The Space of Negotiation: My Art across Borders
Xiao Lu is a pioneering figure in contemporary Chinese art and one of the earliest artists associated with Chinese feminist practice. Long before she consciously embraced feminism, her body had already become a site of artistic and social intervention. Throughout her career, she has remained committed to translating lived experience into art. In this lecture, she reflects on the changing space available for artistic practice in China and internationally, discussing the opportunities, constraints, and negotiations that have shaped her work across different cultural and institutional contexts.
In cooperation with the Institute for East Asian History at Heidelberg University
Lin Hierse: Das Verschwinden der Welt
„Alles wird sich ändern, mein Kind, nichts bleibt.“
Foto: © Linda Rosa Saal / Piper Verlag
Das große Haus am Fluss verspricht Marta einen Neuanfang. Sie verliebt sich in das alte Gebäude, das Zeuge zahlloser Leben, Träume und Verluste geworden ist. Nur wenige sind noch hier: neben Marta nur Herr Yi, die Dichterin und Lu. Als Marta kurz nach ihrem Einzug erfährt, dass das Haus abgerissen werden soll, will sie kämpfen, findet in den anderen aber keine Verbündeten. Also stemmt sie sich allein gegen das Verschwinden der Geschichten, Erinnerungen und einer ganzen Welt.
Ein berührender Roman über das Aufbrechen und Zurücklassen, über Erinnerung und Verlust. Und eine traumwandelnd kluge Parabel auf das Leben in einer dauerbedrohten Welt.
Lin Hierse ist Schriftstellerin und Journalistin sowie stellvertretende Ressortleiterin der wochentaz. Ihre Texte und Kolumnen erscheinen unter anderem in der taz, der Zeit und in Literaturzeitschriften. Nach ihrem hochgelobten Debüt Wovon wir träumen (Piper 2022) ist Das Verschwinden der Welt (Piper 2024) ihr zweiter Roman. Im Herbst 2026 ist Lin Hierse Max Kade Writer in Residence an der University of Michigan.
Eine Veranstaltung in Kooperation mit feeLit Internationales Literaturfestival Heidelberg.
Prof. Dr. Aleida Assmann: History and Memory – Changing Time Regimes between 1945 and the Present
Keynote Lecture
The lecture will address changing frames of temporality over the last 80 years. In this case Aleida Assmann will draw on her biographical experience and the evidence that she observed, registered and theorized in her own life-span. She will describe how the concept memory first evolved as a partner and then as a rival to the concept of history, and how these dynamics have affected historical work and thinking until today.
Speaker
Prof. Dr. Aleida Assmann is an English scholar, Egyptologist, and literary and cultural studies scholar. She has taught at Yale, Princeton, and Chicago, among other institutions. Together with her husband Jan Assmann, she coined the concept of “cultural memory.” In recognition of their outstanding research and social engagement, Jan and Aleida Assmann were awarded the Peace Prize –Friedenspreis– of the German Book Trade in 2018.
International Graduate Student Conference 2026 – “Memory—Between Experience, Culture and Transculturality”
Memory has become one of the central categories through which the humanities interrogate the past, the self, and the conditions of historical knowledge. Far from being a mere repository of bygone events, memory unfolds at the intersection of experience, narration, embodiment, and cultural transmission. This conference invites graduate students from across the humanities to explore memory as a dynamic and contested field—one in which individual recollection, communicative exchange, and culturally sedimented forms of remembrance are in constant dialogue.
Drawing on theories of cultural memory, this conference encourages reflections on how societies stabilize, ritualize, and transform images of the past through texts, images, practices, and institutions, while also attending to communicative memory as it circulates in everyday interactions and lived social relations. Equally central is the notion of collective memory, which foregrounds the ways in which remembering is never purely private but shaped by social frameworks, power relations, and shared imaginaries. What are the functions of different dimensions of memory, how should its media (such as writing, images, or monuments) be evaluated, and what forms of dealing with stored knowledge exist that attach growing importance not only to history, politics, and science, but also to art? In an increasingly interconnected world, different dimensions of memory further cannot always be adequately understood without addressing questions of transculturality: the movement of memories across borders, languages, and historical contexts, as well as the frictions and creative reconfigurations that arise from such encounters.
This conference particularly welcomes interdisciplinary and comparative approaches that open new perspectives on memory beyond national or disciplinary boundaries.
Conference program and schedule can be found here.