EVENTS

Seminar
Amanda Boetzkes
Realism Without Authority
01.04, 04.04.2022
10h–13h, 14h–17h

Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

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Julian A M.P., Growing Underneath Knowledge, 2010

The seminar will consider two concepts that are often associated, but that have become disjoined in the post-truth era: realism and authority. We will explore the ruptures between realism, as an aesthetic trajectory, and authority, a discourse of power that governs knowledge production and dissemination. Such ruptures deliver themselves through contemporary art in ways that demonstrate its convergences with, and divergences from, new philosophical realisms. We will see how art’s departures from authority are important avenues into reconsidering the theatricality at play in the political sphere. Art challenges the authority of knowledge, especially knowledge of ‘politics’ as a specialised and dislocated sphere of cultural activity. Its realism is inherently political but the implications of such a statement are best thought through its command of real appearances.

Amanda Boetzkes is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph, Canada. In 2021-22, she is a senior fellow at C:O/RE, the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, “Cultures of Research” at the University of Aachen, Germany. Her research focuses on the relationship between perception and representation, theories of consciousness, and ecology. She has analysed complex human relationships with the environment through the lens of aesthetics, patterns of human waste, and the global energy economy. She is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019), The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and a forthcoming book titled Ecologicity: Vision and the Planetarity of Art. Edited books include Artworks for Jellyfish (Noxious Sector, 2022), Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Routledge, 2014), and a forthcoming volume on Art’s Realism in the Post-Truth Era (2023). Her current project, At The Moraine, considers modes of visualizing environments with a special focus on Indigenous territories of the circumpolar North.

Partnership: Centro de Arte Moderna, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

Registration is free but limited to the number of seats available. Please send an email with a short CV to admin@maumaus.org by 24.03.2022. Confirmation of registration will be sent by email. The seminar will be in English.

Venue: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
Sala 1, Zona de Congressos
Av. de Berna, 45 A
1067-001 Lisbon