Irit Rogoff: Participation: A User's Guide

Wednesday, 18 February, at 6 p.m.
T5 Project Space (Tobačna 5)

The lecture of Irit Rogoff will concentrate on the following questions:
What does it mean to take part in Culture? Beyond the roles that culture allots us for taking part in it; beyond being viewers and voters, listeners and demonstrators, visitors and protestors? Are we finding new modes of engagement within the spaces of contemporary art, perhaps even by galvanizing the attention that these spaces demand, for some other form of inhabitation?

About "participation" in contemporary art she says: "Over the past few years of thinking and writing about 'participation', I have been struck by just how much our terminology of 'art', 'exhibition', 'audience' etc. fails to capture the emergent dynamics within the expanded field of art. This talk explores the different models of participation which we forge through affective regimes, sites of knowledge production and circulation, conversation and unexpected exchange, as well as the possible new vocabulary we need in order to work critically with it."

Irit Rogoff is a theorist, curator and organizer who writes at the intersections of the critical, the political and contemporary arts practices. Rogoff is Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College London University, a department she founded in 2002. Her work across a series of new 'think tank' PH.D programs at Goldsmiths (Research Architecture, Curatorial/Knowledge) is focusing on the possibility of exchanging knowledges across professional practices, self generated forums, academic institutions and individual enthusiasms. Publications include; "Museum Culture" (1997) "Terra Infirma - Geography's Visual Culture" (2001), "A.C.A.D.E.M.Y" (2006) "Unbounded - Limits Possibilities" (2008) and forthcoming "Looking Away - Participating Singularities, Ontological Communities" (2010). Curatorial work includes; De-Regulation with the work of Kutlug Ataman (2005-8) ACADEMY (2006), "Summit - Non Aligned Initiatives in education Culture" (2007).

The lecture will be in English.