Excitation, or, Outside Together: Schändaustellungen, WHEREISANAMENDIETA, Forensic Architecture
Tuesday 31 May
A Fine Art Newcastle Event (Online)
Zoom link below
‘We’re chanting “Oi, Tate, we’ve got a vendetta, where the fuck is Ana Mendieta?” We really mean it. We are vengeful and burning with rage’ — Liv Wynter, 2016
This talk asks what happens when we cite, centre and practice agential forms such as protest, programming and reportage as art writing ‘that really mean[s] it’? What kind of accountability to the communities and practitioners outside institutions does that call us to?
What kind of ex-citations do we find ourselves involved in, which engage the reader, writer and subject equally in moving outwards? Starting from the schändaustellungen, the shame-exhibitions of early Nazi Germany that prefigured the more infamous Entartete Kunst exhibition, I consider how recent examples of curation-as-protest, and protests against (mis)curation, generate ‘spatial scenarios’ (Eshun and Sagar, 2007) that bring us ‘outside together’, enabling ex-citation from the canon and institutions.
So Mayer is the author of A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula, 2020), jacked a kaddish (Litmus, 2018), Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (IB Tauris, 2015) and (O) (Arc, 2015), and the co-editor of Mothers of Invention: Film, Media and Caregiving Labor (with Corinn Columpar, Wayne State UP, 2022) and Unreal Sex (with Adam Zmith, Cipher, 2021). So is a bookseller at Burley Fisher, a curator with queer feminist film collective Club des Femmes, and researcher on the BBC Sounds podcast The Film We Can’t See, produced by Adam Zmith. Their recent writing has appeared in/on Criterion, Frieze, Extra Teeth, LUMIN, Lucy Writers Platform, and MAP.
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://newcastleuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMpcuCurj4vE9Z9u6I2sSMWZ0gpT5T7Sofn
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
These talks constitute part of the research strand, Unregarded: Forms of ‘Outside’ in Art Writing, organised by Dr Sam Buchan-Watts (Newcastle University) and Dr Natalie Ferris (Durham University).
The series looks broadly at categories of ‘outside’ in contemporary art writing practice. Exploiting art writing as a formally mobile discourse operating between scholarly, journalistic and art world forums, speakers are invited to explore the status of disordered and non-conformist art in contemporary art discourse and its links to forms of cultural exclusion. It asks how intuitive forms of art writing may correspond with art that sits in ambivalent relation to the institution; and how categories of inside and outside inform art writing as an interdisciplinary or interstitial medium.
Twitter: @outartwriting