House of Kal

Kal is a word in Urdu-Hindi that can mean both yesterday and tomorrow. Through this word from the poem of the same name by Kashmiri-American Fatimah Asghar, the project Kal taps into the knowledge of the past and the future dystopias and utopias we imagine cannot be separated into binaries.

The Houses of Kal in Karachi, Colombo and Berlin bring together art and transdisciplinary practitioners whose work explores feminist, anti-fascist, anti-racist and queer possibility. The Houses of Kal are conceived as a collective and self-organized space in the making with a public programming and publishing outlet, from May to September 2021.

The Houses of Kal summon a multiplicity of approaches to learning, sharing, healing, and co-living as a collaborative practice with the aim of fostering community and solidarity, locally and across borders. The Houses gathers and co-produces discourse and praxis at the crossings of art-making, queer and decolonial feminisms, and eco-politics with an emphasis on collaboration and care for each other’s practices

a language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word. kal is organized by Aziz Sohail and The Many Headed Hydra with Fiza Khatri and Sandev Handy. kal is a collaboration between District*School Without Center, Archive Books, the Goethe Institut Karachi and Colombo, and Indus Valley Gallery Karachi, funded by the Goethe Institut, the Department for Culture and Europe in the Berlin Senate, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and ifa.

Swiss participants in the Houses of Kal

A Frei

A Frei is a non-binary sound artist, relational listener, sonic community organizer, collaborator, sonic researcher, record store co-operator, graphic designer, experimental dj and mushroom enthusiast based in Zürich, Switzerland. They organize concerts, experimental audio formats and collaborate on listening performances and collective listening settings. A works as freelance graphic designer focussing on sound related projects, small editions and art books and give weekly risograph workshops.

A’s (sonic) practice consist of listening workshops, research-based listening performances, essayistic djing, semi-modular synthesis, various forms of microphony and free electroacoustic improvisation. They are deeply engaged in questions concerning the «ethics of listening» – in socio-political, environmental, embodied and queer practices of listening within its situated contexts, emancipatory possibilities within the sonic realm and forms of non-verbal communication/improvisation.

A Frei is co-founder of OOR Records/OOR Saloon (one’s own room) in Zürich. OOR Records is a collective, cooperative and honorary operated record and art-book store, organic archive and social gathering place for engaged ears.

Vera Ryser

Vera Ryser lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. She studied Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva and at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She is working as an independent curator/artist on transdisciplinary projects between art, research and mediation. In her artistic research she deals with decolonial practices, feminist resistance and migrant discourses and strives to update these topics beyond the supposedly clear boundaries of practice and theory. She cooperates with artists, researchers and everyday experts. From 2015-2020 she formed the duo Ryser+Schonfeldt with Sally Schonfeldt. One of their projects was the research project “Voices from an Archived Silence”, which resulted in 2020 in an exhibition in the Foyer of Basel Theater (Switzerland), which took colonial collections of the Museum of Cultures and the Natural History Museum, both in Basel, as the starting point for critical investigations and expansions.

knowbotiq

knowbotiq (Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Huebler) has been experimenting with forms and medialities of knowledge, political representations and epistemic disobedience. In recent projects they are investigating and enacting inhuman geographies with the focus on algorithmic governmentalities, libidinous and affective economies and postcolonial violence. In various formats (performative settings, critical fabulations, inventions, encounters) knowbotiq explore molecular, psychotrope and derivative aesthetics.