Nelly Y. Pinkrah; Tactics&Practice #16 'Are you a software update?', Aksioma, Ljubljana, 25.02.2025

As part of the Münster Lectures organised by the University of Fine Arts Münster, Skulptur Projekte Münster 2027 is hosting a guest lecture by Nelly Y. Pinkrah on Tuesday, 7 July 2026. The event will begin at 6 pm in the Hörsaal at Leonardo Campus 2, 48149 Münster. 

Nelly Y. Pinkrah is a Black and media-studies scholar from Berlin, based in Vienna whose work explores the entanglements of Black studies, media and technology, poetics and politics, and critical pedagogies. 

 'In this technologically saturated world, we mostly look for technology where it seems obvious to us – smart devices, algorithms, machines of all sorts. In my work I look elsewhere. I take language as technology, as something that stores and transmits, encodes and withholds, makes and unmakes, and binds voice to ear and word to world. Though it never does so completely. This is old knowledge: where speech was forbidden, the word was carried under (the) cover, in a noise that could be heard but not decoded. Language was already worked as technology, because survival required it. I investigate language as technology and its histories, including the ones that constantly write us, to make sense of the now, of our technological everyday, of the violence and the knowledge our world has been and still is inhabited by.'

Pinkrahs doctoral thesis, Édouard Glissant and the Poetics of the Technological Everyday, investigates—through Glissant's work—language as a technology in its historical, cybernetic, and epistemological dimensions. She held positions at TU Dresden, Groningen, and Leuphana University, where she is affiliated with the Center for Digital Cultures. With Mitch Pfeifer she co-runs the School of (Un)Thought (part of ASchool network) and is active in different collective and political initiatives. Recent publications include Opacity. What remains (Bloomsbury, 2025), The Technical (De Gruyter, 2026).

The event is part of Skulptur Projekte Sessions, a public pre-programme running until the opening of Skulptur Projekte Münster 2027.