Oslo National Academy of the Arts
The Academy of Fine Art
Fossveien 24
0551 Oslo
Norway
T +47 22 99 55 00
[email protected]
The Academy of Fine Art in Oslo is pleased to present its upcoming Academy Lectures programme entitled “Skin Talk Tongue Touch.” The lecture series brings together professors, research fellows and former graduates of the Academy of Fine Art at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, among others Petra Bauer, Ane Graff, Felix Gmelin, Saskia Holmkvist, Steinar Haga Kristensen, Lars Laumann, Jan Verwoert, and Kristian Øverland Dahl.
This lecture series puts a spin on the feminist phrase “the personal is political” and presents approaches which place personal, biographical or otherwise idiosyncratic perspectives in relation to larger societal issues. Against the notion that personal experiences are the ground for unique and distinct subjectivities, the speakers in this series propose that we are always being affected and affecting others at the same time.
Taking their cue from the black radical tradition, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten speak of “hapticality” as “the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you.” In The Undercommons – Fugitive Planning and Black Study, the authors address groups of people who are denied almost everything, but who, through forced or chosen proximity, develop a common sensibility, a “hapticality.” This concept allows us to rethink notions of collectivity by emphasizing the subversive and potentially emancipatory effects of touch, contact and care.
March 10, 2016
In Ane Graff‘s work, the subject is exposed to an opaque but loquacious form of being. The material of the artist is intelligent, transmitting energies and intra-acting with us in multiple ways. Graff will be in dialogue with Jan Verwoert, who has written extensively about intuition, sentience and touch as existential modalities of relating to creatures, objects and spirits alike.
Autumn 2016
Lars Laumann and Felix Gmelin use semi-biographical and fictional narratives to evoke alternative forms of social life. Both artists intertwine historical facts with conspirational, fantastical or poetical stories. Their works are often of personal nature, revealing as much as they conceal about their subject matters and how they are affected by these.
Autumn 2016
Saskia Holmkvist is interested in what happens when different professionalized languages come in contact with each other. She analyses the affective economies at work in various spaces of social interaction such as during asylum hearings and exposes the political effects of linguistic exchange and translation. Holmkvist will be in dialogue with Petra Bauer who is interested in the role of gender, ethnicity and class in our modern-day society and the relation between the private event and public history. Often taking people’s personal experiences as a starting point, Bauer investigates how patriarchal and colonial histories affect political and social structures as well as individual practices today.
April 20, 2016
Kristian Øverland Dahl and Steinar Haga Kristensen each have a practice as independent artists and work together in collaboration, often together with Sverre Gullesen as the artist group D.O.R. In their latest collaborative work, Dahl and Kristensen are interested in the history of the fugitive people of Zomia who had to ingest the ox-skin upon which their scripts were inscribed. This loss of heritage through ingestion constitutes one of the more brutal effects of colonialist politics which, however, also allowed for certain groups to blur their ethnic identities and remain stateless.
Programme curated by Vanessa Ohlraun, dean at Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
For updated information and dates of the lecture series, please see academylectures.khio.no.
