Working Through. Friedl Dicker, Margit Téry, Mordecai Ardon – Das Kapital (Script), ca. 1933

Working Through is the first chapter of the artistic research project Relational Images in the Arts Since 1920. The project seeks to develop the interrelations among art-historical, theoretical, and artistic inquiries into feminist, politically committed positions.
Its point of departure is a series of photo-collages and photomontages collaboratively produced in 1933 by the artists Friedl Dicker, Margit Téry, and Mordecai Ardon and documented on a slide film. Connected through their studies at the Weimar Bauhaus in the 1920s, this group increasingly began in the 1930s to mobilize their artistic strategies against National Socialism. In a co-produced slide film, the group visualized concepts from Karl Marx’s Capital as well as the entanglements of economic crisis and fascism.

In Working Through, we realize a performative lecture and an installation that bring together spatializing and embodied artistic procedures with formal analyses and historical contextualization. To this end, the slide film is placed in relation to Dicker’s network in Berlin around 1930, when she was involved in designing an apartment for Téry in the Berlin-Wilmersdorf artists’ colony, which served as a hub for leftist intellectuals and artists.

Working Through is premised on co-authorship through joint research, writing, and artistic practice, with a focus on feminist-materialist historiography and speculative reconstruction. By interweaving sculptural elements, drawings, and archival materials with spoken reflections and object-based interactions, we trace the narrative, medial, and material structures of the slide-film as well as its aesthetic and social conditions of production. At the same time, we examine how the critical gestures of this historical artistic work might be reactivated in relation to contemporary crises.