The third evening will be a musical confrontation with the exchange of knowledge, for which we have invited a singer, who is also engineer and actor. Samee Ullah from Pakistan has been living in Berlin for two years. In the play Letters Home by the Refugee Club Impulse he plays a starring role and sings songs in Punjabi, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi and English.
In the 19th century Alexander von Humboldt held his KOSMOS lectures in the Berlin Singakademie—today's Maxim Gorki Theatre. He brought knowledge from various countries back to Berlin and reported on his trips around the world. During the season 2015/16, with the series KOSMOS ² curated by Grada Kilomba, we want to grapple in the course of ten events with issues of knowledge transfer and knowledge production today. Who has access to knowledge and the opportunity to share it, and if so, then what knowledge? Who talks to whom, and about what? In KOSMOS ² artists whose lives have been shaped by fleeing will give lectures. They live in Berlin, but their knowledge cannot find a way into the conventional academic or cultural-institutional spaces for the dissemination of knowledge. We will be opening the series with three events during the Herbstsalon, artists will provide insight into their work. The author, theorist and interdisciplinary artist Grada Kilomba will give an introduction into the topic and moderate the talks.