curating.org
Master Project
Merly Knoerle (project curator)
This is Exchange
22 May–22 June 2015
12th Havana Biennial, Havana Cuba
Tino Sehgal
Co-curating a part of the 12th Havana Bienial at Center for Contemporary Art ‘Wilfredo Lam’, Havana, Cuba.
Tino Sehgal’s project did focuss on two relevant issues, affect and social interaction, this project questions the topicality of Immaterial Labour today as well as the importance of the production of affect in participatory pieces in which audience engagement and social exchange have the central role.
Are the issues of affect and social interaction always intermingling? How to question the topicality of immaterial labour? Why is the production of affect in participatory pieces so important?
“Affect theory brings a new picture of consciousness, of thought, of mind and of language that no longer accepts division, placing the emphasis instead on the fluid intermingling of matter and nonmatter.” Marie-Luise Angerer, Desire after Affect (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
“The perceiving subject stands with his body in a torrent of external images that envelop him in a network of solidarity, at whose centre he finds himself.” Mirjana Vrhunc, Bild und Wirklichkeit (Munich:Fink, 2002). “Affect, unlike the drives, has a degree of competency and complexity that affords it the relative ability to motivate the human to greater degrees of freedom.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Frank, Shame and it Sisters.
“With this focus on the production of meaning, cultural studies has lost sight of an aspect that is of fundamental importance to both Lacan and Laclau, that is, understanding images, narratives, discourses in their function as facades that mask the meaninglessness of the subject.” Marie-Luise Angerer, Desire after Affect (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).