The Micropolitics Group (PoCA) invite you to:
Suely Rolnik PUBLIC LECTURE: Lygia Calling
Wednesday, December 5th 5-7pm
Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre, Goldsmiths
Suely Rolnik is a cultural critic, curator, psychoanalyst and
professor at the Universidade Católica de São Paulo, where she
conducts a transdisciplinary doctoral program on contemporary
subjectivity. She is co-author with Félix Guattari of Molecular
Revolution in Brazil, to be released in English translation by
Semiotext next year and Micropolitics: Cartographies of Desire (1986).
Most recently Rolnik curated "Lygia Clark. From work to event. We are
the mould, it's up to you to breathe substance into it', a touring
exhibition and catalogue on Clark's later work. Refusing to simply
re-display art works, the exhibition was composed of 63 video
interviews with Clark's friends, acquaintances, students and
colleagues about the implications of her experimental, collective
projects like the 'Nostalgia of the Body' workshops of the early 1970s
and the individual therapeutic 'Structuration of the Self' sessions
she undertook on her return to Rio in 1976..
The Micropolitics Strand of PoCA (The Political Currency of Art group)
investigates the forces and procedures that entangle artistic
production and the flexible subjectivities of its producers into the
fabric of late capitalism. The prefix micro does not indicate 'small'
or 'mere'. Nor does it assume a belief in the revolutionary potential
of everyday life, or indicate a retreat into the inner life of the
subject. Rather, it is invoked to access the registers of desire,
vulnerability, affect and subjective implication that generate both
artistic practices and the collective engines of cognitive capitalism.
If current regimes of cultural and cognitive capitalism are predicated
on subjective forces, on the collective production of knowledge and
surplus creativity, how can artists begin to distinguish, let alone
imagine a practice that does not merely feed and replicate the machine
itself? How can art practices that in Suely Rolnik's words bring
'mutations of the sensible' into the realm of the visible or
speakable, refuse or exit the limited field of possibility inscribed
by late capitalism? Finally, if it is the very regimes of cognitive
capitalism that not only capture but also produce flexible, creative
subjectivities, how could we imagine a micropolitics of
subjectivation? The research of the group will evolve from these core
questions and will aim to investigate them through (a) theoretical
analysis (b) the analysis of concrete situations of existing practice
(c) the production of events and exhibitions.
http://micropolitics.wordpress.com/
Organisers: Valeria Graziano, Janna Graham, Susan Kelly, Kerstin
Forkert, and Rodrigo Nunes
The Political Currency of Art (PoCA) Research Group conducts research
on the assimilation of critical and counter-hegemonic contemporary art
practices and their propositions with the interests of more or less
dominant cultural, state and financial institutions. The operating
assumption generating the PoCA's research is the condition in which
contemporary dominant sociocultural ambitions are no longer organised
around normative or majoritarian standards but emphasise
individualism, creativity, innovation, difference and questioning.
These are of course key characteristics of what we have historically
understood to be the condition of criticality in art. The project
looks to understand what happens to art, what critical art can do, how
its operation is to be understood, and what critique now is, in this
condition when critical art becomes emblematic of what is valued in
auto-critical societies such as liberal-democracies and the
institutions and ideologies that promote it. Our research will be
conducted through a combination of discussion of practice and its
contemporary conditions together with curatorial and studio-based
practices.
www.gold.ac.uk/visual-arts/poca/
Supported by the Department of Art, Goldsmiths College.
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