Stannaki Forum

Stannaki Forum: Art and Research in Conversation is a research format at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden that facilitates conversations that fosters dialogue across different horizons of knowledge. Each forum begins with a specific object, which acts as both a witness and an interlocutor. These objects, shaped by their material provenance, acquisition and trading history, visual grammar, cultural techniques, or biography, reflect contexts ranging from colonialism, enslavement, dispossession, and cultural appropriation to diplomacy, exile, migration, economic relations, and education. The Stannaki Forum aims to acknowledge these contextual entanglements, thereby evoking the diasporic histories of the 500-years old state collections, which are conjured through contemporary conversations that seek to instigate shared futures. Doreen Mende is director of the cross-collections Research Department at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden [State Collections of Art Dresden], associate professor at HEAD Genève of HES-SO, and co-founder of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin.