“Bypass and Splendor”
In this talk Neferti X.M. Tadiar discusses the work of contemporary Philippine artists, Lyra Garcellano and Kiri Dalena, as forms of striving and strife within a context in which global tendencies of financialized urbanization and state terror are playing out in full force. How might we read their aesthetic efforts in a world being remade through a global fantasy-project of uber-urbanization, which Tadiar calls “City Everywhere”, and a state-led order of relentless, massive extrajudicial killings implemented through a brutally violent war on drugs? Tadiar explores the dynamics of bypass and splendor – of “life-times” expended and created, of refuse and remainder – as a way to think about the politics of Garcellano’s and Dalena’s (art)work in an age of financialized capitalist war.
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. She is the author of the books, Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), and co-editor with Angela Y. Davis of the collection, Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation (2005). Her current book project, Remaindered Life, is a meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire. She is co-Editor of the New York-based Collective and international journal of cultural studies, Social Text.
The lecture will start with a performance by UrbanNomadMixes. UrbanNomadMixes is a loose alliance of creative & performance artists that Camilo C. Antonio, as its founder-convenor, mobilizes and facilitates for collaborative intercultural dialogues in the public domain.
UrbanNomadMixes have been improvising on the same approach to celebrate diversity by breaking borders ever since the first edition of the Hallamasch Festival of Cultures in Vienna in 1998. Joint collaborations, such as this event with the Night School, aims to co-create platforms that stimulate and transform people empowering public spaces. The talk will be moderated by Camilo Antonio from UrbanNomadMixes.
Volkskundemuseum Wien (1st floor)
Laudongasse 15-19, 1080