Privation in Three Acts: A Program by Decolonial Hacker by LE 18

Privation in Three Acts is a one day program initiated by Decolonial Hacker. It features a public workshop by the artist Rouzbeh Shadpey which “hacks” the mechanics of medical memory tests to explicate the logics of institutional forgetting, a lecture on potential museological histories by the writer (and founding editor of Decolonial Hacker) Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, and the reading of a new, commissioned text by the writer Sanja Grozdanić. Inspired by Ahmed Bouanani’s novel L’hôpital (1989) in its configuration of the hospital as a site of unstable consciousness and contested memories, alongside lumbung artists’ LE 18’s Undoing documenta public program which pathologized documenta fifteen’s political conditions and its ramifications for artists and art administrators, Privation in Three Acts steps into the recesses of historical “forgetting” to demonstrate how certain narrations of iniquity are silenced by nation states, cultural institutions, and other autocratic regimes.

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