This lecture series examines gestures of invitation in artistic and academic practices—gestures that open up spaces for relationships, negotiation, and change. While concepts of invitation and hospitality are increasingly present in art and curation, the lecture questions their political effectiveness within and outside institutional frameworks. To invite means to open a space where encounters become possible, and power is shared—but never without friction. Invitations can reproduce hierarchies and regulate who is allowed to enter, speak, or be heard.

The series explores how narratives of “inviting” simultaneously reinforce and challenge mechanisms of inclusion and understands un/inviting gestures as a field of tension that can be rethought through refusal, redistribution, and care.

Through contributions from artists, researchers, and cultural actors (among others Luce deLire, Alessandra Corti and Amanda Piña), the series examines the infrastructures, affects, and politics that determine how and who invites, hosts, and participates. In keeping with the transdisciplinary context of the doctoral program “Cultures in Transition,” the series combines curatorial, artistic, philosophical, and political approaches and utilizes a variety of formats—from lectures to participatory encounters to experimental presentations. This creates a space for thinking about and practicing the politics of invitation.

Overview (Details will follow):

Mi 11.03.26, 18:00-19:30: Auftakt mit anschließendem Get-together

Mi 25.03.26, 17:00-19:30: Maré Tulio Jenzer / Luce deLire: The Queer Art of Hospitality

Mi 15.04.26, 17:00-19:30: Fernanda Ermelindo Rodrigues / Amanda Piña: Crashing the Party: Entering Uninvited, Decolonial Ancestry, and the White Gaze 

Mi 29.04.26, 17:00-19:30: Anna Rebecca Menslin / Alessandra Corti: Collaborative Gestures in Contemporary Ballet: On inviting, negotiating, and choreographing relations

Mi 06.05.26, 17:00-19:30: Kinga Tóth / Bertram J. Schirr: Die Geste des Gebets als Invokation und Invitation 

Mi 20.05.26, 17:00-19:30: Ewa Meister / Maja Simišić: Everyone’s Welcome (Terms Apply).  Artistic and Curatorial Research on Practices of Invitation

Mi 10.06.26, 17:00-19:30: Zuzana Ernst / Mai Ling Collective: Becoming Stickiness & Listening Otherwise 

Mi 24.06.26, 17:00-19:30: Julieta Jacobi / Anna Wieczorek / Manuela Schemm: Aesthetics of Access. Audio description as an archive for multisensory experience