In her new performance, Judith Raum explores the habitus of key figures in the 1908 Anatolian Railway strike, creating drawings and engaging with historical letters and photographs. This forms a labyrinthine network of connections between aesthetics, social, economic, and colonial history. The actions and rhetorics of power, as they appear in the Anatolian Railway project, become expressions of a vulnerable economic principle that did not end with the colonial era but continues today. In her artistic research, Judith Raum has investigated Germany’s influence on the economy and culture of the Ottoman Empire in the years preceding World War I, focusing in particular on testimonies of alternative economies and local resistances to rationalization and modernization. In 1888, the newly founded Deutsche Bank was granted permission to build the Anatolian Railway and later the Baghdad Railway, fueling a series of colonialist and capitalist illusions.

Judith Raum. eser

eser is a comprehensive publication on the works, installations, and texts related to Judith Raum’s performances from 2011 to 2014. It is also a theoretical anthology and a collection of materials on the semi-colonialist advance of German entrepreneurs and bankers in the Ottoman Empire prior to World War I and concurrent with the construction of the Anatolian Railway. In this context, capitalist logics and geopolitical interests reveal connections between engineering commissions and less explicit objectives: taking over the management of agriculture, archaeology, and working conditions in the country. Judith Raum’s work suggests that the actions and rhetorics of power and domination stem from an economic principle that did not end with the colonial era but indeed persists today. Her work, made up of paintings, drawings, objects, and texts, leads her to conduct research in locations and archives, while still manifesting an autonomous aesthetic dimension and suggesting an alternative approach to artistic research.

eser was recently presented at Heidelberger Kunstverein (Heidelberg), Salt (Istanbul and Ankara), and Haus der Kulturen der Welt: HKW (Berlin). Judith Raum is the winner of the Premio Villa Romana 2015 and lives in Florence. The book was co-financed by Einstein Stiftung Berlin.

Judith Raum. eser
Texts by Sabeth Buchmann, Alexander García Düttman, Suzanne Marchand, and Iz Öztat (English, German, and Turkish)
Design by HIT, Berlin
500 pages
Archive Books

photo credits
Judith Raum, am of the opinion strike is useful, 2015
Lecture Performance at 100 Years of Now. The Opening
30.9. – 4.10.2015
© Sebastian Bolesch / Haus der Kulturen der Welt