Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen

Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen holds an MA in Gender Studies and German Literature from Humboldt-University Berlin and a PhD in Media Studies from Ruhr-University Bochum. Prior to joining the ICI she was a researcher and lecturer at the Media Studies department in Bochum. She has written about the less tangible dimensions of racist violence and its capture in film and video, the affective impact of the NSU-murders, mainstream and critical discourses and media of adoption (Kippbilder der Familie.

Ambivalenz und Sentimentalität moderner Adoption in Film und Video, 2017), as well as public feelings and reparative queer theory. After a guest professorship at the University of Vienna, she is currently a postdoctoral fellow of the VW Foundation at the Braunschweig University of Art with a project on the postcolonial Korean-German adoption archive.

Between 1971 and 1996, 2,300 South Korean children have been placed for adoption in West Germany. Not much is known about their history. The global history of the South Korean transnational adoption programme connects Japanese colonialism, US occupation, military dictatorship, and the Cold War, industrialization and population policy, sexualized violence, Christian mission, and global race relations. The project aims to retrace where and how these global entanglements appear in the South Korean-West German archive, where postcolonial relations are intimated, and how they manifest themselves.

I attempt to tell a version of the adoption history that takes its archival situation as starting point. Instead of accumulating (counter-)knowledge, the focus is on laying open what is already there, paying attention particularly to the simultaneously connecting and separating gaps between the manifest elements. I thus understand the archive of the South Korean-West German adoption history – fragmentary as it is – as an archive of reality production, of ‘worlding’ (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). This approach requires ‘narrative restraint’ (Saidiya Hartman), a form of reduction.

The project takes up the notion of the non-relational Other and reassesses its use for the analysis of postmigration Germany. The political assassinations by the NSU between 2000 and 2007 indicate that we need to consider a socio-ontological separation between postmigrant lives and the lives of the majority of the population, not in the racist sense of ‘Parallelgesellschaften’ (alluding to supposedly secluded, criminal migrant milieus), but rather as effect of that very notion. The project examines tropes such as the ‘parallel’ as elements of derealization, a form of violence that precedes and makes physical extinction possible.

Additionally to Judith Butler’s notion of derealization, Michaelsen takes conceptual inspiration from theories of social death and anti-Black violence, as well as local studies of racism. Considering the limitations of the conventional documentary form, Michaelsen turns to the capacity of audiovisual art to capture racialized violence, particularly in its ‘ordinary’ forms and effects. Films and videos by Ayşe Polat, Hito Steyerl, Hiwa K, and others, allow to scrutinize derealization and non-relationality as they impact, and possibly constitute postmigrant lives.