Dear friends far and wide,
You're cordially invited to attend this *very* interesting lecture series which I am helping to coordinate as part of my thematic fellowship at Academy Schloss Solitude. I would like to draw your particular attention to the lecture by Heather Davis on Monday, March 29th, which I will be moderating.
Don't forget to register if you want to attend - go to the eflux announcement for the registration links if they don't work in this email.
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/382716/mutations/
Mutations
A Lecture Series
March 22–May 10, 2021
www.akademie-solitude.de
www.kfw-stiftung.de
Facebook / Instagram / Vimeo / Twitter
“It is time to focus beyond logical systems and to utilize the potential of an inter- and transdisciplinary approach to (artistic) research in order to critically rethink the concept of ‘Mutations’ and, consequently, life.”
“Mutations. A Lecture Series” brings together a dynamic group of researchers, artists, thinkers, curators, and scholars. Curated by the fellows of the interdisciplinary artist residency “Mutations” at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, and in cooperation with the KfW Stiftung, Frankfurt, it is the first of several public platforms which are being developed within the scope of the program. Interconnected with the evolving digital platform, mutations.akademie-solitude.de, which will be launched at the end of March, the lecture series is both an outcome of the program and a source of knowledge for further discussion. Within the fellows’ individual backgrounds in fields such as fine arts, architecture, music, philosophy, or life sciences, the lecture series aims to contribute a transdisciplinary approach to artistic investigation.
The following experts represent different voices that offer a spectrum of perspectives on the concept of mutations and its multifaceted impact on social, political, and scientific structures.
March 22, 2021, 7pm CET
JoAnn Kuchera-Morin
Composer, professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music at UC Santa Barbara, USA, Director of the Allosphere Research Facility, and a researcher in multi-modal media systems, content, and facilities design. To register for this lecture, please click here.
March 29, 2021, 7pm CET
Heather Davis
Assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School, NYC, USA, member of the Synthetic Collective, and co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies and Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada. To register for this lecture, please click here.
April 7, 2021, 12pm CET
Eben Kirksey*
Anthropologist, writer, storyteller, and associate professor (Research) at Alfred Deakin Institute in Melbourne, Australia. To register for this lecture, please click here.
April 12, 2021, 7pm CET
Marcia C. Castro
Associate professor of Demography at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA. To register for this lecture, please click here.
April 14, 2021, 7pm CET
Natasha Ginwala*
Associate curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin, and artistic director of the Gwangju Biennale 2020. To register for this lecture, please click here.
April 19, 2021, 7pm CET
Andres Lepik
Director of the Architekturmuseum TU Munich and professor of Architectural History and Curatorial Practices at the TU Munich, Germany. To register for this lecture, please click here.
May 3, 2021, 7pm CET
Sophia Roosth
Anthropologist, Max Planck Sabbatical Award Laureate 2020, and Cullmann Center Fellow, New York Public Library 2020/2021. To register for this lecture, please click here.
May 10, 2021, 7pm CET
Brenna Bhandar
Senior lecturer in law at SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom. To register for this lecture, please click here.
*Please note that the lectures by Eben Kirksey and Natasha Ginwala will both be held on Wednesdays.
Following each lecture, there will be a Q & A where viewers are encouraged to join in on the discussion. Lectures are free and open to the public. Registration is, however, requested. For further information, the link to the series, and to register, please visit our website under akademie-solitude.de or contact the project coordinator Rose Field at r.field [at] akademie-solitude.de. All lectures will be recorded and made available online.
The thematic focus group “Mutations” is a cooperation between the Akademie Schloss Solitude, an international and transdisciplinary artists’ residence based in Stuttgart, and the KfW Stiftung, Frankfurt, an independent non-profit foundation which focuses on intercultural dialogue and artistic production in the global context. The lecture series takes place within the KfW Stiftung’s Mondays102—an event series at the Villa 102, the platform for culture and dialogue of the KfW and its foundation.
Since October 2020, seven international artists and creative thinkers have been engaging, both locally and digitally, with the topic of mutations through immersive group labs. “Mutations” is comprised of the following fellows: Sabina Hyoju Ahn: Media and Sound Artist (South Korea) | Angela Anderson: Video Artist and Researcher (USA/Germany) | Grayson Earle: New Media Artist (USA) | Ana María Gómez López: Artist, Writer, and Researcher (The Netherlands/Colombia/USA) | Clara Jo: Video Artist (Germany) | Maxwell Mutanda: Multidisciplinary Researcher, Visual Artist, and Designer (Zimbabwe) | Joana Quiroga: Visual Artist and Philosopher (Brazil).
*
One of my brilliant and sweet Work Master HEAD students Viktor Tibay is in an exhibition. Check it out:
Si vous ne visualisez pas correctement l’e-mail, cliquez ici
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Circuit, centre d’art contemporain, Accès quai Jurigoz,
case postale 303, CH – 1001 Lausanne, +41 21 601 41 70
www.circuit.li
∞
Alfatih, Anouk, Lorraine Baylac,
Delphine Coindet, Pauline Cordier,
Nicolas Geiser, Tobias Kaspar,
Daniela Keiser, Viktor Korol,
Hélène Iratchet, Claire Van Lubeek,
Yves Mettler, Flora Mottini,
Guido Nussbaum, Laurence Pittet,
Natalie Portman, Viktor Tibay, ...
Ouverture du 19 mars au 09 juillet 2021
du mardi au samedi de 14h à 18h
et sur rendez-vous
Nous sommes heureux d’annoncer le lancement à Circuit d’un projet séquentiel intitulé ∞.
Une exposition évolutive et transformable à caractère organique, durant laquelle les
recherches des artistes invité·e·s se croiseront, cohabiteront par chevauchements,
glissements, remplacements, déplacements et retours. Le projet se déploie sur une
durée d’accrochage ouverte et modulable quis’étendra au moins jusqu’en juillet,
avec, au fil et au gré des échanges et des collaborations, la possibilité d’une
prolongation en septembre.
Les états successifs du projet seront régulièrement annoncés afin d’informer de
l’intervention d’un·e artiste, de la présence d’une nouvelle œuvre, et de suivre ces
séquences, ponctuations événementielles et des contenus inattendus.
Actuellement présentés à Circuit :
Anouk, Lorraine Baylac, Nicolas Geiser, Guido Nussbaum
*
And this from the amazing New York based artist Damien Davis:
Mrs. is very pleased to present Weightless, Damien Davis’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view March 20 - May 8, 2021.
Mae Jemison, the first Black woman to travel into space, brought a collection of objects to accompany her on the 8-day voyage beyond the earth’s atmosphere. Among them were a certificate for Chicago public school students celebrating accomplishments in math and science, a Bundu carving from Sierra Leone, a banner for the first Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, and a poster of dancer Judith Jamison in Alvin Ailey’s signature solo Cry, which the choreographer dedicated to “all Black women everywhere–especially our mothers.”1 In the dance, a performer wields a white cloth used at one moment for cleaning, and at another, as a head wrap, and as a gown; a vessel pregnant with struggle, triumph, and joy. Jemison’s companion artifacts were selected to fill-in the gaps of who and what had never before been in outer space, and together form a map reclaiming links and stretching time.
Since 2014, Damien Davis has built his own lexicon of, as the artist describes, “the visual language of historical representations, focused primarily on people, places, and things marked as ‘Black’” to question how cultures “code, decode, and recode representations of race.” This vocabulary also embodies aspects of what art historian Cheryl Finley describes as the “symbolic possession of the past” by contemporary African diaspora and African American artists who reclaim emblems of the past in order to understand their connection to the present.2 Across Davis’s work, the meaning of icons shift as imagery accumulates and associations form, conjuring historical narratives while inviting speculation on alternate purposes and futures. Chains recall the violence of the transatlantic slave trade, while offering their strength to hold new assemblages up. Cowries scatter as currency traded, hidden, or lost, while giving a skeptical side-eye, for we will never know the full story of their travels. Initially produced as vector files which are then output to a laser-cutter, each element in Davis’s work is infinitely repeatable, up for recombination, and stored in memory, safeguarding their reproduction and assuring their continued presence. Industrial hardware sutures these fragments together, yet each joint can be tightened and taken apart using only one’s hands.
In new works produced for Weightless, Jemison’s spaceship and other forms add to Davis’s symbology, expanding his investigation into past and present up to the stars and out to a future where Black life persists and thrives. Here, we find Jemison’s orange flight suit collaged atop Huey P. Newton’s rattan throne. Her space helmet converges with a Zulu isicholo hat forming an Afrofuturist crown. Glittering inlays echo the shine of Chicago’s lights at night that caught Jemison’s eye from space. Teeth, a long-standing element of Davis’s lexicon, remind us of how they were used to assign value to bodies, but now, we also recall Jemison’s research: her work on board the spaceship Endeavor included the study of bone cells. Trained in biofeedback, another of Jemison’s tasks was to research how to maintain one’s body suspended, without gravity, in weightlessness. How would the body react, and what would our psyche do when we achieved this state?
At the close of Herbert Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation, the philosopher asks how can we envision liberation when our imagination for political and social solidarities is so repressed, when we are so weighed down? Or, as he wrote, “What are the people in a free society going to do?” In searching for an answer, he quotes a “young [B]lack girl” who replied, “for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do.”3 This speaker was plausibly abolitionist scholar Angela Y. Davis. As art historian Sandrine Canac writes in her recovery of Angela Davis’s presence, this reply acknowledges our limited capacity to see and to articulate liberation without first taking on the political work of securing liberation for all. It also gestures towards a broader horizon, to a site somewhere beyond the boundary of our atmosphere, towards new constellations of liberation, solidarity, and a future teeming with life, where, for the first time, we will be free to see and speak the future we want–where we will be weightless.
-Lauren van Haaften-Schick
The one and only Damien Davis, one of New York Cities most talented artists.
