during all seminar days will be provided and if participants do not have project funding, travel and accommodation costs in and between Copenhagen and Berlin will be covered by PASS.

Registration

Please register with a short application via email to pass@hum.ku.dk no later than 1 April 2025.

Deadline for submission of abstracts for PhD students: Please mention in your application whether and if so on which related subject you would like to do a 20-minute presentation. Deadline 15 April 2025.