Margareta Kern

Margareta Kern: ‘Dream State: hugs, dreams and British psychopolitics’
Journal of Visual Culture & Harun Farocki Institute, 2020

Dream State: Hugs, Dreams, and British Psychopolitics by Margareta Kern weaves personal pandemic dreams with archival research to expose the colonial roots of contemporary psychological governance. Beginning with lockdown-era dreams of forbidden hugs and social distance, the text traces how British colonial officials collected dreams from colonised subjects to quell rebellion—a practice mirrored today in the psychopolitical tactics of surveillance capitalism and AI-driven behavioural control. Through Seligman’s anthropological archives and Dominic Cummings’ techno-authoritarian agenda, the work reveals a continuum: from colonial ‘rehabilitation’ programs to NHS data deals with Palantir and Google. The essay frames dreams as sites of both compliance and resistance, asking whose inner lives are mined for control, and how fascist logics adapt colonial violence for domestic use. Published in Pause. Fervour. Reflections on a Pandemic by Journal of Visual Culture and the Harun Farocki Institut, Kern’s writing bridges poetic reflection with urgent critique of the "Screen New Deal” (Klein, 2020).

Pause. Fervour. Reflections on a Pandemic is co-published by the Harun Farocki Institut and Journal of Visual Culture, designed by Simon Pavič, and edited by Manca Bajec, Tom Holert, and Marquard Smith, 245 pages, self-published (by JVC and HaFI), ISBN 978-1-5272-9544-5

GUESTures I GOSTIkulacije
Published by Balkanet e.V Munich with the kind support of Kulturreferats der Landeshauptstadt München and in collaboration with Red Min(e)d and Galerie Kullukcu & Gregorian, Munich and Myrdle Court Press, London, 2014. 
82 pages, paperback, full colour, June 2014. 

GUESTures is the first artist’s monograph documenting Kern’s long-term project, tracing the overlooked histories of Yugoslav women workers that challenges the institutional and archival amnesia surrounding gendered labor migration. Kern’s project excavates these workers’ double invisibility – marginalised in both socialist Yugoslav narratives and West German economic miracle mythology. Through its interplay of testimonies, archival documents, and theoretical interventions, the book operates as a feminist counter-history and a migratory archive, revealing how these workers were doubly erased: from socialist Yugoslavia’s narratives of progress and West Germany’s mythology of economic miracle. GUESTures exposes how industrial capitalism’s promise of stability masked racialised labour hierarchies — where ‘guest workers’ fuelled economic growth while structural violence ensured their perpetual disposability.

The publication includes critical texts by Natalie Bayer, Nanna Heidenreich, Katja Kobolt and Branislava Kuburović that collectively interrogate: the visibility politics of precarious histories within feminist migration archives; the institutional regimes governing migratory knowledge production; and fiction’s subversive potential in narrating displacement. Their essays frame the project as a feminist counter-archive that by juxtaposing personal ephemera with state documents, not only challenges erasure but reconfigures whose stories are deemed worthy of preservation.

Download the related text by Margareta Kern, How to Speak Precarious Histories from a Precarious Position? in The Gastarbeiter: In Search of an Afterlife (published by eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2017).

Which Side is Art on? Dean Kenning and Margareta Kern, 
Art Monthly Feature, September 2013

In the face of government austerity measures which have squeezed artists and public arts provision more than any other sector, an elite art world has continued to prosper. Isn't it time that, in order to develop political agency in their work, artists begin to acknowledge this glaring dichotomy?

Talk Show on Resonance FM, 9th September 2013
Presented by Chris McCormack
Dean Kenning, Margareta Kern and Sophie J Williamson discuss art’s collusion with unquestioned capital. Listen to the podcast here.

To Whom Does the World Belong?
Exhibition catalogue (Serbian, English)
Published by the Cultural Centre Belgrade, 2015.

'The existential impulse – beatings of the heart – prevails over the stock exchange sound of the bell with its life force, while internalised contradictions of capitalism activate an affective space in which an emerging political articulation can be discerned as a demand for the construction of a different world. The politics of glitch in stopping the machinery of capitalism, the politics of hope in the universal dystopian image of an alienated world, movement of the revolution- body which lies motionless on the street – these are the red exhibition threads that the aesthetics of bare/scratched images are leading us through.'
Exhibition text by Jelena Petrović, Endowed Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Download the full exhibition catalogue below.

Also, available as full download is the exhibition catalogue published by the Gallery Nova, Zagreb, featuring text by Laura Guy: HERE.