Margareta Kern and Valeria Graziano: bodies that can’t take anymore. images that can’t take anymore

25. 11. 2015 at 7 p.m.

BAZA, Adžijina 11, Zagreb

This event will feature presentations by artist Margareta Kern and theorist Valeria Graziano with plenty of time for discussion. Both speakers will draw on their individual work as well as on experiences as part of campaigning collectives to explore and raise questions on the (re)production of precarity in arts/culture/education, the role and strategies of organising, limits and possibilities of 'representation' and the affective regime of neoliberal capitalism.

The starting point for Kern’s talk is her video bodies that can’t take anymore. images that can’t take anymore (2013-2015), from the series of works To Whom Does the World Belong?. Based on the print of every third frame taken from the footage shot by Tages Woche journalists at the Basil Art Fair 2013, and re-captured back into the camera in a perpetual forward-backward loop, the video shows the Swiss riot police firing rubber bullets and teargas at an artist-activist group who occupied and held a party in artist Tadashi Kawamata and architect Christophe Scheidegger’s art installation Favela Café contesting their appropriation and aesthetisation of poverty.

Valeria Graziano's intervention will revisit Ivan Illich' concept of 'shadow work' - originally indicating the transformation of reproductive labour under industrial capitalism - to talk about resisting the current pressure to psychopatologize the political.

Who are the bodies that can’t take anymore? What is it that they/we can’t take anymore of? And how do images capture, rupture, tear at their/our own fatigues with the simulacra of the art-world(s)? How do we talk about that which we can’t find words for, that which structurally inhabits/inhibits our bodies and minds, occupies it and exhausts it? How do we imagine a cartography of exhaustion, an exhaustion of possible in order to begin a new cartography of care – of the precarious body, of -self, -community and lest we forget - images too?

Margareta Kern is a visual artist and lecturer in photography at Falmouth University, UK. She holds BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College and MA in Visual Anthropology from University College London. Through photography, film, drawing and animation Kern explores labour, migration, gender and construction of political agencies and subjectivities.

Valeria Graziano is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Art and Design Research Institute, Middlesex University, London. Her academic research focuses on procedures sustaining collective practice, or how certain micropolitical, aesthetic and somatic dispositives can impact autonomous organization.

Programme editor: Vesna Vuković

Supported by: Croatian Ministry of Culture and Municipal Office for Education, Culture, and Sports (City of Zagreb)