On Practices
2017/18

The figure of ‘research’ has gained some weight of history. It once had the revolutionary promise to curtail the oppressive forces of the cultural-industrial beast of contemporary art. That which meant to be subversive, alternative and political through counter-public actions seems to have constituted new institutional standards, both in academia as well as exhibition-landscapes. ‘Research’ in the arts today is a code-word to enter study programs, biennales, PhD-grants in the arts, museum-reforms, funding applications and makes students pay tuition fee. Let’s get to work for re-articulating the politics of ‘research’ through speaking about and making practices. We have in mind a network of practices that departs from life’s complexity: language, gender, race, sexuality, geopolitics, education, class, knowledge, the climate, ecology, computation, economics, mobility, unresolved histories and – love. We do not want to hierarchize any practice against the other. Instead we investigate how research practices initiate a form of knowledge-processing that enables new thoughts to arrive: What does it need to listen, to inhabit non-knowledge, to unmaster critique, to transform guilt into solidarity and shame into politics, to face the politics of alienation, to share fear and the intimacy of reading, to engage in theory without Theory, and to dehistoricise history into contemporary narrations that matter for a migratory world, a planet on loan and real virtualities?

Monday, May 28, 2018, 7PM
The Phantoms of Collecting
Kader Attia
Video

Monday, May 14, 2018, 7PM
Art Work(ers): A “Prospective” For Multifaceted Constellations of Art, Work and Research
Petra Köhle, Federica Martini, Anne-Julie Raccoursier

Tuesday, April 10, 2018, 7PM
Je suis Biomasse
Michael Marder
Video

Tuesday, February 20, 2018, 7PM
Distributed Cognition and Generic Situatedness
Patricia Reed
Video

Monday, January 15, 2018, 7PM
Research, Solidarity and Resistance in States of Emergency
Çağla E. Aykaç

Monday, December 4, 2017, 7PM
From Calvin to Calvinland, A Political and Artistic Investigation of Geneva’s Subconscious
Dominique Ziegler with the participation of Olivier Lafrance
Video

Wednesday, November 1, 2017, 7PM
Ferocious Lack Harmony – A Reading
Caspar Heinemann