Talk

Antarctica. A Symposium on Alienation

Oct 4 2018 to Oct 6 2018
Museumsplatz 1
Vienna 1070
Phone: +43 1 581 35 91
Thursday:
18:00-21:30
Friday:
17:00-21:30
Saturday:
15:00-21:00
Thu/Fri € 5 / Sat € 2 / 3-Days € 10
Thursday, October 4, 2018 to Saturday, October 6, 2018
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In a sketch for a film, Michelangelo Antonioni wrote: “The Antarctic glaciers are moving in our direction at a rate of three millimeters per year. Calculate when they’ll reach us. Anticipate, in a film, what will happen.” Anyone who knows Antonioni can guess what such a film would have been about; in the image of the polar desert, metaphorically condensed—a diagnosis as old as the modern age: alienation. Today, climate research shows that an ice age is not to be expected. The polar ice caps do not expand, but shrink. And beyond the climatic, the signs point to a significant “warming”: Affectivity and creativity have superseded the primacy of “bourgeois coldness” (Adorno). Authenticity is the new cool. Has the diagnosis of alienation consequently become outdated?

As a prelude to the exhibition Antarctica. An Exhibition on Alienation at Kunsthalle Wien, Tanzquartier Wien and Kunsthalle Wien organize a symposium on this term. The symposium aims to discuss and examine the (im/)plausibility of the concept of “alienation” today, and to engender a critical re-reading, with a view to its genealogy as well as its applicability to present-day political and aesthetic phenomena.

With Angela Dimitrakaki, Michael Hirsch, Nina Power, Andreas Rumpfhuber, Kerstin Stakemeier, Martina Vishmidt

On Thursday and Friday, Antonia Baehr, Latifa Laâbissi and Nadia Lauro will present the performance Consul and Meshie within the framework of the symposium. The artist Claudia Bosse will conduct a lab on On aesthetic strategies of defamiliarisation, and present the outcome together with the participants on Saturday at TQW Studios.

Tickets are available at Kunsthalle Wien. Free admission with TQW Card Gold and Kunsthalle Wien Annual Ticket.

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