Seminar 9 // 27, 28, 29 March, 2008 // London
Seminar 9 // 27, 28, 29 March 2008: location tba
1. Guest speaker Rune Gade; presentation by Inês Moreira
2. Jean-Paul Martinon session on Allegories and the Curatorial
3. Reading group on Bourdieu led by Doreen Mende and Anshuman Das Gupta Click for texts
Further information about the sessions can be found below:
THURSDAY 27 MARCH: location tba
11am-1pm Guest Speaker Rune Gade Research into that which society does not need, or: Exhibitions of poverty In the talk I discuss the economies and logics of art in relation to different cases of exhibitions of poverty, the abject, homelessness and begging. The intention is to complicate and/or extend the notions of art and exhibition as well as the idea of societal interest and need. [very much WORK IN PROGRESS] Rune Gade (b. 1964), Ph.D. in Art History, Associate Professor at The Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Areas of research include photography, pornography, gender studies, feminism, museology and contemporary art. Has published several books in Danish and co-edited two anthologies in English: Performative Realism: Interdisciplinary Studies in Art and Media, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005 and Symbolic Imprints: Essays on Photography and Visual Culture, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1999.
2-5pm Presentation: Inês Moreira Building sites: spatial practices and the curatorial In this session, I will introduce my field of operations and some of my practical projects through transversal concerns, so to, hopefully, activate an open conversation with the research group. Instead of focusing on a specific author, or concept, I will be assembling fragments of situated fields of action. I have been focusing on the notion of "building site". Building sites are generated by power and representation; they enunciate tectonic proposals, while are inhabited by material conflict. Building sites are Mid(dle) things, they are assembling actors (the mediators of projected futures and built projects) and tangible in-between spaces (ephemeral places, semi-clandestine platforms, precarious conditions). They are contingent locations inhabited by temporal activities, improvisation and social and material conflict. At building sites, research is replaced by "processual experimentation", or maybe, "contingent experimentation". The work table acts: it is a situated micropolitical actor-network: office table, laboratory bench, meeting room, dining room. In its surface converge objects, people, and distant geographies: blue print, spatial model, material samples, contracts, keys, passports, migration movements, workers demands and submission, economic flux. They all converge, materializing spaces and buildings. To think of Building Sites is to start from the middle, with every social, technological, representational and material conflict implied in/by the designed proposal.
FRIDAY 28 MARCH: location tba
11-1pm: Jean-Paul Martinon Allegories and the Curatorial
In order to begin thinking about writing skills and styles in relation to the curatorial and in order to begin discussing our proposed book (Allegories of the Curatorial or Theses in the Philosophy of Curating, Goldsmiths College, 2006-2011), this session will explore the notion of allegory. For that, we will be looking at Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory and see how this theory can help us in writing about the curatorial.
2-4pm Discussion: Writing in the context of a PhD + Book-project: Allegories of the Curatorial or Theses in the Philosophy of Curating, Goldsmiths College, 2006-2011
SATURDAY 29 MARCH: Glocation tba
11am-4pm: Reading Group
Discussion of select texts by Pierre Bourdieu led by Doreen Mende and Anshuman Das Gupta
Exhibitions are constituted by powerful knowledge relations, which are also mediated by language. The process of exhibition making strongly depends on language, i.e. from conversations, talks, guided tours through the writing of texts itself. As curators, we should consider our role within the system and how we use language as an essential part of exhibition making (which might also include our Ph.D.-project/programme Curatorial/Knowledge itself?). What kind of language is used? Who is speaking from which perspective? As we know, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defined different sorts of capital––in particular he analyzed the production of capital within the cultural field (field as a network of power relations). When he talks about "linguistic goods", which we can understand as a commodity, we can talk about cultural capital as linguistic capital. In particular the artist Andrea Fraser has been applying self-reflexive strategies into her work as means to balance the relational interfaces between critique, intervention, transformation and reproduction. In the position of an artist, she takes the confrontation between her own artistic intentions and the expectations of the institutional system as a center of her productivity. It might be useful to discuss the Ph.D.-programme Curatorial/Knowledge under aspects of "Language and Symbolic Power": Which qualities of relationships do we produce when we work on the development of new vocoablulary within Curatorial/Knowledge? Where could lead the Bourdieu's concept of self-reflexivity within the curatorial? What could we learn from Bourdieu today?
