Art Critique as Midwifery of a Shifting in Consciousness

Art Critique as Midwifery of a Shifting in Consciousness explores transitional states like grief, healing, and collective re-imagination and their relation to art critique. It asks how the spiritual, aesthetic, and political labor of art—attending to pain, mapping intergenerational trauma, and tracing fragile architectures of care—intertwines with the urgency to reform the language that articulates such work.

The title relates here to 'Midwifing a Cultural Shift', a phrase attributed to Rachelle Garcia Seliga, a midwife and birth educator. It emerges from a conversation with Stav Yeini, reflecting on the loss of language to polarization, the physiology of birth, and this moment of shifting consciousness shaped by new technologies. Examining notions of art critique after linear media, the symposium positions critique as a metabolism of rupture, a form of listening and responding otherwise to aesthetic and social shifts.

Together with participating members of AICA Germany, section of the International Association of Art critics, the event offers a conceptual framework where critique is a technology of analysis deeply interwoven with our understanding of the world and the biases we carry in this process. Here, art critique is reimagined as a tool through which to metabolize the manifestations of pain, trauma, and ideological fixation in art production, and invites critical joy—a practice of being present to contest the fixation of truth in a singular form. 

Can art critique become a midwifery of consciousness by holding space for what has yet to come into language?

In the context of Berlin, Stav Yeini’s sonic architecture, rooted in practices of perinatal care, offers more than a metaphor for critique: it stages a material condition for it. Her installations and performances cultivate a space of co-presence, where witnessing becomes an embodied, durational engagement with that which struggles to come into form. This is not critique as judgment, but as midwifery: a labor of listening, holding, and attuning to emergent life amid systemic constraint. Yeini insists that critique must be situated, vulnerable, and participatory—a practice of solidarity that does not extract meaning but helps bring it into the world.

This ethos of critical midwifery resonates with the work of Issa Amro, whose defense of civic infrastructures in Hebron foregrounds the material risks and ethical stakes of witnessing. Together with him and Barbara Debeuckelaere, Arts of the Working Class produces posters of daily life photographs from mothers in Tel Rumeida, whose proceeds directly support local families. The photographs transform acts of witnessing into material redistribution, refusing the moral capital often accrued by distant spectatorship.

Across these practices, critique shifts from an authoritative stance to a generative one, anchored in presence, care, and the redistribution of power.

These are modes of engagement where critique becomes a shared ritual for relearning how to speak, witness, and listen across difference and through rupture. Drawing from feminist and decolonial thought, the conversations in this symposium privilege relational and collective ways of critique-making over pre-established and canonical ideological postures. Critique thus becomes not merely analysis, but a gesture of reciprocity, embracing the difference in experiences. Its absence in political and art discourses has revealed a growing impossibility of conversation without the instrumentalization of perspectives—an increasingly common condition in a global society leaning toward conservatism.

Curated by María Inés Plaza Lazo, member of AICA Germany, a publisher and founder of Arts of the Working Class. Kindly supported by Atelier Gardens and the Institute for Film and Performance Expanded. Everyone is welcome to join, but to secure a seat, RSVP: distro@artsoftheworkingclass.org

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Schedule

11 am
Opening Remarks & Sound Intervention

We begin by attuning. A sonic field welcomes participants into a shared sensorial threshold, opening the boundary between public and inner space. This ritual opening—designed by Stav Yeini—invites the body to become a listening organ, preparing for a mode of thinking-feeling grounded in attentiveness, permeability, and care.

12 pm
Conversation with Issa Amro and Barbara Debeuckelaere

In this conversation, visual activism meets testimonial care. The presence of Issa Amro at this moment of intensified violence in Israel-Palestine offers a rare and urgent opportunity to hear from someone living and organizing under occupation, firmly advocating for nonviolent resistance. Together with artist and researcher Barbara Debeuckelaere, they reflect on the conditions under which images—and those who bear witness to them—circulate. The discussion touches on the body as an archive, photography as a form of situated knowledge, and the poetics of humanity unfolding as an inquiry into how critique can inhabit political realities without reproducing their destruction drive.

1 pm
AICA Panel I — Writing about Art as Healing Process
With Will Furtado, Kristian Vistrup Madsen and Ruth Noack

This panel asks how art writing can act as a vessel for psychic and social repair. From AWC’s embodied topographies of place and inheritance, to Will Furtado’s editorial practice at the intersection of diaspora, queerness, and curatorial intervention, to Kristian Vistrup Madsen’s meditative prose on intimacy and institutional critique—each writer foregrounds vulnerability as method. Writing, here, is not a performance of knowledge, but a form of listening through language.

2 pm
Lunch Break

An interlude to digest, to connect. A sound installation by Stav Yeini subtly continues the work of tuning—through frequencies that bypass the rational and speak directly to the nervous system.

3 pm
AICA Panel II — Art Writing as Mycological Communication
With Stav Yeini, Julieta Aranda and Stanton Taylor

What might criticism learn from mycelium? This panel gathers artists whose practices operate at the threshold of the seen and the sensed—where performance, pedagogy, and publication model alternative systems of knowledge transmission. Stav Yeini’s somatic sound practice redefines birth and border as sonic conditions. Stanton Taylor engages embodiment through movement, tracing the collective unconscious of dance as an insurgent technology. Julieta Aranda works across conceptual platforms and infrastructures of circulation to interrupt capitalist time. Together, they reflect on how critique, like fungus, can move horizontally: dissolving hierarchy, feeding from decay, sustaining underground networks of solidarity and meaning.

4 pm
Closing Remarks and Concert

A collective exhale. The day closes with a musical offering by Stav Yeini that threads affective resonances into rhythm, opening space for non-verbal continuity, as well as assembled notes by Amelie Jakubek, Liad Kantorowicz, and Mohammad Salemy.

5 pm
End of Symposium

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Participants

Issa Amro is a nominee for the Nobel Prize for Peace, holder of the Franco-German Human Rights Award, State of Law Prize and the Right Livelihood Prize 2024. He focuses on advocating for nonviolent resistance and collective action against systemic oppression.

Julieta Aranda creates conceptual work that navigates the intersections of time, speculative infrastructure, and alternative systems of circulation.

Barbara Debeuckelaere weaves memory studies and political testimony into visual narratives that reflect on post-colonial histories and intergenerational trauma.

Will Furtado examines decolonial ecologies and queer futurities through writing and curatorial practice.

Kristian Vistrup Madsen is a writer whose reflective prose navigates themes of incarceration, intimacy, and artistic practice from his base in Berlin.

Ruth Noack grounds her curatorial and art historical work in feminist thought and critical theory, centering marginalized narratives.

Maria Inés Plaza Lazo is an editor, curator, and publisher whose work focuses on experimental publishing, curating, and critical theory.

Stanton Taylor investigates embodiment and collective memory through art and writing.

Stav Yeini is a musician who draws from ritual and perinatal practices to explore embodied knowledge as a resource for collective healing.

AICA Deutschland e. V. is the German section of the Paris-based International Association of Art Critics (AICA), which today counts 65 national sections and one open section with a total of more than 5,000 members in 95 countries. The globally active association was founded in 1948/1949. 

 
Atelier Gardens
Oberlandstrasse 26-35
12099 Berlin
Germany

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Image: Barbara Debeuckelaere and mothers in Tel Rumeida, Hebron 2023. Copyright and courtesy of the artist.