School of Listening
School of Listening explores performative ways of collaborating through vocalizing, listening, and their somatic manifestations. Navigating the gamut between collaboration, participation, and refusal, it engages with the potential of adversarial conversations as a vehicle for empathy and co-resistance. The project focuses on listening differently, probing listening’s capacity to embody conflict, to amplify silenced narratives, to permeate borders, and to challenge simplistic perspectives on identity.
Nora Amin, Thalia Hoffman, Samira Saraya, Neta Weiner and Netta Weiser
Curated by Maayan Sheleff, in collaboration with Nora Sternfeld (Professor of Art Education at HFBK Hamburg)
Maayan Sheleff's residency at HFBK is facilitated by Artis in collaboration with DAAD.
The public program is supported by Artis.
Participants
Nora Amin
Nora Amin is a choreographer, performer, author & scholar. She lives in Berlin since 2015 where she’s been practicing her choreographic signature through community dance workshops, professional contemporary dance workshops, solo performances, academic lectures/seminars and authored books. She holds a PhD in cultural policy and the performing arts at University of Hildesheim, and is author of Migrating the Feminine & Dance of the Persecuted (Matthes & Seitz, 2018-2021). She is a board member of the German Centre of the International Theatre Institute, member of the scientific committee of the Barba Varley Foundation, and currently co-curator of the platform “Healing across Imaginative Spaces” by Ringlokschuppen an der Ruhr.
Thalia Hoffman
Thalia Hoffman is a visual artist and researcher working in film, video, performance, and public interventions in the area where she lives, east of the Mediterranean. Alongside her artistic actions, Hoffman holds a PhD in artistic research from Leiden University and is a lecturer in video, performance and artistic research at the University of Haifa. Her work strives to be involved in its surroundings and engages people to look, listen and feel their socio-political landscape with attention.
Samira Saraya
Samira Saraya is an actor, writer, director, spoken word artist, and LGBTQ activist. In her early twenties, she began performing as a drag king while working as a nurse. Saraya won several awards in theater and cinema, including the Best Script Award for her short film Polygraph of 2018 at TLVFest, a film which features the first openly lesbian Arab character in cinema in Tel Aviv.
Neta Weiner
Neta Weiner is a musician, theater director, actor, rapper, founder, lead singer, and accordionist of System Ali, a multilingual Jewish-Arab hip-hop project. Weiner is also the artistic director of the Beit System Ali social educational movement. He has created several critically acclaimed and award-winning stage works that have been produced for festivals and prominent theaters around the world. Last year, Weiner released his second solo album, Pinui Binui, written in Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish, and English. Additionally, he has been practicing martial arts for over 20 years and is a licensed teacher of Wing Tsun Kung Fu.
Netta Weiser
Netta Weiser is an artist and choreographer based in Berlin, working across performance, sound installation, and experimental radio. In 2019, she established the long-term artistic research project Radio-Choreography, which explores the poetics and politics of transforming dance into sound, the relationship between live broadcasting and muted histories, and acts of listening as modes of being together. Her work has been presented internationally, most recently at the Akademie der Künste Berlin, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, Tanzquartier Wien, Onassis Stegi Athens, WDR, Villa Medici Rome, Tanznacht Berlin, CCA Glasgow, and TONSPUR Micro Museum for Sound at MQ Vienna. In 2024, the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe presented her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. Alongside her artistic practice, Weiser regularly teaches at the Klangzeitort Institute for New Music in Berlin and the Universität der Künste Berlin.
Dr. Maayan Sheleff
Dr. Maayan Sheleff is a curator and researcher. She curated projects at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; KW, Berlin; Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht; Reading International; the Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo and Madre Museum, Naples, among others. She was formerly the curator of the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, and a co-curator of the first and only Tel Aviv-Jaffa Biennial. She is the author of Echoing with a Difference, Curating Voices and the Politics of Participation, and co-author of (Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communcal Bodies (OnCurating academic book series, 2024 and 2021). Her publications include “Fear and Love in Graz”, in Empty Stages, Crowded Flats. Performativity as Curatorial Strategy, Performing Urgency #4, ed. Florian Malzacher and Joanna Warsza (Berlin: House on Fire, Alexander Verlag and Live Art Development Agency, 2017) and “The Infiltrators - Crossing Borders with Participatory Art”, in Refugees and Cultural Education- Formats and strategies for a new field of practice, ed. Caroline Gritschke and Maren Ziese (Transcript publishing, Germany, 2016).
Dr. Nora Sternfeld
Nora Sternfeld is an art mediator and curator. She is professor for art education at the HFBK Hamburg. From 2018 to 2020 she was documenta professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. From 2012 to 2018 she was Professor of Curating and Mediating Art at Aalto University in Helsinki. In addition, she is co-director of the /ecm - Master Course for Exhibition Theory and Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in the core team of schnittpunkt. austellungstheorie & praxis, co-founder and partner of trafo.K, Office for Education, Art and Critical Knowledge Production (Vienna) and since 2011 part of freethought, Platform for Research, Education and Production (London). In this context she was also one of the artistic directors* of the Bergen Assembly 2016 and is 2020 BAK Fellow, basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht). She publishes on contemporary art, educational theory, exhibitions, historical politics and anti-racism.