Shaping spatial constellations – approaches through sound, sculpture
and photography towards a shared world
Presentation by Johanna Diehl and Raphael Sbrzesny
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
March 20, 2024
3:30pm, MC522.
In their presentation, photographer Johanna Diehl and performer and artist Raphael
Sbrzesny explore how spaces can be conceived in which different religious, political
and aesthetic actions can coexist simultaneously.
Their artistic works operate at the interfaces of sound, public space, photography and
film. Both teach at art and design colleges in Germany, publish, research, exhibit and
perform in academic and artistic contexts.
Raphael Sbrzesny is particularly interested in new forms of collaborative practice in
his teaching and has developed a pedagogical teaching concept that he calls the
Polyphonic Workshop. Central to his practice is to redistribute public space through
interventions (to redistribute the sensual in the sense of Rancière) in order to enable
unconventional uses by the people who live in the cities.
In her photographs, Johanna Diehl investigates how various historically situated
actions have inscribed themselves into the places themselves in Ukraine, Italy,
Cyprus, Sarajevo, Athens and Lithuania (to name just a few). How does fascist
architecture function, what do conversions of former synagogues into factories,
cultural spaces and cinemas reveal about post-Soviet Eastern Europe and how can
different layers of time exist in parallel in a photographic image?
The talk is open to all students from music, fine art, sound art, photography, film and
installation.