The digital exhibition project ARE YOU FOR REAL enters a new stage: ifa invites you to a six-part online mediation programme of guided tours, artist encounters, speculative writing and listening sessions, and an opening lecture by Nelly Y. Pinkrah.
18:30 – 20:00. online via BigBlueButton

But how and what can be called reality or realities at all when each and everyone’s perception of it is so different? Nelly Y. Pinkrah asked 2021 in ARE YOU FOR REAL – Phase 1.

When does anything become reality or real? For this lecture Pinkrah further probes how media and technology constitute the reality in which experiences become possible, reflecting on world-building and its possible resonance with Édouard Glissant’s statement: Nothing is true, everything is alive.

Register online here

How do technology, computation, and the sciences shape our understanding of the real? And how do we distinguish the real from the merely possible, the virtual, the actual, the magical? Since launching in 2020, ARE YOU FOR REAL has evolved into a resonant constellation of cosmo-clusters exploring technology’s infrastructural entanglements, regenerative power, magical thinking, tactical agency, predictive ambitions, and haunted nature. Shaped by its diversity of artistic commissions, the platform contends with digitalization and a reality irreducibly entangled with the online sphere.

Now you are invited on a deep dive into the solar systems gathered by ARE YOU FOR REAL through six guided sessions shaped around world-building exercises and reflections on generated realities. Join in whichever mode feels comfortable: Listen in or actively participate, stay for one or join all six.
All events are free of charge and will be hosted via ifa’s open-source Civil Society Platform using BigBlueButton.

ARE YOU FOR REAL was initiated by ifa in 2020. Phase 2 is curated by Giulia Bini and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, the online mediation programme is hosted by Barbara Zoé Kiolbassa.

Nelly Y. Pinkrah

Nelly Y. Pinkrah is a Black and media studies scholar currently with a position at the Chair of Digital Cultures at the Technical University of Dresden. Her work explores Black studies, media and technology, poetics and politics, and critical pedagogies. Her doctoral thesis explores The Technological Everyday through Édouard Glissant in relation to language and technology, history and epistemology, as well as cybernetics. Nelly co-runs the project School of (Un)Thought with Mitch Pfeifer (part of international network ASchool). She is also part of the speakers’ circle of the Alliance for Critical Scholarship in Solidarity (KriSol), a member of the German Forum Antiracism Media Studies (FAM) and the DFG Network Gender, Media, Affect. She is affiliated with the Center for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University. In 2021, she lectured at the University of Groningen.

Most recent: Calculating Intelligence in: Stella Rollin, Eva Fischer, Jamila Grandits (eds.), coded manoeuvres (Cologne: Walther und Franz König, 2025).

Additional Program

June 29, 18:30 – 20:00, Curatorial tour

July 15, 18:30 – 20:00, Encounter with artists

September 17, 18:30 – 20:00, free-writing session with written exercises

October 12, 16:00 – 17:30, Sonic experience

November 12, 18:30 -20:00, Encounter with artists

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