THE SALON OF REJECTED CATEGORIES
Online education programme for the 7th Moscow International Biennale For Young Art (12 October 2020 – 06 December 2020)
A series of five international discussions "Salon of Rejected Categories" was conceived as a counterpoint to those values and ideas that initiatives associated with "young art" — consciously or unconsciously — are promoting: spirit of renewal, career and commercial success, work capacity and productivity, an obsession with a healthy lifestyle, positive thinking, creativity and social inclusion. For this reason, the panel discussion covered categories often rejected by mainstream contemporary art. Themes chosen include ageing, negative thinking, failure, social awkwardness and illness, while the main protagonists of the papers were the new "wretched of the Earth" — the senior, losers, sick, silent, skeptics and pessimists.
Participants: Tim Ingold, Anna Shadrina, Ekaterina Muromtseva, Eva Illouz, Boris Klyushnikov, Natalya Protasenya, Aaron Schuster, Jack Halberstam, Gaby Sahhar, Anastasia Vepreva, Francesca Altamura, Egor Rogalev, Oksana Moroz, Anna Mazanik, Havi Carel, Lera Kononchuk. Curator and moderator: Andrey Shental.
TURBULENCE
September 2020, Cosmoscow Art Fair
The discussion program, accompanying the eponymous exhibition, was a meeting place for scientists, philosophers, critics, curators and artists. In a series of short presentations, participants tried to unravel the variety of meanings implied in the title of the competition. The metaphor of turbulence describes the modern world as unpredictable and unstable, but at the same time indicates potential orderliness and self-organization that can be traced at various levels of physical and social matter. According to the plotline, the first session starts from the turbulent movement of liquids or gases, as it is understood by natural science, to its interpretation in philosophy and the history of art. The second series of talks will address various complex systems - living organisms, artistic communities or databases and what happens when they encounter something external - a virus, a crisis or an outsider.
Participants: Aleksey Semikhatov, Elena Petrovskaya, Lera Kononchuk, Aleksey Maslyaev, Sergey Babkin, Oleg Aronson, Ekaterina Nikitina, Ekaterina Muromtseva, Karen Sarkisov, Polina Kanis, Aleksei Taruts, Anastasia Shavlokhova, Vera Trakhtenberg. Curator: Andrey Shental
DIAMAT
CCA Winzavod, Moscow (15 October 2018 - 28 June 2019)
In 1990, reacting to the climate change, French thinker Michel Serres has declared, that for the first time “global history enters nature; global nature enters history.” Since then philosophy has to accept nature, this structural “Other”, as a centre subject matter. Appropriating “diamat” (dialectical materialism) as a title, this programme appeals to the heuristic potential of the Soviet marxist tradition. Put on the equal grounds with western Naturphilosophie, it emraces not only traditiona epistemology of science, but also new materialists world views. The participants discussed the following subjects: the nature of information, origins of life, reality of matter, limits of the species, the application of abstract laws, nature/nurture dualism.
Participants: Armen Avanesyan, Karen Sarkisov, Boris Klyushnikov, Lina Medvedeva, Alla Mitrofanova, Marina Simakova, Alexander Vetushinsky, Ekaterina Nikitina, Nikita Sazonov, Polina Khanova, Magdalena Kozhevnikova, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Denis Sivkov, Keti Chukhrov, Alexander Pisarev, Maxim Miroshnichenko, Nikita Vasilenko, Maria Chekhonadsky. Curators: Andrey Shental and Anastasia Shavlohkova.
NEW COSMOLOGIES
CCA Winzavod, Moscow (May 2017 - June 2018)
Nearly forty years post-structuralism has proclaimed the end of “grand narratives”. The new series of lectures at “Philosophical Club” opens up the problem of possibility of new “metanarratives” and possible ways out of the epistemological crisis. It is a space, where scientists, philosophers, researchers and artists offered their views on the global contemporaneity, planetary forces and cosmological models of the Universe. Putting in the centre the idea of a universal language, transdisciplinarity or meta-narrative, “New Cosmologies” lecture series brought together speakers from various intellectual and artistic backgrounds from futurologies to neurobiology, from religious studies to bioinformatics.
Participants: Elena Bryzgalina, Vladimir Budanov, Boris Boyarshinov, Svetlana Bardina, Irina Sirotkina, Igor Chubarov, Maria Falikman, Dmitry Ivanov, Stanislav Protasov, Vyacheslav Dubynin, Stefano Mancuso, Alexander R. Galloway, Elizabeth Rudinesco, Victor Mazin, Georgi Derlugyan, Peter Osborne, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Federico Campagna. Curators: Anastasia Shavlohkova and Andrey Shental
AESTHETICS AND ITS DISCONTENTS
CCA Winzavod, Moscow (January 2016 - December 2017)
‘Aesthetics has a bad reputation.’ wrote Jacques Rancière in 2004 — ‘Hardly a year goes by without a new book either proclaiming that its time is over or that its harmful effects are being perpetuated.’ After more than ten years we can see that the situation has not changed: both old and new philosophical concepts try to limit aesthetics’s rights for interpretation, proclaiming it an obsolete or irrelevant discipline. Simultaneously, writers praising aesthetics as “prime philosophy” and endowing this field of knowledge with metaphysical status go to another extreme. However, notwithstanding these categorical assertions, today one can speak of multitude of aesthetics that take various forms: inaesthetics, aesthetic regime, neuroaesthetics, mathematical beauty, new aesthetics, speculative aesthetics, decolonial aesthesis, environmental aesthetics.
Participants: Keti Chukhrov, Graham Harman, Christoph Menke, Alexander Markov, Natalia Smolyanskaya, Victor Vakhshtayn, Ekaterina Degot, Artemy Magun, Tatiana Volkova, Viktor Misiano, Robert Pfaller, Madina Tlostanova, Yoel Regev, Boris Klyushnikov, Sergei Lishaev, Oleg Aronson, Alexei Semikhatov, Franco "Bifo" Berardi. Curators: Andrey Shental and Anastasia Shavlokhova
