Uncomfortable Encounters, Disruptive Pedagogies

Uncomfortable Encounters, Disruptive Pedagogies:

Critical Explorations at the Intersections of Collaborative Art/Research/Education Practices

Thursday, 10 December, Methodist Church, Abbey Street, Dublin, 10-5pm

Increasing collaborations among artists, academics, activists and other socially engaged actors reflect a heightened interest in the overlapping fields of critical inquiry, creative practice and education. These explorations have galvanised an array of innovations in scholarship, teaching, arts practice and community work including new forms of cultural production and social analysis; of knowledge, politics – and knowledge politics; of alternative methodologies and pedagogies. Yet, by its very nature, such work provokes both productive and limiting tensions, as well as critical questions about the broader projects of transformative and transgressive praxes of knowledge production and artistic creation.

Seed funded by the NCAD+UCD alliance, and with additional support from CREATE and UCD Parity Studios, this project aims to cultivate collective understandings and vocabularies surrounding this sphere of work in Ireland, to support an evolving network and community of practice, and to locate Irish practice internationally.

As an academic, artist and activist, our guest speaker, Marina Gržinić, embodies the aesthetics-knowledge-pedagogy nexus at the heart of the socially engaged collaborations and praxes this event seeks to explore. She will engage us in an exploration of her transdisciplinary conceptual work. This work turns on critical genealogies of the entanglements of neoliberal global capitalism. Marina uses these to interrogate the ways contemporary forms of racism, coloniality, democracy, and contemporary art/culture are both shaped by and implicated in the shift from biopolitics to necropolitics. This is a shift from the power to control forms of life by differentiating them from one and other, to the power to impose various forms of death and diminishment according to and because of these differences. Alongside an analysis of the post-socialist transformations of ‘(the former) Eastern Europe’, Gržinić will illuminate the ways in which the depoliticisation of politics and of art, and the aestheticisation of ideology effect new articulations between form and content.

The screening of her videofilm, seizure – rewriting counter-histories (Gržinić and Šmid 2015), will provide an opportunity not only to engage with the sensual, generative, dissident responses to these discursive and material conditions, but to work through the ways in which such individual acts of creative intervention are themselves embedded and entangled in wider global legacies, formations and moments.

These expositions will then stimulate reflection and debate among and across three mixed panels of critical respondents (organised according to the areas of aesthetics, knowledge and pedagogy) – then extending to all those present - around the thresholds, confluences, and faultlines that traverse and constitute our practices.

Marina Gržinić PhD, is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and a researcher at the FI SRC SASA (Institute of Philosophy at the Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts) Ljubljana. She publishes extensively in academic journals and has authored and co-authored more than ten books (monographs and translations), both at home and abroad, such as Une fiction reconstruite: Europe de l’Est, post-socialisme et rétro-avant-garde, (Ouverture philosophique). Paris; Budapest; Torino: Harmattan, 2005, Re-politicizing art, theory, representation and new media technology, (Schriften der Akademie der bildenden Künste Vienna, Vol. 6). Vienna: Schlebrügge.Editor, cop. 2008. -Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism. Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life. Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić, Lexington books, 2014. She has been active in video art and media art from 1982. She works in collaboration with Aina Šmid, art historian and artist from Ljubljana. http://grzinic-smid.si/

*This sphere of praxes is defined by socially engaged, trans-disciplinary and cross-sector dynamics, involving multiple forms of collaboration and interaction. It includes, for example, artists/researchers/educationalists/activists working together on tangible projects; artists pursuing PhD and research degrees; researchers employing arts-based methods, and so on: those who are working toward transforming essential elements of their practice through transgression of disciplinary, institutional, political/ideological conventions, paradigms, and evaluative criteria that underpin the contexts in which they work.

All such interested people welcome!

Event is free but registration is required