Presentation: What now, What Next - Kairotic Imagination and the Unfolding Future Seized

First then, to set the scene […] There is a room, stripped back, bare. Maybe the lights are dimmed. Illumination comes from a chain of naked light bulbs — of different colours perhaps — strung up somewhat haphazardly … and from the gleam of a spotlight, which picks out two figures from the surrounding dark. Two figures – let’s say a man and a woman. They pause … then begin to speak. It would be improper to steal the thunder of their very first line, so … imagine an ellipsis … the dot-dot-dot of passing time. Two figures exchanging visions of the future, swapping narratives of optimism and despair, utopian and dystopian imaginings. A man and a woman, illuminated, mid-flow in the to-and-fro of exchange: “… in the future, everyone will have brown eyes; or ... in the future there’ll be no word for weekend; or ... in the future small will be beautiful; or... in the future no-one will care about algebra or trigonometry or sequence patterns or anything mathematical because computers will do it all, no problem; or ... people will grow an extra thumb for quicker texting; or, people will learn to walk on water; or, everyone will speak all the languages of the world; or ... no-one will remember the seventies … or buses … or takeaways or… dirty weekends”. The two continue to imagine what the future might be like through an unfolding litany of prediction, projection, prospection and prophecy: “in the future; or … in the future; or … in the future … or … or … or ” and so on.

My full paper, What now, What Next - Kairotic Imagination and the Unfolding Future Seized, can be read below. The paper was presented as a key-note at In Imagination: The Future Reflected in Art and Argument, at University of Sheffield, 4 Oct 2013.

Exhibition: Agora - Now what?

Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, a video 'performance lecture' work made in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer is going to be exhibited as part of the following biennale.

AGORA

4th Athens Biennale

29 September–1 December, 2013

Former Athens Stock Exchange

Given that 2011 was the year of protesting and dreaming dangerously, 2013 prompts us to think responsively and come up with useful ideas and suggestions. At a time when the financial crisis in Greece and elsewhere is reaching a highpoint, the 4th Athens Biennale (AB4) cannot but respond to this bleak situation through a pertinent question: Now what? This year the Biennale will set out to explore creative alternatives to a state of bankruptcy. Using the empty building of the former Athens Stock Exchange as its main venue, AB4 proposes AGORA not only as a place of exchange and interaction, but also as an ideal setting for critique. Contrary to an idealized image of the ancient agora, this new AGORA points to a radical re-orientation in thinking—one that entails judgment, ruptures and conflict. As a contested space where multiple theses and doctrines emerge, this AGORA cannot be taken for granted: it aims for pleasure and purpose; it opts for the carnivalesque and the ambiguous, for the significant as much as the insignificant. AGORA draws on the notions of the assembly and the assemblage. Conceived both as a living organism and an exquisite corpse, it is formulated through a succession of objects, collaborative events, performances, roundtable discussions, film screenings, workshops and educational programs. In AGORA works and theses evoke that which is urgently needed at this particular moment: an engaged subjectivity, an unearthing of timely attitudes, a reevaluation of artistic strategies, a deconstruction of mystifying narratives.

My Brain Is in My Inkstand: Drawing as Thinking and Process


November 16, 2013 – March 30, 2014 


Cranbrook Art Museum

curated by independent curator Nina Samuel

Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis is also included as part of the exhibition My Brain Is in My Inkstand: Drawing as Thinking and Process, an exhibition debuting at Cranbrook Art Museum that brings together 22 artists from around the world to redefine the notion of drawing as a thinking process in the arts and sciences alike. Sketches on paper are the first materialized traces of an idea, but they are also an instrument that makes a meandering thought concrete. Inspired by the accompanying exhibition The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot, the exhibition uses multiple sources to show how drawings reveal the interdependency of mark making and thinking, how tracing lines is a prerequisite for all mental activity.

Publication: On Not Knowing: How Artists Think

The publication On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (eds.) Rebecca Fortnum and Elizabeth Fisher (Black Dog Publishing, 2013) to which I have contributed a text 'Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected' and two artist's pages (in collaboration with Clare Thornton and Rachel Lois Clapham respectively)  is now available here. 

How far does our openness to aesthetic experience, and new forms of knowledge, depend on our capacity to enter and indulge states of wonder and awe, doubt and failure, ignorance and play? How critical are these conditions to the creative process? How do artists invite the unknown into their creative practice? On Not Knowing brings together contemporary artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines to explore the role of ‘not knowing’ within the creative process. The state of ‘not knowing’ or engaging with the unknown is an important aspect of all research. For artists it is crucial, as the making process often balances a strong sense of direction with a more playful or meditative state of exploration and experimentation.

Contributions include:

Dennis Atkinson, Pedagogy of the Not Known

Phyllida Barlow (in conversation with Elizabeth Fisher), Unidentified Foreign Objects

Sonia Boyce and Sarah Cole in conversation, Gulp

Emma Cocker, Tactics for Not Knowing – Preparing for the Unexpected

Cornford & Cross, Mobilising Uncertainty

Elizabeth Fisher, In a Language You Don’t Understand

Rebecca Fortnum, Creative Accounting – Not Knowing in Talking and Making

Rachel Jones, On the Value of Not Knowing – Wonder, Beginning Again and Letting Be

Ian Kiaer, Studio

London Fieldworks, Towards the Reification of a Wandering Mind

Office of Experiments, On Being Overt- Secrecy and Covert Culture

Gary Peters, Ahead of the Yes and No – Heidegger on Not Knowing and Art

Jyrki Siukonen, Made in Silence? On Words and Bricolage

Andrew Warstat, Unteachable and Unlearnable, The Ignorance of Artists

Image: Sarah Cole, Loving is Work, performance video documentation from A Million Minutes,  developed in collaboration with Islington Carer’s Centre, 2013. Camera and post-production: Karl Cresser. Courtesy of the artist.