events calendar

Workshop: The Lives of Others: Ethnographic Ethics or Politicized Aesthetics

16 Feb 2012

Venue: 16 February, Fire Station Artists' Studios
Lecturer: Anthony Downey

This session will address the ethnographic turn in collaborative art practices, alongside the ethical and methodological implications of art-making that involves social and community-based groups over extended periods of time. The workshop will examine how critical analysis can develop a series of questions that avoid the pitfalls of current critiques that often either overtly politicize art - reducing it to a series of statements - or rely too much on a "soft ethics" that merely normalizes reactions to art as a practice and thereafter the means of its production. In more specific terms, we need to ask whether current artistic practices that engage forms of ethnographic observation - from the work of Artur Zmijewski and Santiago Sierra to the films of Renzo Martens - are formulating a "situated ethics" that, in the moment of questioning the ethical relativism and forms of "moral communalism" prevalent in the West today, have become paradoxically ethical in their import. Could such works, in sum, be the starting point for an ethics of aesthetics that answers to the recent demand for a politics of aesthetics?

Anthony Downey is the Programme Director of the MA in Contemporary Art at Sotheby's Institute of Art, London. He is an Editorial Board member of Third Text and the Editor of www.ibraaz.org, a research forum for visual culture in the North African and the Middle East. He is a trustee of the Eisler Foundation and an Advisory Committee member for the Art and Patronage Summit (to be held at the British Museum in January 2012). Recent and upcoming publications include "Beyond the Former Middle East: Aesthetics, Civil Society and the Politics of Representation", in The Future of A Promise (Ibraaz Publishing, 2011); "An Ethics of Engagement: Collaborative Art Practices and the Return of the Ethnographer", in Third Text, issue 100, 2009, pp. 593-603; "The Production of Cultural Knowledge in the Middle East Today" in Art and Patronage in the Near and Middle East (Thames and Hudson, 2010). "The Lives of Others': Artur Zmijewski's ‘Repetition' and the Aesthetics of Surveillance", in Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art, ed. by Outi Remes and Pam Skelton (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010); "The Burden of Representation: Contemporary Visual Arts in the Middle East", in Representing Islam: Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming, 2012); "Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben's Bare Life and the Ethics of Aesthetics," Third Text, issue 97, 2009; "Thresholds of a Coming Community: Photography and Human Rights", Aperture, issue 194, spring 2009; "Camps, or, the precarious logic of late modernity", Fillip 14, 2010; and "At the Limits of the Image: Representations of Torture in Popular Culture", Brumaria, 10 (Spring 2009). He is currently researching a book on Art and Politics Today (Thames and Hudson, 2013).

By application only.

Application deadline: Monday 7th November 2011.
For further information on the programme and lecturers, contact: www.firestation.ie/classes
Email: artadmin@firestation.ie
Tel: 01 8069010