Radical Matter: RAW!

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Bringing together the exhibition FROM THERE THROUGH HERE with the wider Museum event: WHITENESS AS PROPERTY, this one-day symposium – Radical Matter: RAW! – will address some of the critical aspects of these works. Supported by the Austrian Science Fund/PEEK there will be two conversation events: The first one on the archive – highlighting the important works by Christina Sharpe (The Wake), Sadiya Hartman (Wayward Lives) and Keguro Macharia (Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora) all of which emphasise invention over discovery, nomadism over stasis, the sensuous over reductionism. Artist-scholars will include Ajamu Ikwe-Tyehima (London, erotic queer black fictions), Linn Phyllis Seeger (London, moving image/grim fairy tales) and Manu Luksch (London / Vienna, artist, filmmaker, researcher). The second conversation piece will focus on the emergence of Radical Matter as a method, a making and a way to re-think collective agency in an age of artificial and distributed intelligence, where plurality and emergence become not only players in the game of science and of life, but emphasise the shift away from Newtonian physics and old-fashioned cybernetics. At stake: the age old question – what is it to be human? and what can our humanity become.

Lecturers