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 the values and ideas often promoted by initiatives associated with "young art." These include the spirit of renewal, career and commercial success, work capacity and productivity, an obsession with a healthy lifestyle, positive thinking, creativity, and social inclusion. In contrast, the panel discussions focused on categories frequently dismissed by mainstream contemporary art. Themes explored included ageing, negative thinking, failure, social awkwardness, and illness. The central figures of the papers were the new "wretched of the Earth" — seniors, losers, the sick, the 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, in response to climate change, French thinker Michel Serres declared that, for the first time, "global history enters nature; global nature enters history". Since then, philosophy has had to accept nature, this structural "Other", as a central subject matter. Appropriating "diamat" (dialectical materialism) as a title, this programme appeals to the heuristic potential of the Soviet Marxist tradition. Placed on equal footing with Western Naturphilosophie, it embraces not only the traditional epistemology of science but also new materialist worldviews. The participants discussed the following subjects: the nature of information, the origins of life, the reality of matter, the limits of species, the application of abstract laws, and the 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 after post-structuralism proclaimed the end of "grand narratives", the new lecture series at the Philosophy Club revisits the question of the possibility of new "metanarratives" and potential solutions to the epistemological crisis. This platform brings together scientists, philosophers, researchers, and artists to present their perspectives on global contemporaneity, planetary forces, and cosmological models of the Universe. Centering on the idea of a universal language, transdisciplinarity, or meta-narrative, the New Cosmologies lecture series unites speakers from diverse intellectual and artistic fields — from futurology to neurobiology, and from religious studies to bioinformatics.
Participants: Elena Bryzgalina, Vladimir Budanov, Boris Boyarshinov, Svetlana Bardina, Irina Sirotkina, 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". More than a decade later, the situation remains largely unchanged. Both old and new philosophical approaches continue to challenge aesthetics’ interpretative authority, deeming it obsolete or irrelevant. At the same time, some thinkers take the opposite stance, elevating aesthetics to the status of "prime philosophy" and granting it a metaphysical significance. Despite these polarised positions, one can observe today the emergence of a multitude of aesthetics, each taking on distinct forms: inaesthetics, the aesthetic regime, neuroaesthetics, mathematical beauty, new aesthetics, speculative aesthetics, decolonial aesthesis, and 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
