Does modern/contemporary art have a cosmology? Or is the “modern” in modernism defined by its negative and alienated relation to cosmological functions, the latter understood in the anthropological sense as a complex set of beliefs and practices pertaining to the place of the human in the order of the cosmos? This lecture seeks to critically engage with the genealogy of the modern by looking at practices and domains that in the process of modernization have been marked as pre- or non-modern. It will engage with the split between knowledge, belief and art as an isolated sphere and discuss how these distinctions and the discursive rules that uphold them are coming under pressure with the quest for decolonial knowledge as well as the demise of liberalism and its promises.

The lecture was presented online on 18 May 2021 as part of the Aesthetic Seminar series at Aarhus University.

This lecture will present two investigations by Forensic Architecture that had significant lives in the Greek courtrooms. The first, the murder of the antifascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, was a key case in the trial against Golden Dawn which in October 2020, resulted in the indictment of the political party as a criminal organisation. The second, the killing of Zak Kostopoulos, a prominent LGBTQ+ activist, is still litigated in the court in Athens. In both cases, Forensic Architecture’s investigations performed a key role in the understanding of the incidents, whether by allowing for a different type of public witnessing through reassembled media, or by being presented as testimony by an expert witness. The lecture will present a brief run-down of the investigations and their lives in court, as well as key reflections on the agency’s truthmaking practices that suggest a potential reframing of the question of secondary witnessing.

The lecture was presented on 7 April 2022 as part of the Aesthetic Seminar series at Aarhus University.

For the past 10 years, Joen Vedel has been working with moving images as the main apparatus for the representation of historical time and developed a performative method of video live-editing – normally deployed in live TV – as a materialist investigation into the temporal aspects of various forms of political events. His presentation will elaborate this methodology by taking its starting point in a series of live TV programs that he created for the local TV station, Offener Kanal, as part of his contribution to Documenta 15. By live-editing video materials from the official Documenta archive (from 1955 to 2017), with material shot over the duration of the exhibition and live-streaming cameras from different locations in Kassel, these TV programs attempted to capture the mega-event of Documenta 15, while it was happening. In close collaboration with different local media-activist groups, as well as Kassel-based musicians and others, he approached Documenta 15 as a revolt, and used the TV medium as a capturing tool and a meeting place between different forms of aesthetics, voices, temporalities, and historical layers seemingly separated by linear time.

The lecture was presented on 12 October 2023 as part of the Aesthetic Seminar series at Aarhus University.

Workshop description:

“Make friends, not art!”

—ruangrupa 

“Each of us had arrived at a vivid sense that some momentous historical shift had taken place in the productive conditions of the visual arts, even if, outwardly speaking, the institutional complexes of the art world-the galleries, the art schools, the periodicals, the museums, the critical establishment, the curatorial seemed relatively stable.”

—Arthur Dante, After the End of Art  

"Contemporary art manifests an awareness of a history of art but no longer carries it forward."

—Hans Belting 

This convening is a conversation that prefigures the possible publication of Delusions of Reference: In Defense of Art; a parafictional book, in which an unnamed protagonist expresses anxiety around the end of art. Part-roundtable, part writing-sprints around the recurring question is art history? the discussion is prompted around a future-perfect interrogation both of the historicity of contemporary art and of what art will have become in 2048.

Participants are invited to reflect on the following questions and bring their own to the discussion. Is there a distinction between art as an asset and art as an extension of civic practice? What are the consequences of the “democratization of art”? When art leans towards activism does it resist the space of doubt? When did artists assume a moral obligation toward society? Do artists have an ethical responsibility? What happens to art when autonomism disappears? Will AI generated images deconstruct the discipline of art altogether? Does the deconstruction of art as a discipline matter?

Sarah is a writer, curator, entrepreneur, historian, and theorist, currently writing her doctoral dissertation on Cultural Infrastructure in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s.

Sarah Rifky "welcome mail":

I am grateful to Maj for manifesting this coming together, soon. The last few months have been particularly harrowing with the war on Gaza. Within the arts, there have been wide-felt waves of censorship, polarization, and volatility, which disrupt the imagination of the place, function, and future of art. 

I recognize the privilege of being able to convene and hope that we can engage in an open and sincere conversation around “problems” that face our field of practice, and of work.

Is art history: The premise of the workshop is included below. It partially grew out of a text that was published over ten years ago and which I am sharing here. 

The session will be approx 3 hours, mostly structured as a roundtable discussion, with moments of pen and paper writing. I am mostly interested in your personal views on the questions, I recommend you spend some time actively thinking about them—you’re welcome to bring suggested literature to the discussion but there is no required reading to attend. The conversation will be recorded. 

Maj has suggested that we kick off the day with a round of introductions—we invite you to bring along an object (material or not, as you prefer) as part of your short personal introduction to the group. 

The workshop was held on 3 april 2024