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Revolutionary turns: exploring the immateriality of Sama practice in German postwar art

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Resumo:The Sufi practice of Sama (سماع)is deeply engraved in the Western imagination as a figure of Otherness. In this imagery, the whirling dervish has been misconstrued as a dancer rotating around its own axis. However, Sama is better understood as a multifaceted and diverse ritual combining listening practices with (in)corporeal movements to induce dizziness, dissociation, and a “destabilization of subjectivity.” (Golestaneh 2023, 5–6) While performing a “poetics among the limits of the body” (Brandstetter 1995, 224), Sama embodies a desire for a state of trance and a brief encounter with immateriality. This essay will look at how Sama gained importance as a means for artistic reinvention in the unlikely context of postwar Germany as a form of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). For this purpose, we will examine the oeuvre of artist Günther Uecker, whose multi-faceted work explores these fruitful boundaries of materiality and immateriality. Uecker was one of the core members of ZERO, an avant-garde postwar artist collective trying to reach a zone of zero by reimagining artistic techniques and expressions from scratch in the aftermath of the Second World War. In exposing the underlying formal, conceptual, and methodological correspondence between the work of the German artist and the practice of Sama, as exemplified in works such as New York Dancer (1965) and Sandmill (1970), we aim to narrate the story of how immaterial pasts get remobilized to enable immaterial futures.
Autores principais:Golestani, Raha
Outros Autores:Schönfelder, Konstantin
Assunto:Sama Immateriality Postwar Germany Vergangenheitsbewältigung ZERO Trance
Ano:2025
País:Portugal
Tipo de documento:artigo
Tipo de acesso:unknown
Instituição associada:Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Idioma:inglês
Origem:Diffractions

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