Seminar 12 // 17, 18, 19 October 2008 // London
Seminar 12 // 17, 18, 19 October 2008 // London
London location tba
1. Guest Speaker: Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Raqs Media Collective
2. Introduction to new academic year by Irit & Jean-Paul; Doreen Mende presentation; C/K Vocabulary Project
3. Student-led reading group Further information about the sessions can be found below:
FRIDAY 17 OCTOBER: location tba
10:30-1pm: Guest Speaker: Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Raqs Media Collective Curating Across Cultural Entities RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE have been variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work, which has been exhibited widely in major international spaces and events, locates them squarely along the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory - often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters. They live and work in Delhi, based at Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, an initiative they co-founded in 2000. They are members of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series.
http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/
http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/
2-4pm Discussion
SATURDAY 18 OCTOBER: location tba
11am-12pm Introduction to the new year by Irit and Jean-Paul and introduction of new students Joshua Simon and Cihat Arinc. 1
2-2pm Thinking within the Curatorial through the Blind Spot. Or: Drawing a Distinction is always Political. Working Hypothesis by Doreen Mende
In particular the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari gave us terms like ‘rhizome’, ‘de-territorialization’, or ‘line of flight’. These notions name and mediate indispensable re-thinking processes of cultural actualization and perspective shifts. Nevertheless, the realization of a curatorial concept demands decisions in space. The political weight of the curatorial increases highly when we are dealing with processes of drawing distinctions to make things public that start long before the ‘public’ presentation for an imaginary audience. Or to put it in other words: When there is an 'ex-hibition' there must be an 'in-hibition,' separated by a hyphen.
The unavoidable manifestation in space, which is shaped, determined, controlled, and manipulated by a curatorial design, seems to stand in contrast with an ‘origami cosmos’, which is always folding, un-folding, re-folding. I want to encounter this––I think, most fruitfully complementary––contradiction between the apparent and the non-apparent under the Blind Spot as a metaphoric lens. Only if one recognizes this blindness, if one understands the recognition of ones own blindness as a way to see, the cybernetician Heinz von Foerstser concludes metaphorically: “Perceiving is Acting.” The Blind Spot constantly brings the observation back to the subject, which can be a human or also a non-human observing system. Theorist Brian Holmes correctly complicates here the political economy of the recursive data that can be fed back to control and smoothly govern the observer. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, Foerster assigns language the singular means to articulate the observing act. For him, any meaningful observation needs a translation into language, i.e. the world––in its very fragments––becomes real in language. Here he demonstrates his conclusion, that reality is an invention. In complication with the understanding that reality is constructed I would like to unfold the exhibition complex as an unfinished system in space and time under the conditions of publicness.
In my research of the last half year, Heinz von Foerster’s writings gave me an intense impulse to think through the complexity of exhibiting and politics of displaying. Furthermore, a thinking that talks about reality as an invention approximates the exhibition space with a demonstration in the street, with a summit conference, with the spatial order of an airport, or with the logic of a city, etc. Thinking through the Blind Spot brings me to three main paths in my thesis: Recursive movement: The articulation of curatorial subjectivity in exhibitions. Drawing distinctions: The production of publicness in exhibitions. Different zones (marked/unmarked space): The production of space in exhibitions.
3-5pm Revisions – In order to continue our discussion about our vocabulary and revise some of the terms we have been using, we would like each participant to choose one term (a new term or a term already in the CK Glossary) and propose a definition of it in relation to the curatorial.
Discussion of C/K website and program for upcoming session in Copenhagen
SUNDAY 19 OCTOBER: location tba
11am-4pm: Reading Group: Sarah Pierce leads a discussion on excerpts from Giorgio Agamben's Means without Ends: Notes on Politics with particular emphasis on "Notes on Gesture."
