Natascha Sadr Haghighian charts modes of strategic ignorance and recognition that operate in structural racism.
"We tried to get over this disturbance by learning to suppress the perception of racist structures. This in turn made it difficult to develop a commonality, a conversation about the experience of racism. Languages that were developed to articulate one's own perception, literature, songs—at most they had street credibility in Germany, if they were registered at all. As foreigners, everyone was on their own inside the epistemic bubble of integration. Any form of gathering and assembly was considered a sign of failed integration."
In her text "What I Do Not Recognize Yet, Now at This Very Moment," Natascha Sadr Haghighian grapples with the dialectics of looking in German structural racism by returning to the how's and why's of "not seeing" the NSU (the neo-Nazi organization that was able to carry out racist murders in Germany from 2000 to 2011 without being "found"). The text charts modes of strategic ignorance and recognition that operate in structural racism. Sadr Haghighian's interest in recognition goes back to a longer study on ways of seeing as political acts, in which she tried to detect or develop modes of seeing that make themselves unavailable to dominant or suggested views. "Looking Awry," not looking straightforwardly, became one of these modes of seeing that allow us to pay attention to the fringes, to the events outside of the image that in fact constitute the image. Today, Sadr Haghighian understands these modes of seeing as an embattled negotiation of recognition and ignorance, both willful and conditioned. By attending to this negotiation, life beyond a racist reality might become conceivable.
Natascha Sadr Haghighian (born 1963 in Teheran) is an important voice of contemporary art. In her
work she unfolds the poetic, imaginary and critical potential of art. She
stands for an artistic position that not only analyses or comments on
aesthetic and scientific concepts and social or political
conditions, but actively changes them. Within each working process the
artist develops a new understanding of her role and a new approach.
She primarily creates works in the fields of installation and performance,
text and sound. As an
individual or collective artistic position, she frequently allows her
practice to flow into political, social processes. She addresses the
activist aspect of artistic work and reassesses the conditions and spaces
for aesthetic research and artistic action. Disconnecting the artist from
representative roles or political instrumentalisation has always been an
integral part of Natascha Sadr Haghighian's artistic practice. As early as
2004, the artist initiated the CV exchange platform bioswop.net, where
concepts such as identity, representation, facts and self are renegotiated
and the fetish of the "artist's biography" is undermined. For
her participation at the German pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennale, she
intentionally misspelled her name as "Natascha Süder Happelmann".
