Townsend Working Group in Contemporary Art

04/19/2016

Thanks to everyone who joined us today for Professor Jill Casid's lecture!! It was a thought-provoking talk on transversal methods and an equally inspiring performance of "embodied poststructuralism".

03/15/2016

HAPPENING this WEDNESDAY, March 16: Free. Open to the Public. BAMPFA, at noon: A conversation with Trajal Harrell that TWGCA's own Megan Hoetger and Dance Studies Working Group co-coordinator Kate Mattingly will facilitate. Topics will include histories and archives and museums and a dance canon and hagiography and bell hooks and "The Ghost of Montpellier Meets the Samurai," which is on view this weekend at Zellerbach Playhouse. Our discussion is part of The Architecture of Life Lectures. More info here:

The Architecture of Life Lectures Thinking across the Arts and Design at Berkeley: The Architecture of Life Public Talks: Spring 2016 Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Hand holding a model for BAMPFA, 2012; digital photograph. Courtesy and © Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Fil…

03/14/2016

Mark your calendars for the last TWGCA public event of the spring!

"Transversal Methods in Everyday Death-Worlds"
Lecture by Professor Jill H. Casid
Monday April 18th at 4pm in 308A Doe Library

What electrifies, what makes palpable the disavowed filaments of connection between the death-worlds over there and right here? Taking Guantánamo (and its phantom closure) as its improper object, this lecture offers an alternative in action to those engrained habits of method that partition death and life in ways that make illegible the extent to which we inhabit, in this extended period of endless war, a terror-zone in which the making of death-worlds of the living dead ostensibly “over there” in the occupied territories and extra-legal limbo zones of the “black sites” of unseen incarceration are also “right here” as the limits not just on right but also on the sensible.

This event is co-sponsored by the History of Art Department, the Department of African-American and African Diaspora Studies, the Townsend Working Group in Contemporary Art, and the Black Feminist Epistemologies of Afro-Pessimism Working Group.

03/06/2016

From her deep engagements of risk transfer (Jane Blocker),the normalization of the subcontract (Klein), and capital's imagination (Max Haiven), to her careful materialist histories of provenance, patronage, property, and power in the production of "vanguard" art practices, Eunsong Kim brought it yesterday! Thanks Eunsong for an amazing talk and to those of you who made it out on a rainy Friday afternoon!!

03/04/2016

Such a great, discussion-inspiring lecture from TJ Demos this last Wednesday, followed by an even more provocative workshop on Demos' recent article on "rebel creativity" the following morning. It always feels good to be reminded that intersectional Marxist critique and dialectical thinking lives here at Berkeley! Thanks to all who participated!!

02/27/2016

Join us for the upcoming lecture by TJ Demos on the state of visual activism. Wednesday, March 2nd at 4pm in Doe Library 308A, UC Berkeley

Join Us for a lecture on T.J. Demos,

01/26/2016

We're co-sponsoring a fantastic lecture by T.J. Demos
"Decolonizing Nature": The Activist-Arts of Climate Change

4:00 pm | 3/02/2016 | 308A Doe Library

This presentation considers Climate Games, the recent artistic-activist project organized around COP21 in Paris, December 2015, which brought together international practitioners and collectives in a coordinated effort to challenge the corporate-dominated climate negotiations. Participants aimed to bring attention to the invisibilities pertaining to the economic framework of climate governance, specifically neoliberalism, which has offered only failed proposals for how to address the current environmental crisis. Climate Games, organized by the France-based Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, promoted creative nonviolent civil disobedience as part of a longterm strategy to democratize environmental governance, insist on a just transition to a postcarbon future, and develop alternatives outside the automatic assumptions of capitalist hegemony. I will consider the visual infrastructure of Climate Games, as well as select examples of participating contenders, and examine how the project sought to organize ethico-political action around climate justice activism, representing a developing model of visual-cultural engagement today. What are the lessons of this type of practice, and how does it reconfigure the imperatives of art historical analysis?

12/12/2015

The co-chief art critics for The New York Times on the most notable themes of the year.

12/12/2015

Two great events in San Francisco tomorrow -- Talking Contemporary Curating at the Kadist Foundation and artist Robby Herbst in conversation with media art scholar Fred Turner at Southern Exposure. Both at 5:00pm, so choices will have to be made!

More details here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1514844605480825/

https://www.facebook.com/events/982928465113641/

12/12/2015

Jeremy Deller interviewing Hal Foster!

One of the most influential and dynamic thinkers on contemporary art in the past few decades is writer, critic, and Princeton professor Hal Foster.

12/12/2015

https://www.facebook.com/sfmoma/posts/10153167391391817

11/06/2015

Thanks to all who participated in making the last two days with Professor Shawn Michelle Smith such a success! First, we heard an insightful lecture into the interplays of photography and history in work of Lorna Simpson, and then we workshopped ideas around memory, materiality and positionality in the photographs of Sally Mann -- phew! Always grateful for the cross-disciplinary conversations supported by UC Berkeley.