02. Februar |  19:00   |  Irit Rogoff (London)

„Looking Away - Participating Singularities, Ontological Comunities”

What does it mean to take part in culture? Beyond the roles that culture allots us for taking part in it, beyond being viewers and voters, listeners and demonstrators, visitors and protestors? Are we finding new modes of engagement within the spaces of contemporary art, perhaps even by galvanizing the attention that these spaces demand, for some other form of inhabitation? Does our gathering within these spaces have the ability to signal new modes of community based on ontology rather than on identity?

Over the past few years of thinking and writing about »participation«, I have been struck by just how much our terminology of »art«, »exhibition«, »audience«, etc. fails to capture the emergent dynamics within the expanded field of art. In the contemporary art world, for over 30 years, artists have been proposing modes of making the spaces they inhabit, spaces of participation and of moving us from being a passive to being an active audience. We have shifted from critically conscious to critically active, to completing the work, to becoming the work.

Deleuze says in Difference and Repetition that to participate is to »lay a ground to a claim«. In thinking of »laying a ground to a claim« we need to engage notions of whether this is an individual or a collective enterprise. This talk explores the different models of participation which we forge through affective regimes, sites of knowledge production and circulation, conversation and unexpected exchange, as well as the possible new vocabulary we need in order to work critically within it.