The Imaginary Seminar at Volt
House of Literature in Bergen, Norway
Tuesday September 30, 2014 7:00pm
Luis Guerra (Santiago de Chile/Barcelona)
Brandon LaBelle (Bergen)
Wednesday October 1 2014 7:00pm
Andrea Geyer (New York)
Panel discussion
Free entrance
Parallel to the political and economic tensions occurring across the globe, there has emerged a new sense for informal, makeshift, and minor economic and pedagogical structures, supporting aspects of direct democracy, shared economies, and commonwealth. These can be appreciated as countermeasures to the major structures of national governance, and open the way for new types of political subjectivity – a rethinking of the logics of agency and what constitutes acts of resistance.
This two-day seminar addresses these topics by focusing on the relation between the political and the personal, and proposes the political imagination as a gap for triggering speculative and propositional actions. Can we approach political crisis as an opportunity for generating and fostering new forms of sharing, affiliation, and the common good? What alternative stories might be crafted within the mechanisms of media and its representations of the crisis? Is there a state of imagination to be found within the economic drives of globalism?
Through performative presentations the seminar searches for alternative understandings of the political, giving voice to the ecstatic and the itinerant, the poetic and the antagonistic, the disappointed and the hopeful. Involving international artists, the seminar seeks to stage the possibilities and problematics of political subjectivity today.
Andrea Geyer uses both fiction and documentary strategies in her image and text based works. She investigates historically evolved concepts such as national identity, gender and class in the context of the ongoing re-adjustment of cultural meanings and social memories in current politics. Exhibitions include: MoMA, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Artist Space, New York; RedCat, Los Angeles; TATE Modern, London; Serpentine Gallery, London; Generali Foundation, Vienna; Secession, Vienna; Witte De White, Rotterdam; the Turin Biennale, Italy; Athens Biennale, Greece; and documenta12, Kassel. She is represented by Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne. Books include History is Ours (with Sharon Hayes), 2009, Kehrer/Nürnberg; Audrey Munson, The Queen of the Artists’ Studios, 2007, Art In General, New York and Spiral Lands/Chapter 1, 2008, Koenig Books, London. In 2012 and 2013 she has held a research fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art made possible by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation.
www.andreageyer.info
About Volt
Volt is a long-term curatorial project founded in Bergen in 2008. Volt commissions and presents new contemporary art projects with a focus on artists working across several media and modes of expression. Volt does not have its own exhibition space, but finds suitable locations for each project. Past projects have taken the form of exhibitions, time-based media, performances, discursive projects and sound art.
