Two conversations on love and politics in contemporary art

Two conversations on the intersections of love and politics in contemporary art practices

The conversations will take place in Model for a Public Space [knot]
Reading Room, Hart House, University of Toronto
7 Hart House Circle

Each conversation will begin with an introduction, six five minute contributions by invited guests, followed by an open conversation.

1. Love is the motive force of every emancipatory politics.
March 18, 7:00pm

What we are looking for—and what counts in love—is the production of subjectivity and the encounter of singularities, which compose new assemblages and constitute new forms of the common. - Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

Can love untie the knot of the identitarian politics of the family or the nation? What would it mean to love the stranger? Can love become a material, political force that holds the potential to create new compositions? This conversation will offer new ways of thinking, envisioning and enacting love beyond the stubborn imperative to love only those most proximate.

Adam Bobbette
Christof Migone
Allyson Mitchell
Helena Reckitt
Alessandra Renzi & Laura Kane
Kika Thorne

&

2. Love is an event ignited by the distance between two polarities.
March 25, 7:00pm

Love comes to compensate for the lack of a sexual connection. - Jacques Lacan

As parallel, yet separate, discourses, what common features do love and politics share? What is produced in the mismatch, or missed appointment, between the singular desires of individuals and communities? How are both intimate and political relations inevitably tied to the complex interactions between two bodies? This conversation will focus on the productive contradictions, antagonisms, and antinomies that underlie relations of politics and love.

Abbas Akhavan
Mike Hoolboom
Luis Jacob
Michelle Jacques
Christie Pearson
Etienne Turpin

Contributors bios:

Born in Iran, Abbas Akhavan completed his MFA from University of British Columbia.
His practice includes drawing, painting, installation, video / performance and site-specific ephemeral works. His work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally.

Adrian Blackwell is a visual artist and architectural and urban designer whose work has been exhibited at artist-run centres and museums across Canada. He is a member of the Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry and the editorial collective of the journal SCAPEGOAT: Architecture, Landscape and Political Economy. In 2009 he collaborated with Jane Hutton to design and build Dymaxion Sleep for the International Garden Festival in Metis, Quebec. He teaches architecture and urban design at the University of Toronto.

Adam Bobbette is a designer and researcher based in Toronto.

Mike Hoolboom is a Canadian artist working in film and video. He is the author of three non-fiction books: Plague Years (1998), Fringe Film in Canada (2000) and Practical Dreamers (2008) and one novel The Steve Machine (2008). He has co-edited books on media artists Philip Hoffman (2000) and Frank Cole (2009), and co-authored a book on David Rimmer (2009). He is a founding member of the Pleasure Dome screening collective, and has worked as the artistic director of the Images Festival and the experimental film co-ordinator at Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. His films and videos have won more than thirty international prizes, two lifetime achievement awards and he has enjoyed twelve retrospectives of his work, most recently in Poland.

An artist, curator, and writer, Luis Jacob’s practice challenges categorization. His art production alone manifests itself as photography, installation, artist multiples, public intervention, and video. His pursuits are varied, but all are unified by a concern for the philosophical and cultural possibilities of social interaction. Opening in March 2010, he will participate in the exhibition Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York) and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Spain). Opening in June 2010, he will present the first of a three-part touring mid-career survey exhibition Luis Jacob Tableaux: Pictures at an Exhibition, that begins at the Darling Foundry (Montréal) before traveling to Toronto and Vancouver.

Michelle Jacques is a Toronto-based curator, writer and educator who currently holds the position of Associate Curator, Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her recent projects at the AGO include Sarah Anne Johnson: House on Fire (2009); Luis Jacob: Habitat (2005-2006); and Christine Swintak: The thing that won’t let you walk away (2005). In 2007 she was one of the curators for Toronto’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. Recent writings include “The Artist-run Centre as Tactical Training Unit” in decentre: concerning artist-run culture (YYZ Books, 2008); and “Art and Institutions: An interview with Janna Graham and Anthony Kiendl,” in Fuse magazine, September 2007. She sits on the board of Vtape, is a contributing editor with Fuse magazine, and is Adjunct Faculty at OCAD.

Laura Kane is a struggling academic working on the imagination, a lose term that she hopes will provide for a long and rewarding future. She mostly writes on the intersection between the psyche and politics, idealistically aiming for expressions of radical autonomy in politics and sexuality.

Christof Migone is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. His work and research delves into language, voice, bodies, performance, intimacy, complicity, endurance. He co-edited the book and CD Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2001) and his writings have been published in Aural Cultures, S:ON, Experimental Sound & Radio, Musicworks, Radio Rethink, Semiotext(e), Angelaki, Esse, Inter, etc. He obtained an MFA from NSCAD in 1996 and a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University in 2007. He has released six solo audio cds, curated a number of events and exhibitions, and performed at numerous festivals. In 2006, the Galerie de l’UQAM presented a retrospective on his work accompanied by a catalog and a DVD entitled Christof Migone - Trou. He currently lives in Toronto and is a lecturer at the University of Toronto Mississauga and the Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery.

Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working in sculpture, performance and film. Her practice melds feminism and pop culture to trouble representations of women, sexuality and the body. Her works have exhibited at the Textile Museum of Canada, MOCCA, the Warhol Museum, Walker Art Center, and the BFI. Her ongoing aesthetic/political project, “Deep Lez” advocates a return to the histories of radical and lesbian feminisms, and has been taken up by lgbtq activists and artists through alternative curatorial projects. Mitchell is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University.

Christie Pearson is an artist, writer and architect. She makes poems, sculptures, buildings, events, performances and installations, and is a member of Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape and Political Economy journal editorial board; Wade Collective for installation and performance art; THE WAVES sound events group; Urbanvessel performance collective; and Levitt Goodman Architects. Her work has been published and presented in journals and galleries across Canada.

Helena Reckitt is Senior Curator of Programs at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. She has previously been a curator, education director, talks organizer and commissioning editor at institutions including the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, GA, the ICA, London, and Routledge. Reckitt’s group exhibitions include ‘Not Quite How I Remember It,’ 2008, on forms of re-enactment and reconstruction, and ‘What Business Are You In?,’ 2005, on the mimicry of corporate and academic behaviour. She is co-curator of the first Canadian show by US artist Ryan Trecartin that opens at The Power Plant in March 2010. Co-editor of Acting on AIDS: Sex, drugs and politics (Serpent’s Tail, 1997), she is the editor of Art and Feminism (Phaidon Press, 2001), a sourcebook which has appeared, in abridged form, in French, Korean and Spanish.

Alessandra Renzi is completing a PhD on Telestreet, an Italian network of pirate television producers at OISE, University of Toronto and is a post-doctoral fellow at the Infoscape Lab for the study of Social Media (Ryerson University). Her work focuses on the development of radical research methodologies and collaborative creative practices that overcome the boundaries of representation to strengthen and relay the links between academia and activist communities.

Christine Shaw is an artist, curator and educator whose work has been presented in galleries and public sites across Canada. Her projects experiment with organizing devices for curatorial knowledge, collaborative practice and creative pedagogy. Such initiatives include Public Acts 1-29, a translocal exhibition of 29 artists and collectives across the Trans-Canada Highway. She obtained an MFA from the University of Western Ontario in 1999 and a PHD in Social and Political Thought from York University in 2007. She organizes exhibitions and events with Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry and teaches Visual Culture, most recently at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Kika Thorne received her MFA from the University of Victoria, BC and has exhibited extensively, including projects at Murray Guy, New York; the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Portikus, Frankfurt; the Power Plant, Toronto and the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver. Upcoming exhibitions include CSA, Düsseldorf and ZK, Berlin.

Etienne Turpin received a Master of Philosophy from the Université d’Ottawa, and a Bachelor of Humanities from the College of the Humanities at Carleton University. Etienne is currently completing a PhD in Philosophy of Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. His dissertation, Aesthetics of Expenditure: Philosophy, Art, and the Infinite Faculty, examines the way in which Georges Bataille’s notion of expenditure serves as a transformative event in post-Kantian discussions of aesthetics, teleology and ethics. He is currently teaching History Theory Criticism 1 in the Master of Landscape Architecture program, as well as other graduate courses in continental philosophy and theory at the University of Toronto.