10am-7pm Monday 29th February & 10am-4.30pm Tuesday 1st March 2016
Studio A, Barriedale Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW
We are delighted to invite you to participate in two-days of presentations, workshops and display that might open up a discussion around oblique and frontal strategies. All welcome!
How can we think about the need for frontality - in the form of oppositional politics or a nostalgia for the frontality and flatness of modernism - at the same time as thinking about the need to defeat frontality, and find oblique strategies to represent, orientate and give space to the body that seeks to escape from confrontation and opposition?
This is the question that we want to unpack and dramatise - perhaps you could say, make public. This question might at first seem to be abstract, and actually, oblique. But if it is thought about in connection with the spectacle of front-lines of violence, disaster or disease that might open up anywhere. If you think about this question in relation to the idea of fronts and borders, both national and personal, that are being reinforced in response to perceived threats of invasion. And also think it in connection to the pervasive presence of the interface and screen, through which the intensification of algorithmic flows operate more or less obliquely, appearing to insinuate themselves into the texture of our cognition and physiology - the same flows and swarms that offer new forms of ecstatic dissolution of the boundaries of “the self”. Or, lastly, relate it to the spectral networks of information and surveillance that make oblique strategies of escape or evasion of the system harder and harder and yet also facilitates oblique strategies of gathering, commerce and protest. If we considered these contexts as a pressing background - sometimes bleak and threatening, sometimes hopeful - to our question, then the abstracted ideas of frontality and obliquity might start to take on resonant existential and physical forms. And the idea of the body and subject attempting to maintain autonomy, sovereignty, health, stability on a finite plane and coherence in the face of perceived or actual threat - from within or outside - show itself with urgent force. And not just in the sense of political forms of representation and opposition but also in relation to aesthetic and therapeutic processes. We ask you to join us then to consider a range of contributions towards a discussion and to offer your own in the form of critical or supportive comment or gesture.
Monday 29th February
10.00-10.30: Joseph Schneider, Introduction and screening of Horse-Bus (22 minutes)
10.30-11.15: Neda Genova, Machinic surfaces and politics of scale
11.15-11.30: Break
11.30-12.15: John Chilver, Oblique Gestures
12.15-12.45: Scott Raby, The Artist's Contract, and After…
12.45-1.00: Group Discussion
1.00-1.45: Lunch with showing of film by Oreet Ashery, Party for Freedom track 5, Piano Rim (3 minutes, looped)
1.45-2.45: Chris Alton, splashing mutant versions
2.45-3.45 Michael Dutton, The Cultural Revolution as Method
3.45-4.00 Group Discussion
4.00-4.15 Break
4.15-5.00 Shama Khanna, Spectacle Politics
5.00-5.30: Break
5.30-7.00: Positive Confrontation, Martial Arts Workshop with Juan Ordóñez (please wear loose clothing)
Tuesday 1st March
10.00-11.00: Hannah Catherine Jones, Striking Vocal Chords - Voice Workshop (no vocal training required, all welcome)
11.00-11.45: Joseph Schneider, The Passengers: An Open Rehearsal
11.45-12.00: Break
12.00-12.30: Joanna Rajkowska, Zechstein Sea
12.30-1.00: Sigrid Holmwood, Facing Pleitas: paintings as subjects
1.00-2.00: Ian Verstegen, The Lives of Frontality
2.00-2.30: Lunch
2.30-3.00: Make way to Arcadia Missa (details below)
3.00-4.30: Visit to Linda Stupart’s exhibition and performance at Arcadia Missa, A dead writer exists in words and language is a type of virus
