Programme

TWO DAYS CONFERENCE
at Forde Geneva and Wallriss Fribourg

Organized by the art spaces WallRiss (Fribourg) and Forde (Geneva), this weekend of conferences around the notion of Pharmakon aims at discussing its possible contributions to the fields of contemporary art theory and of exhibition making. Borrowed from Bernard Stiegler, this notion exposes the dependency of imagination modelling to technologies. Beyond divisions between often overly polarized ethical and critical positions, a pharmacological thinking of technology approaches it in its capacity of both remedy and poison.

This conference gathers participants at the intersection of the fields of contemporary art, theory, philosophy and digital cultures. By breaking disciplinary boundaries, Pharmakon performs the current situation as much as it is an answer to it. The omnipresence of the digital paradigm forces to rethink the relationships between aesthetics and conceptual abstraction, between academic knowledge and contemporary art. The event will bring together accelerationist thought, speculative realism and their position in contemporary art, the possible reactualisation of the notion of critique, the figure of Lyotard, who more than any other researcher of his generation sought to rethink the relationship between thought and the exhibition form, the tradition of the avant-garde to productivism, as well as romantic poetics. The interventions will unfold through a genealogical order as well as a polemic one.

Inscribing the project within the context of independent art spaces emphasizes the possibility for such spaces to function according to the principle of an imagination that acknowledges the Pharmakon by shaking conventional hierarchies which distribute the sensible on one side and the intelligible on the other. More than closing and circumscribing a field, the shock produced by digital cultures calls for the renewal of the engagement with the production of fragmentary and transversal forms of knowledge, torn between the force of the negative and a narrow exit from democracy which has lost its force.

Saturday 18th, at Wallriss Fribourg:

10:30  Welcoming + introduction
11:30  PABLO LARIOS (art Critic, writer, editor Frieze d/e): Network Fatigue (Art and circulation)
12:30 Lunch break
14:00  INA BLOM (art historian, associate professor, university of Oslo): The Autobiography of Video
15:00 ROBIN MACKAY (philosopher, director Urbanomic, editor Collapse): Pigs, Tapeworms, Citizens: Accelerated Attention, Libido, and Anamnesis
15:45 Discussion with Ina Blom, Yuk Hui, Pablo Larios, Robin Mackay, Sadie Plant, Kyung Roh Bannwart
17:15 Screening: Orphan Drift, You Its Eyes 94-13, 2013

Sunday 19th at Forde Geneva:

13:30 Welcoming + introduction
14:00 KYUNG ROH BANNWART (artist, curator): The pleasure of exhibition
15:00 SADIE PLANT (philosopher, freelance writer, art critic): Speculation, acceleration, limitation – a few insider and outsider thoughts on poisons, cures, and intoxicants
16:00 Break
16:30 YUK HUI (philosopher): The Pharmacology of the Posthuman and the Eschatology of Technical Objects – Philosophy in the time of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
17:30 Discussion with Yuk Hui, Pablo Larios, Robin Mackay, Sadie Plant, Kyung Roh Bannwart

All conferences will be in english

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Small bookshop with a special selection provided by ORAIBI + BECKBOOKS

An event organized by Forde, Wallriss, Samuel Dubosson and Adeena Mey (in collaboration with Wallriss and Kunsthaus Langenthal in the context of Megarave Metarave)

www.forde.ch
www.wallriss.ch

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du 18 au 19 octobre 2014