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Olafur Eliasson The Weather Project 2003 © Olafur Eliasson. Photo: © 2003 Tate, London |
Giorgio Agamben, Etienne Balibar, Rosi Braidotti, Drucilla Cornell, Olafur Eliasson, David Harvey, Bruno Latour, Achille Mbembe, Ernesto Neto, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Peter Weibel are among the leading intellectuals, artists and writers who will be coming to Tate Modern as part of the Topology project.
Topology, as a general theory of space, was constructed by mathematicians in the first half of the twentieth century. It initially emerged as an understanding of space in terms of properties of connectedness and invariance under transformation. Within a few years of its inception, psychologists, psychoanalysts, architects, artists, scientists and philosophers had started to use the conceptual language of relationships, intensities and transformations of this new theory outside its original field of mathematics. Limit, boundary, interior, exterior, neighbourhood, disconnection and cut were central notions that became ways of describing the fields of forces experienced by individuals. Static ideas of space as a container were replaced by understandings of movement-space, of multiplicity, differentiation and exclusive inclusion that in turn have led to new ideas of power, subjectivity, and creativity.
Topological theory has thus come to serve as a link in a network of disciplines: in each case the multiplicity of space and the formal analysis of its relations has proved illuminating. Few commentators have made explicit the nature of this topological grounding however, and in many ways these mathematical realities have been allowed to fade into the background. The Topologyseries of events renders explicit what has been lost sight of in this process by inviting contemporary intellectuals, artists and writers to discuss how they make use of topology in their thinking, writing and making.
Curated by Bernard Burgoyne, Marko Daniel, Julian Henriques, Celia Lury, Jean Matthee, Brian Rotman and Fredrik Shetelig.
