Artists’ Readings on the Work of Sudhir Kakar
With:
Mandakini Devi (Artist-in-Residence / New Delhi /India)
Manjari Goteti (Hyderabad / Hamburg)
Katharina Kakar (Goa / India)
Michael Kress (HyCP)
Priyanka Sarkar (New Delhi / Hamburg)
Chrisdian Wittenburg (HyCP)
Exhibition Opening: 22.06.2025, 16.00 h
HyCP Veddel Space
Sieldeich 36, 20539 Hamburg
Artist Dinner: 29.06.2025,
Café Nova, Veddel, 18.00 h
Wilhelmsburger Str. 73, 20539 Hamburg
Building on an intellectual partnership with the Kakar Centre for Psychoanalysis and Culture (KCPC), an institution founded in Goa in 2024, artists from India and Hamburg are invited to jointly explore the work of the Indian psychoanalyst and writer, Sudhir Kakar, as an aesthetic basis for artistic collaboration. The author’s texts will be read, discussed, and further developed in various workshops as a basis for artistic interpretations. As an AiR, we invite an Indian artist to exchange ideas with Hamburg-based Indian and Hamburg artists and jointly develop an artistic approach to the topic. Open artistic readings, discussions, and presentations are planned over several days and will be published in an audiovisual blog. A special focus of this format is on integrating the Indian community and its networking within Hamburg’s art scene. This creates a different, new perspective on artistic practice. The focus is on questions of different cultural identities, questions about the location of the cultural unconscious, as well as questions about the concepts of aesthetics and their universal validity, in relation to (and in response to) postcolonial arrogance.
About the work of Sudhir Kakar and the Kakar Centre for Psychoanalysis and Culture (KCPC): For more than a century, the cultural imagination of psychoanalysis had its roots primarily in Europe. A culture’s imaginary world is known through its myths and legends, proverbs, metaphors, and iconic works of art. It is also reflected in the choice of educational methods, the stories told by members of a society, and the important social rituals they practice.
The emergence of multicultural movements in many Western societies has led to an increasing call by analysts of diverse backgrounds to re-examine the question of culture in psychoanalysis. Building on the work of Indian psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Sudhir Kakar, the Kakar Centre for Psychoanalysis and Culture is working to create an “international psychoanalysis” rather than a purely local, national, or Indian psychoanalysis. For psychoanalysis to be global, it must draw on multiple civilizational roots and diverse theories of the human psyche to modify its understanding of fundamental questions of human existence, the human mind, and the search for psychic truth. In the face of globalization, a culture of inclusion is crucial for revitalizing psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and other disciplines and for understanding “the other.” In such an integrative approach, different civilizations and their cultural imaginaries are used as an invaluable resource to open up a deeper understanding of cultural difference and identity to a broad audience.
Concept: Katharina Kakar and Michael Kress
Arist-in-Residence: Mandakini Devi (New Delhi /India)
Photo/Still: “Between the Stem and Lotus” a film by Shwetal A. Patel
Mit freundlicher Unterstützung
der Behörde für Kultur und Medien
und des Bezirks Hamburg-Mitte
Get here by S3/5 Train (Elbrücken, two stops from HBF),
bicycle, or Moia!
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