What Can Art Do for Post-Capitalism?

Mercer Union is delighted to announce that Suhail Malik and Nick Srnicek will be the seventh guests of our fORUM critical conversation series. Please join us on Tuesday March 24th at 7:30PM for their discussion on What Can Art Do for Post-Capitalism?

Left Accelerationism proposes that a viable and socially-just succession to capitalism can be established by repurposing the advanced social and technical processes of todays capitalist development. It argues that the task is more specific than regular claims to find routes out of or against capitalism, usually by turning to small-scale, furtive, or retrogressive alternatives to capitalist domination organized through discourses of resistance, for example, all of which are common enough in todays critical art. The task of Left Accelerationism is, rather, to advance post-capitalism.

In their talk Malik and Srnicek will address whether and how art can contribute to making a post-capitalist future. In particular, what demands does Left Accelerationism make on art or should it make on art, and why is the currently prevalent mode of contemporary art not even capable of contributing to the construction of post-capitalism?

Suhail Malik is 2012-15 Visiting Faculty at CCS Bard, New York, and Programme Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies. Malik writes on political economy, theory, and arts axioms. His book On the Necessity of Arts Exit From Contemporary Art is forthcoming from Urbanomic 2015.

Nick Srnicek is a PhD graduate in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He is the author of Postcapitalist Technologies 2016, Inventing the Future 2015, with Alex Williams, and editor of The Speculative Turn 2011, with Levi Bryant and Graham Harman.

This event is free admission.

fORUM is a monthly series of talks, lectures, interviews, screenings and performances held at Mercer Union. The series is generously supported by The Hal Jackman Foundation