December 4, 2015
Join us on Friday, December 4 at e-flux for the New York launch of Composing Differences, a book edited by French curator Virginie Bobin and published by Les presses du réel in conjunction with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York. The book and its accompanying 2014 public programs, developed during ART2: An International Platform on Contemporary Art and held in part at e-flux, were described as an attempt to “reinvent the relations between art and research outside of the academic world, and to experiment, often in a collaborative manner, with alternative models of knowledge production and exchange.” Composing Differences brought together European and American artists, curators, researchers and others who are establishing new platforms to experiment with art and knowledge production.
The event contracts this broader discussion in the form of a conversation between three individuals whose work helps articulate the complex questions Composing Differences puts into play. The participants – founding member of the New York City Players, Jim Fletcher; writer, scholar and dramaturge Joshua Lubin-Levy; and filmmaker Jenny Perlin – will discuss the ways in which their work is constituted by encounters with others. Collaborators, audiences, and institutional frameworks will be examined as coinciding elements of theatre, film, exhibition and performance that shape the outcome of each speaker’s work. The event will be moderated by Nova Benway, a participant in Composing Differences and contributor to the book, and curator of the Open Sessions program at The Drawing Center, which provides a platform for a large group of artists to work together to realize exhibitions and programs over the course of two years.
In the words of Composing Differences contributor Judith Revel, “Faire-multitude is a problem that is both logical and organizational: What type of organizational system allows us to think the singularities and what it is they produce—a system that goes beyond them without overriding them?” Addressing the dependence of certain modes of artistic production on “common knowledge” – that is, knowledge that can only be produced through association with others – this conversation attempts to articulate the extension and redistribution of singularities in aesthetic terms, through the disparate practices of Fletcher, Lubin-Levy and Perlin. Conceived as a development of Composing Differences rather than a recapitulation, this conversation turns a lens on individual practices as one way of understanding the complex mechanisms of art and knowledge production.
With the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.