Seminar on time
ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival organises a seminar, the theme if which is time. The speakers of the seminar include a British live artist and researcher Joshua Sofaer, Mika Määttänen, who has specialised in translating French philosophy into Finnish, British artist and journalist Dominic Johnson and Hanna Johansson, whose doctoral thesis deals with environmental art. Dancer Pia Lindy, sound artist Simo Alitalo and the artist duo Mad for Real from London - who have provoked a lot of attention internationally - provide the artists’ point of view.
Joshua Soafer, PhD, presents and performs a work called Performance Pack, which is also a piece of art as well as a lecture series on performance art. Sofaer is a researcher at Middlesex University and a lecturer in several other universities.
Mika Määttänen gives a lecture on French philosopher Paul Viriol’s science of speed. In her lecture Hanna Johansson, PhD, deals with time in contemporary art, especially in "dispersed works".
Dominic Johnson is working on his doctoral thesis at the moment and he lectures in Courtauld Institute of Art that is part of University of London. Johnson also writes for numerous significant art magazines. His lecture is about the performance work of the late Lawrence Steger.
The seminar is organised in co-operation with Kuopio Summer University. Participation fee is 40€, student and group discounts can be negotiated directly with Mervi Ylitalo from the Summer University.
Place: Kuopio (exact location to be announced later)
Time: 10 am-6pm
Programme
10-11.30am Joshua Sofaer; The Performance Pack
Conceived and created in association with Tate Modern and the Live Art Development Agency in London, The Performance Pack is a signed and numbered limited edition artwork, a performance enabler, and an educational resource. Creator Joshua Sofaer performs The Performance Pack at ANTI -festival.
Drawing on works that have been informed by performance in Tate’s permanent collection and beyond, The Performance Pack is a ready-made kit containing all the audio-visual material, historical information, key term definitions and props needed to develop a lecture-based performance explaining and exploring the relationship between fine art and performance.
The Performance Pack features the work of Matthew Barney, Joseph Beuys, George Chakravarthi, Robin Deacon, Forced Entertainment, Franko B, Ronald Fraser Monro, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Rebecca Horn, Tehching Hsieh, Zhang Huan, Oleg Kulik, Richard Layzell, Stacy Makishi & Vic Ryder, Piero Manzoni, Howard Matthew, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Hayley Newman, Carolee Schneemann and Cindy Sherman.
11.30 - 12.00 Mad For Real; artists’ statement
12.00 - 13.00 BREAK
13.00 - 14.00 Mika Määttänen; Paul Virilio and real time art
According to the French philosopher and urbanist Paul Virilio our everyday reality is increasingly controlled by the socalled real time technologies that have a tendency to invalidate the two dimensions of time, the past and the future, in favour of the pure present. This means that we live in a completely new sphere of time where the concepts of duration and memory are ever more nebulous. According to Virilio this losing of fixed points in time has unprecedented consequences for art too.
Mikä Määttänen is a tai chi teacher and translator who lives in Helsinki. He has focused particularly on translating French philosophy into Finnish including two books by Paul Virilio: The aesthetics of disappearance and Escape velocity.
14.00 - 15.00 Dominic Johnson; IT NEVER WAS YOU. Nostalgia, Cruising & Queer Time (Lawrence Steger)
This talk will look at the performance work of the late Lawrence Steger, specifically his film piece IT NEVER WAS YOU. Johnson will look at the piece in relation to queer cruising as a queer durational practice, understood here as a radical engagement with the ethical potential of the face-to-face encounter.
15.15- 15.45 Pia Lindy; artist’s statement
15.45 - 16.45 Hanna Johansson; Processes and time in contemporary art
In her lecture Hanna Johansson, PhD, deals with time in contemporary art, especially in "dispersed works". According to her the spatio-temporal dispersal of works combines various forms of contemporary art all the way from environmental- and community art to video installations.
16.45 - 17.15 Simo Alitalo; artist’s statement
17.15 - 18.00 CONCLUDING DISCUSSION