Plenary sessions Doreen Mende
17 April 2012
Plenary session 2-5.30 PM
The reading group emerges from aspects of the public guest-lecture by Fareed Armaly. He brings in the text Imaginative geographies (1995) by the geographer Derek Gregory of which we will read an excerpt. It proposes an approach to space in struggle with territorial boundaries and patterns of colonial powers. From this struggle, it becomes possible to think a geography moving the image beyond the concept of representation. A further contribution in the reading group will introduce the exhibition Road to Victory from 1942 at MOMA in New York which has been highly problematized as an exhibition propagating the imperial forces of a country in war; it places the power of display to a new peak. We want to elaborate how Derek's thoughts create a resonance body for approaching a relation between space (geography), image (photography) and the exhibitionary apparatus.
evening lecture by Fareed Armaly.
20 March 2012
Plenary session 14.00 – 17.00 PM
FACS OF LIFE (a film by Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson) HDV, colour, 116 mns., FR/ I / UK, 2009 Inspired by, and making creative use of, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Facs of Life is a film in eight plateaus that attempts to sketch and construct singular trajectories of life and thought, beginning from a series of encounters: with video footage of Deleuze's courses at Vincennes (1975-76), with several of the students who attended the seminar and who appear in these images, with the woods of Vincennes where the university buildings once stood, with students of the new university at St Denis, and inevitably with the phantoms of revolution, both cinematic and political, that continue to haunt our desires. The eight plateaus each fall under a key concept-word or refrain that delineates the territory of each student's relationship to Deleuze's thought (their angle of approach) and the nature of our encounter with them. The plateaus, while sketching a narrative of the film's making, are designed to fold and unfold upon each other in a series of non-linear, multiple concatenations and assemblages. www.facsoflife.wordpress.com
7 February 2012
Plenary session 14.00 – 17.00 PM
Doreen Mende's group is going to discuss two texts by Mladen Dolar. What is in a Voice? (2008/2009) moves around the notion of 'voice' in relation to body and language and has been published in a revised version for the book publication of the artist Smadar Dreyfus. Beyond Interpellation (1993) unfolds a reflection on the constitution of subjectivity beyond ideological state apparatuses. 'Love' seems to connect both texts; the reading shall help us to figure out how. --- A more general note on the reading group: The themes of the reading groups host quite a wide range of disciplines, methodologies and branches of theory; please take it as a texture where you can take up maybe only a detail. (Nevertheless, please always read the texts.) A thematic unfolding shall take place in your individual research that we discuss in the tutorials.
10 January 2012
Plenary session 14.30 – 17.30 PM
Doreen Mende’s reading group January session will look at the dissemination of images, words, cultures and economies, it needs to be clear that our world is not organized according to territorial and national borders. Though, it is certain that migrations have been taken place for centuries – both voluntarily and violently – but which language helps to unfold the question: "what is it to exist in the conditions of contemporaneity?" (Terry Smith) and to ask what are the consequences from there for us in art? They will discuss a chapter from the book Modernity at Large by Arjun Appadurai who proposes a set of 'scapes' to articulate a spatial fluidity; it will be cross-read by an interview between Tom Keenan and Özge Ersoy on the exhibition Antiphotojournalism that took place in Amsterdam in early spring 2011. The discussion in the reading group will likely focus on the aspect of the circulation of the image.
29 november 2011
Plenary session 14.30 – 17.30 PM
‘The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction’. Doreen Mende’s reading group November session will focus on questions about the undocumented event and its relevance for the unconscious of society. The students will read the essay "The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction" by Peggy Phelan. The text stands in relation to the artistic practice of Milica Tomić who will be our guest for the reading group as well as for the evening lecture. In this framework, Phelan's text will offer several lines of thoughts enabling to entangle theoretical propositions with urgencies of practice and concerns of gender. It is also useful here to understand 'performance' in a wider sense than a media-specific category but through its singular moment, e.g. the act and space of exposure. If there is time, we will relate Phelan's text to the notion of 'event' as a cross-point of politics and aesthetics which has been extensively unfolded by Alain Badiou in his seminal book Being and Event (1988) - (optional for further reading and research).
18 October 2011
Plenary session 14.30 – 17.30 PM
Doreen Mende’s reading group will focus on the notion of archive from two different perspectives: Allan Sekula's approach is informed by his practice as an artist, critic and writer; his seminal text Reading the Archive (first published in 1983) tackles the process of the accumulation of capital when artists are imbedded in the means of production of an "imaginery economy" through the use of archival material. The psychoanalyst, curator and writer Suely Rolnik recently published the text Archivemania, which reads as a reponse to the surplus of archival projects (by artists, curators and in institutions as in books) in the international art world of most recent decades and, by that, thinks about the entanglement of the poetic and the political along the body delivering crucial instruments for art as different to culture. Allan Sekula's approach is informed by his practice as an artist, critic and writer; his seminal text Reading an Archive (first published in 1983) Suely Rolnik: Archive Mania / Archivemanie, in: dOCUMENTA (13) (Ed.), 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken, No. 022, Hatje Cantz 2011.