Session #5: Swell
Anja Isabel Schneider

Rib is pleased to present a lecture by writer, editor, and curator Anja Isabel Schneider, Swell. This talk is part of Taming the Horror Vacui, a long-term project (January 2020–June 2021) at Rib, cultivating a deeper engagement with Ahmed’s practice.

Anja Isabel Schneider’s current research explores the interactions of art with science and psychoanalysis with a special interest in performativity and ecologies of resistance, the relationship between spatial practices and writing, text and physicality. Schneider links Allan Sekula’s “staging [of] the wind” to Haseeb Ahmed’s ongoing wind tunnel experiment at Rib, and to questions of scale, liminality and human agency they both address.

Swell takes up the dialogue between Ahmed and Schneider, initiated in Antwerp on the occasion of his solo exhibition Haseeb Ahmed – The Wind Egg at M HKA (2018). The lecture’s title [from the German word “schwellen”] references Walter Benjamin’s definition of a threshold [Schwelle], significant to articulating space and time present in the way both Sekula thinks of the port and Ahmed the wind tunnel.

In keeping the spirit of Sekula’s critical engagement with the port of Rotterdam, her lecture will address the wind as an animating agent in Allan Sekula’s final work Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum (2010–2013) and with it the space of reflection where the artist situates his project: the interstitial space of the harbor. Its relationality to other ports, to other docks, makes it a space of potential linkage points.

In part, this lecture inscribes itself into the larger research project Art Against the Grain of “Collective Sisyphus”: The Case of Allan Sekula’s Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum (2010–2013), jointly developed by M HKA and the Lieven Gevaert Centre at KU Leuven and UCLouvain, with professor Hilde Van Gelder as promotor, and supported by the Research Fund KU Leuven, the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO), M HKA and the Allan Sekula Studio.