BBX Crit Sessions

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Beyond the Transparent Eye: Affectability and the Fugitive Social

Lubaina Himid, Why are you looking?, from the series On the Night of the Full Moon, 2018, courtesy Lubaina Himid; Hollybush Gardens, London, photo: Timo Ohler

Free admission, fully booked

Akademie der Künste
Clubraum
Hanseatenweg 10
10557 Berlin

BBX Crit Sessions
Beyond the Transparent Eye: Affectability and the Fugitive Social
Denise Ferreira da Silva and Tiziana Terranova in conversation with Antonia Majaca
Talk as part of the Curators Workshop, in English

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The conversation will be an attempt to situate Denise Ferreira da Silva's theoretization of "affect ability" and her critique of the "transparency thesis" within contemporary curatorial practice. It will further engage with Ferreira da Silva's approach to aesthetics that moves away from "subjective universality" through an exploration of the "deep implicancy" of matter (or the raw) of the artwork. Tiziana Terranova's contribution will be formulated as a speculation on the "refusal to become human capital". It will foreground the ways in which the social life of what Ferreira da Silva has called "affectable I" has played a role in the constitution of the metricized space of "social capital" and consider how the tools and methods of social network analysis have become computationally embedded in the metrics of social media. Terranova will trace how what later appeared as social capital was initiated with a "fugitive social" – that is a social that metaphorically escaped visibility, and literally fled confinement and discipline.

Denise Ferreira da Silva’s academic writings and artistic practice address the ethical questions of the global present and target the metaphysical and ontoepistemological dimensions of modern thought. Currently, she is a Professor and Director of The Social Justice Institute (the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice) at the University of British Columbia.

Tiziana Terranova is associate professor of Cultural Studies and New Media in the Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Naples, 'L'Orientale'. She is the author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press, 2004) and numerous essays on digital media.

Antonia Majaca is an art historian, researcher and curator based in Berlin where she is currently involved in the long-term project Kanon-Fragen at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Her forthcoming artistic research, The Incomputable, at the IZK Institute for Contemporary Art at the Graz University of Technology, will explore the intertwined histories of psychoanalysis and cybernetics. Feminist Takes, her ongoing collaborative investigation, considers the relation between the Global South cinema and feminist theory. Together with Sohrab Mohebbi, Antonia Majaca directs the Curators Workshop within the 10th Berlin Biennale.

The Curators Workshop directed by Antonia Majaca and Sohrab Mohebbi acts as a close reading of the 10th Berlin Biennale, with unique interjections from selected respondents. For more information about the workshop and its public programs, please visit the project page.