March 19 // Conference
"The World is Our Corner: Neurodivergent Homelands and Landscapes"
Guest curated by Hamja Ahsan
With Sarah Browne and Ipek Burçak
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam / Teijin Auditorium, 13:00-17:00
In his book "Shy Radicals: Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert", Hamja Ahsan envisions a transnational liberation movement and a utopian homeland—Aspergistan—for neurodivergent, quiet people and introverts. His presentation will explore the expansive practice of Shy Radicals, which extends beyond the book through film, installation, zine archives, and, more broadly, as a decentralized curatorial culture.
Hamja invites İpek Burçak, the first artist to bring the concept of Aspergistan and its coined terms into another space through her risograph book "The Autistic Turn" and its accompanying multidisciplinary practice in sound, publishing, film, and performance.
Joining the conversation, artist Sarah Browne will present her film project "Echo Bones: A Parallel Play", which reinterprets Samuel Beckett’s fiction by working with a community of autistic young people in the landscapes of Ireland.
These practices speculate on a shared future within real and imagined worldscapes, beyond the pathological, medical, and corporate frameworks.
Hamja Ahsan is a London-based artist, writer, curator, and activist. He is best known for the book "Shy Radicals: Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert", which envisions a utopic homeland for quiet, awkward, and neurodiverse people. Based on the language and formats of liberation movements, he imagines a Black Panthers for introverts struggling against extrovert supremacy. His artwork "Aspergistan Referendum" won the Grand Prize at the 2019 Ljubljana Biennial. His transdisciplinary practice extends into social justice movements, mental health institutions, and Muslim diasporic spaces. He was shortlisted for the Liberty Human Rights Award for the "Free Talha" campaign in 2013, which opposed extradition and detention without trial under the War on Terror. He co-founded DIY Cultures, a festival of zines and creative activism, which ran from 2013 to 2017 in London, UK.
In 2019, he participated in Art & Protest: What’s There to Be Mad About?, curated by Dolly Sen at Bethlem Gallery, London. Recent group exhibitions include Documenta 15 (2022) with the Halal Fried Chicken project – which forms the basis for his forthcoming book Radical Chicken; Absenced (2024) at Malmö City Library, Sweden; The Possibility of Not Having Been: Seven Decolonial Interferences (2023) at Santa Mònica, Barcelona.
Hamja Ahsan is part of the editorial collective for "Asylum: The Radical Mental Health Magazine".
Website: https://www.hamjaahsan.com
12:30 Walk-in
13:00 Welcome
Maaike Lauwaert (Gerrit Rietveld Academie), Jorinde Seijdel (Studium Generale) and Tarja Szaraniec (Rietveld Uncut)
13:15 The World is Our Corner: Neurodivergent Homelands and Landscapes (introduction / lecture presentation)
14:15 Echo’s Bones: a parallel play (film screening)
Echo’s Bones is a public art project created by Sarah Browne with autistic young people in North County Dublin, Ireland. The project borrows its title from an unpublished story by Samuel Beckett set in that landscape, populated by unusual characters and wildlife, where an asylum building meets the coastline. This presentation involves a screening of the film and a reading from the accompanying book, a text by Browne that maps the source material and unpacks co-creation methods. In this work, autism is not a ‘topic’ but a way of sensing the world and speculating about a shared future together.
Sarah Browne is an artist based in Ireland concerned with spoken and unspoken, bodily experiences of knowledge, labour and justice. Her practice involves sculpture, film, performance and public projects, often in collaboration with others.
Recent solo projects include Echo’s Bones (2022: a collaborative film-making project with autistic young people in North Dublin, responding to the work of Samuel Beckett); Public feeling (2019: public art commission in South Dublin leisure centres); Report to an Academy, Marabouparken, Stockholm (2017), Hand to Mouth at CCA Derry~Londonderry & Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and The Invisible Limb, basis, Frankfurt (both 2014). In 2020 she curated TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, with a project titled The Law is a White Dog.
Significant group exhibitions Browne has participated in include Bergen Assembly: Actually, the Dead are Not Dead (2019) and the Liverpool Biennial, with Jesse Jones (2016). In 2009 Sarah Browne co-represented Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with Gareth Kennedy and Kennedy Browne, their shared collaborative practice. She is associate artist with University College Dublin College of Social Sciences and Law.
15:15 Coffee Break
15:45 The Autistic Turn (lecture performance)
İpek Burçak’s project, "the Autistic Turn", includes an artist’s book and spreads itself into other forms and media. The multimedial project deals with affective computing and neurodiversity in intersectional waters. Autistic turn comes after the previous turns, such as the affective turn and other Western feminist turns, and aims to bring a fresh wave—the work centres on a fictional Uncanny Valley, where non-neurotypicals meet by the water. Through the uncanny valley, many concepts related to neurodiversity, feminisms, machine learning, and face and emotion recognition emerge and spread out.
İpek Burçak is a multidisciplinary artist born in Istanbul and based in Berlin. She studied media and conceptual art at the School of Arts Kassel and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She works with various media, such as video, sound, installation, performance, and publishing. With a speculative approach, she investigates technologies as commons, neurodiversity, and legacies of resistance movements. She has shown her work and performed internationally, at Galerie im Turm in Berlin, SoMad in New York, Dia Chelsea, Depo Istanbul, and Kosminen in Helsinki among others. She is also 1/2 of Well Gedacht Publishing, an artist duo that engages in publishing practices.