Cultural policy is social policy, both nationally and internationally. SAVVY Contemporary cordially invites you: Andreas Görgen, head of the culture and communication department at the Foreign Office and companion of SAVVY Contemporary, will shed light on the close relationship between areas of politics, art and society and the resulting responsibilities in his lecture. Following the lecture, Andreas Görgen and Julia Grosse, art historian, author and editor, will discuss essential aspects with one another.

In a “country with a migration background” (Federal President Steinmeier) the old “inside” and “outside” flow together more strongly than ever before. This has implications for our understanding of the freedom of art (and science). It is about the necessity of these spaces of freedom and their importance in a society based on mutual respect and recognition. The thesis is that the space of freedom of art and aesthetics prefigures what becomes recognizable and negotiable in the political space. This applies to our understanding of beauty, but also of diversity and responsibility. An aesthetic of diversity is therefore just as necessary as it is tense, since the idea of ​​the nation state is based on the assumption of homogeneity. It is about these tensions and hopes from the perspective of international cultural policy.

ANDREAS GÖRGEN is Head of the Culture and Communication Department at the Federal Foreign Office. After completing his studies, he started his career in 1996 at the Berliner Ensemble and for many years worked across borders between Germany and France, both in the field of culture and in industry. After completing a scholarship at the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration, he switched to the area of ​​film financing for the public sector. After positions in the European Department in the Federal Chancellery and in the Foreign Office under Federal Foreign Minister Steinmeier, management positions in the energy sector followed in 2009 and 2011, before he returned to the Foreign Office in 2014.

JULIA GROSSE is co-founder and artistic director of the Contemporary And (C &) platform. She is a lecturer at the Institute for Art in Context at the University of the Arts in Berlin and has been an associated curator at the Gropius Bau since June 2021. Grosse studied art history and worked as a columnist and art journalist in London for taz, FAZ and AD Magazine. She is the author and co-editor of books, including 2018 A Lifetime (Hoffman and Campe). In 2020 she curated Friendly Confrontations: Festival for global art and institutional criticism at the Kammerspiele in Munich and was awarded the “European Cultural Manager of the Year” prize (together with Yvette Mutumba).

23.11.2021, 7PM.

Event in German.

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