Book Launch: Berlin: Antonia Hirsch's Negative Space: Orbiting Inner and Outer Experience
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Farbvision, Schönhauser Allee 28, Berlin
Presented by Books People Places, Farbvision, Inclinations, and SFU Galleries
Participants: Daniel Colucciello Barber, Antonia Hirsch, Olaf Nicolai, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Patricia Reed, and Wolfgang Winkler.
Made up of seven conversations and two reprinted texts, Negative Space: Orbiting Inner and Outer Experience (SFU Galleries, 2015) includes contributions by Theodor W. Adorno, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Lorna Brown, Elena Filipovic, Antonia Hirsch, François Laruelle, Olaf Nicolai, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Lisa Robertson, and Wolfgang Winkler. Published by SFU Galleries (Vancouver) and edited by Antonia Hirsch, the reader considers the eponymous inner and outer space as both "real" and imaginary. The title thus describes the space between and around subjects and objects, becoming the focus for contemplation in and of itself.
For the Berlin launch, four of the book's participants will be present to engage with a topic that could have constituted another chapter of the book: a conversation about how such a thing as "relevance" emerges in artistic practice. While artistic practice used to be accepted as a legitimate expression of an individual’s interior world, there has been an increasing demand for artwork to address issues seemingly external to the producer's imaginary, for example, political or moral issues-in other words, there has been an increasing demand for art to be socially productive. Against this backdrop, one might pose the question differently: what is the relevance of artwork that is propositional, rather than primarily discursive (a negotiation of positions in the midst of which it emerges)?
The conversation will be moderated by Antonia Hirsch; Patricia Reed, initiator of the Inclinations lecture series will act as respondent for the evening.
Daniel Colucciello Barber is based in Berlin and received his PhD from Duke University, where he worked in Religious Studies and the Program in Literature. He is the author of Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), and On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Wipf and Stock, 2011). In addition to these books, his work—which addresses questions of (and relations between) immanence, religion, secularism, race, sexuality, and mysticism—has appeared in various journals, including Angelaki, SubStance, Speculations, Symposium, andThe Southern Journal of Philosophy.
Antonia Hirsch is an artist, writer, and editor based in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited at SFU Gallery, Burnaby; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; The Power Plant, Toronto; the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Tramway, Glasgow; and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, among others. Her work can be found in public collections such as that of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry, Miami Beach. Her writing and projects have appeared, among others, in artecontexto, C magazine, Fillip magazine, and The Happy Hypocrite. She is the editor of the anthology Intangible Economies (Fillip, 2012).
Olaf Nicolai is an artist living and working in Berlin. His work has been exhibited at documenta X (1997), the Sydney Biennial (2002), the Busan Biennial (2012), the 54th Venice Biennale (2015), as well as at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover; and Kunsthalle Münster, among others. He teaches at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München.
Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer from Lisbon, Portugal. Currently living in Berlin, she is a PhD candidate in cultural studies at Humboldt University with a research focus on the history of science. Pinto is a regular contributor to E-Flux Journal, Art-Agenda, Mousse, Frieze/de, and Domus. Her work was also published in Inaesthetics (Merve, 2012), Renaissancen (Archive für Mediengeschichte, Fink, 2010) and International Studies in Philosophy of Science (Routledge, 2011).
Patricia Reed is an artist and writer. Her work has been exhibited at Home Works 7, Beirut; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; and Audain Gallery, Vancouver, amongst others. As a writer she has contributed to books and periodicals including: Dea Ex Machina; Mould Magazine; Fillip magazine; #ACCELERATE - The Accelerationist Reader (Urbanomic, 2014); The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Vol. II (Archive, 2014); Intangible Economies (Fillip, 2012); and Cognitive Architecture (nai010, 2013). Lectures have included those at Goldsmith’s, London; Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers; Maerz Musik, Berlin; The Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Tate Britain, London; Artists Space, New York City, and MIT, Boston. She is a founding member of the Laboria Cuboniks and the Office for Applied Complexity (OfAC) working groups.
Wolfgang Winkler is a writer, researcher, curator, and psychoanalyst based in Berlin. He completed his studies in social anthropology in 1979 at the Freie Universität Berlin; in the 1980s he began to train in Freudian psychoanalysis. He was a co-founder of KunstWerke, Berlin, and undertook projects as an independent curator and writer with, among others, Franz Erhard Walther, Jochen Gerz, Gerhard Merz, and Ulay. Winkler has taught at numerous art schools across Germany, among them the Universität der Künste in Berlin and the Städelschule in Frankfurt. His writing and criticism has been published widely through, among others, Portikus, Frankfurt, and Edition Text+Kritik, Munich. Since 1999, he maintains a private psychoanalytic practice in Berlin.
Negative Space: Orbiting Inner and Outer Experience is the second book in SFU Galleries Critical Reader Series.