The event will involve a presentation of short papers by Dr Larne Abse Gogarty (UCL) and E.C. Feiss (UC Berkeley) followed by a discussion with respondent Dr Amna Malik (Slade, UCL) and the audience.

Collective and socially engaged art has frequently been discussed as inheriting a critique of representation from earlier politicised forms of art including conceptual art and institutional critique. However, as this event will discuss, how can we understand the critique of representation within social practice as founded not only upon a deconstruction of artistic form, but also one that makes assumptions about the relationship between artistic and political representation? This is founded upon a notion that ‘subject participants’ might, through the artwork, gain access to political rights, an assumption which reveals a troubling slippage between the form of aesthetic and political representation. Our papers will engage in questions of political strategy and reform, seeking to produce a more dialectical view of the formation of collective subjects.

Larne Abse Gogarty will address group formation and collective art practice, exploring the relationship between psychic and political experience and E.C. Feiss will address some relations between artistic and juridical forms, and their potentialities and limits within political and aesthetic discourses of emancipation.

Image info:

Title: Beyond Allegories
Year: 2014
Artists: Carolien Gehrels, Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal
Photo: Roos van Trommelen
Description: Resolution No.III "Political Representation Beyond Citizenship" presented by Yoonis Osman Nuur (refugee collective We Are Here) and artist and initiator of Silent University Ahmet Öğüt

Conflict, Confrontation & Justice: Representation & Form in Art & Politics