Nights of the Dispossessed - Riots Unbound

Riots are extraordinary events that have been recurring with increasing frequency and occupy a highly controversial space in the political imagination. Despite their often negative portrayals, it is undeniable that riots have played a pivotal role in the confrontation between authority and dissent. Recently, with the deepening crises of capitalism, racial violence, and communal tension, an “age of riots” has powerfully begun. As master fictions of the sovereign nation-state implode, and the hegemonic silencing of the dispossessed reveals the cracks in governability, Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound brings together artistic works, political texts, critical urban analyses, and research projects from across the world in an endeavor to “sense,” chronicle, and think through recent riots and uprisings―evoking a phenomenology of the multitude and surplus population.

With contributions from Asef Bayat, Joshua Clover, Vaginal Davis, Keller Easterling, Zena Edwards, Nadine El-Enany, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Gauri Gill, Natasha Ginwala, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Louis Henderson, Satch Hoyt, Hamid Khan, Gal Kirn, Josh Kun, Léopold Lambert, Margit Mayer, Vivek Narayanan, Ai Ogawa, Oana Pârvan, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, SAHMAT, Thomas Seibert, Niloufar Tajeri, Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Dariouche Tehrani, and Ala Younis.

Natasha Ginwala is an associate curator at the Gropius Bau in Berlin and artistic director of the 13th Gwangju Biennale with Defne Ayas. She is also artistic director of the interdisciplinary arts festival Colomboscope in Sri Lanka and was part of the curatorial team of documenta 14 (2017). Ginwala has curated several international exhibitions and regularly writes on contemporary art and visual culture. She is a recipient of the 2018 visual arts research grant from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

Gal Kirn has a PhD from the University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia. He has since worked, among other places, at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Humboldt University in Berlin, GWZO in Leipzig, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude. He is currently a research fellow at TU Dresden, where he researches the Soviet avant-garde and partisan memory. His book Partisan Ruptures was published by Pluto Press (2019), and The Partisan Counter-Archive is forthcoming from De Gruyter.

Niloufar Tajeri is an architect, an activist, and a writer. She teaches in the department of history and theory of architecture and city at the TU Braunschweig, where she is pursuing a PhD. She coedited Small Interventions: New Ways of Living in Post-War Modernism (Birkhäuser, 2016) and Kabul: Secure City Public City (Archis, 2008). She has taught at the Institute of Architectural Design, Art, and Theory at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and has worked as an editor for ARCH+ and Volume.