Seminar 71 // 10, 11, 12, 13 October 2018 // London
Curatorial/Knowledge Seminar, 10-13 October 2018
Wednesday 10 October 2-6pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
MRes Seminar
Irit Rogoff
For this first MRes Seminar I wanted to sketch out the readings and then the plan for further along. I suggest that for this seminar we set up a few key terms via slightly more familiar readings: some sections from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and Jean Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural.
Readings:
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (sections 1 & 2 of the Introduction by Margaret Cameron and chapter 4 ‘Action’ sections on pages 24, 26, 28 and 31).
- Jean Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Introduction pages XI-XIV, 1-8 and 28-32).
Thursday 11 October 12-6pm
Location: Professor Stuart Hall Building, room LG01 (12-5pm) and room 326 (5-6pm)
C/K 12th Anniversary
On October 11th we will hold a half-day conference looking at the potentialities of the curatorial to effect social lives. Since its inception in 2006, the Curatorial/Knowledge program has focused on how to shift from the professional practice of ‘curating’, to the ‘curatorial’ as producing the event of knowledge. One of its aims has been to explore creating a proximity between knowledges and exhibitionary strategies. Another has been to treat research as the main event of the curatorial, rather than as a preliminary activity. Valuing study and research as forms of public activity, Curatorial/Knowledge has posed questions about how we make things manifest and how we identify stakeholders within introverted processes.
The event is free. All are welcome!
Look out for further details on Facebook, Twitter and the Goldsmiths events calendar.
Programme:
Opening remarks from Irit Rogoff and Stefan Nowotny
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung: presentation and discussion
Conversation 1: Doreen Mende, Ines Moreira, Theodor Ringborg, Carolina Rito
Ana Teizeira Pinto: presentation and discussion
Conversation 2: Bassam el Baroni, Sarah Pierce, Joshua Simon, Aneta Szylak, Grant Watson
Organised by the Department of Visual Cultures
Supported by The Goethe Institute London
7pm – Dinner for everyone at The Rose, 272 New Cross Rd, London SE14 6AA
Friday 12 October 11am - 5.30pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
On Friday the 12th we’d like to start the conversation regarding the content and the format of this year’s seminar, putting forward several directions and thinking about how these might materialise. The program, which started as an attempt to see how ideas might become an intervention in the field of curatorial practice, made considerable headway in that direction. We developed this through a variety of themes including differentiating between Curating and the Curatorial, understanding what might constitute the ‘Event of Knowledge’. We also looked at the possible, non-representational relations between justice and the curatorial, and finally asked whether ‘culture has the capacity to intervene in the world of political realities’.
At present the field of curating has, in numerous sites and venues, become one of the most exciting and inventive arenas for research, and the status of research has shifted from one taking place prior to the main event, to becoming the main event itself. The kind of interventions that seemed imperative at the program’s inception, have now become far less necessary in terms of the field’s current development. Therefor we have agreed that the time has come to shift our focus in recognition that the relation between theory and practice has been changing so crucially in recent years. One of the ideas we are considering is to move the program towards the concept of ‘Advanced Practices’. These are practices in which a multi-perspectival set of relations between different forms of investigation and research and different forms of expression, result in not just in clear articulation, but also in emergent affective fields, which include writing, visualising, performing, negotiating etc.
We are opening a ‘Platform for Advanced Practices’ in the department, are setting up several interesting collaborations with other institutions who are also interested in theory/practice trajectories - and the thought was for Curatorial/Knowledge to form part of this platform.
So, the suggestion is that we devote the Friday to planning the seminar together and devising a new mode for it that would involve several people at each session presenting, proposing readings, curating a series of related works – therefor creating composite structures around an idea. Within these, both Stefan and I can put forward ideas and texts we feel should be gone into in some depth and we which can discuss with you. This taking into consideration that participants have to present their own projects, one of the things we will need to do is weave in your own projects and a broader field in which they can find a productive place.
One of the seminars is already planned, and we will jointly host, together with the art department, Noemie Solomon, a dance and choreography practitioner, curator and theorist. This will in all likelihood occur as part of the January seminar. Noemie runs an MA program in Dance and Performance (similar in structure to C/K) at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and is an adjunct at Performance Studies at New York University. Noemie will do a presentation for us that might be more theoretical in nature and one for the Art department, which may include a greater array of materials she is working with. We are also exploring whether she might be in conversation with a practitioner during one of these sessions. We will ask her for readings and will rehearse some of last years readings from Andre Lepecki’s Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance in relation to these.
11am – 1.30pm Morning session
1.30 – 2.30pm Lunch
2.30 – 5.30pm Afternoon session
8pm – Dinner together
Saturday 13 October 12-4pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
Reading Group / Seminar in Methodology and Textual Analysis
Stefan Nowotny
On Saturday we will be discussing the format of the Reading Group / Seminar in Methodology and Textual Analysis and make plans for the upcoming sessions. In this first session, we will also look at an excerpt from Trinh T. Minh-ha's 'Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box' (from her 1989 book Woman, Native, Other) which addresses a variety of questions around feminism, postcoloniality, and the situatedness and practice of writing - and is an exemplary piece of writing in itself.
Reading:
- Trinh T. Minh-ha, 'Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box'