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Exhibition Artist Talk

Gesture, Liquidity and Archiving Female Voices, Melissa Gordon

In 2010, Melissa Gordon hosted a number of women artists meetings in New York, London, Amsterdam and Berlin entitled ‘a conversation to know if there is a conversation to be had’. These day-long meetings of over 100 artists developed into a series of publications (LABOUR, published in 2011 with Marina Vishmidt, and PERSONA published in 2013 and currently a series of small publications titled ‘Conversations’ (2018-ongoing)). The project developed in numerous phases over ten years, including a launch at Kunsthal Oslo, a series of events titled WE (NOT I) at Artists Space in New York and South London Gallery in London, and Female Genius Nightclub at WIELS in Brussels.

Gordon is currently archiving the entire ten-year project as a website and will include individual testimonials of all the hundreds of women artists and writers that have participated throughout the ten-year project, as well as an exhaustive archive of all the materials, presentations, writings and events. The archive aims to put the voices of female practitioners at the forefront of a current evaluation of how feminism has developed in the past decade.

The subject of voice, the female body and its relationship to gesture and painting is also the current focus of an ongoing body of research that Gordon is currently writing at the moment.  In the talk, Gordon will outline the way in which voice operates in a gestural manner in painting, and how ‘other’ voices begin to enter into this discourse. Specifically, Gordon will use feminist theories of liquidity such as Luce Irigaray and Astrida Neimanis to explain how in her current work and research the idea of liquidity operates as a tool to understand how voices and gestures can break out of formats. Gordon will describe a curated exhibition which took place in 2018 in New York on the history of liquidity and abstraction, as well as current work which examines these themes.

Work Group

Objective Enactive
This online lecture-demonstration unfolds the term ´Poetic Materiality´ within the context of designing and choreographing with Somatic Costumes. Through critiquing and applying the somatic practice of Skinner Releasing Technique, the poetics of philosopher Gaston Bachelard and the materiality of anthropologist Tim Ingold, this talk begins to map poetic and material agencies between bodies-costumes within the design-performance encounter.

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Artist Talk

Objective Enactive

This talk will focus on the first outcome of Glitsch(ening) Ci(rculari)ty, a tripartite site-specific, where I am pursuing a speculative exploration of the ecology of the city, between the urban and the biological, unfolding its layers and materiality of time. The talk will end in a conversation between fellow researchers and artists in the collaborative project Urban Ecologies, where Glitsch(ening) Ci(rculari)ty, is generated from.

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Presentation

Polyvocal Tongue The presentation will focus on relational ethics and polyvocality in performative text. It will also explore the use of plural languages in a play, looking at how a polylingual praxis can open up new aesthetic potential in playwrighting and in artistic research in general.
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Conversation

TRANSPOSITIONS— JAR, Mette Edvardsen and modular diaries At the start, the idea for an artistic research conversation with Mette Edvardsen did not spring out of the topics shortlisted for the conference—hospitality, vulnerability and care—but a book that she had co-edited, and dropped in my shelf.
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Panel Discussion

The Ethics of Vulnerability and Artistic Research

Any ethical framework must take account of the vulnerability of the human condition. This is significant in all creative endeavours – especially in artistic practice and the teaching of it – since the very act of creating something and putting it out into the world is an expression of vulnerability.

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