Click here to see the full program of lectures and events for autumn 2017.
October 25, 7pm
“De-Pixellation”
An artist talk by Thomas Hirschhorn
Thomas Hirschhorn addresses his decision “to see and look at the world as it is, and to insist in doing so.” Hirschhorn notes: “I believe blurring or masking and furthermore censorship or self-censorship, is a growing and insidious issue, also in the social media today. I don’t accept that, under the claim of ‘protecting’—protecting me, protecting the other—the world is pixelated in my place. I want, I can, I need and I must use my own eyes to see everything in our world, as act of emancipation. ‘De-pixelation’ is the term I use to manifest that pixelating no longer makes sense. Pixels, blurring, masking, and censorship in general, can no longer hold back or conceal fake-news, facts, opinions or comments. Fake-news, facts, opinions, comments entirely take part in the ‘Post-Truth.’ We have definitely entered the post-truth world. Pixelation stands for the form of agreement in this post-truth world. I want to insist heavily on what makes me work in a kind of urgency and necessity: The world has to be ‘de-pixelated’.”
An acclaimed visual artist and writer, Thomas Hirschhorn has had his work shown in numerous museums, galleries and exhibitions. His most recent book, Gramsci Monument, was published in 2015 by Dia and Koenig Books. Full information.
November 15, 7pm
WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER
A performance by Susan Howe and David Grubbs
This is the fourth collaboration from poet Susan Howe and musician/composer David Grubbs. Veering away from the stuttering, profoundly fragmented seance of their Frolic Architecture (2011), Howe and Grubbs present a sound work that germinates from text collages and other material published in Howe’s recent collection Debths (New Directions, 2017). This performance work was created while the material (Tom Tit Tot, Childe Roland, Paul Thek, W.B.Yeats, Isabella Stewart Gardner, etc.) in Debths was being arranged and combines Howe’s reading with the resonant sounds and represented spaces of Grubbs’s piano playing and field recordings made in Boston’s Gardner Museum. Full information.
Poet and writer Susan Howe received the 2017 Robert Frost award for distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry. Howe has also had her word collages exhibited at the Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, and in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording and the forthcoming Now that the audience is assembled (both titles on Duke University Press).
November 27, 7pm
“What We Mean When We Ask Permission”
An artist talk by Naeem Mohaiemen
Since 2006, Naeem Mohaiemen has explored defeated utopias in an ongoing project—The Young Man Was, a history of the 1970s revolutionary left. As part of this, in Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), a critically acclaimed three-channel film recently premiered in Documenta 14 in Kassel, Mohaiemen emphasizes the left in state power, and henceforth, to its eventual failure through misrecognition. In this artist talk at YSoA, Mohaiemen poses what different stories may have come out if the form were autobiography. In his conversations with Dutch journalist Peter Custers, the protagonist of Last Man in Dhaka Central (2015), “unrequited love” surfaces as a metaphor for the 1970s left as a movement that attempted to, unsuccessfully, revive itself in later years.
Writer and PhD candidate in Anthropology at Columbia University researching left histories outside state patronage, Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, installations, and essays to research failed left utopias and incomplete decolonizations–framed by Third World Internationalism and World Socialism. Full information.
Previously announced events in the series:
November 7, 5:30pm
“The Optics of The Racial Imaginary”
Claudia Rankine
Full information.
November 9, 7pm
“Public (Re) Assembly”
Shannon Jackson
Full information.