Talks

Edgar Schmitz

Talk: Choreographic and Free Indirect Style

Friday, 12 October, 6 pm
ZHdK, Room 6.K04

https://vimeo.com/294998565

CHOREOGRAPHIC was initiated by Edgar Schmitz in 2016 as a way of collaborating with invited guests from the fields of choreography and (post-)dance on one-off productions at the intersection of artistic, curatorial and discursive labour. As part of a broader investigation into how competency plays out in a post-skill environment, the series stages choreographic modes, language games and production formats in close and conflictual dialogue with neoliberal forms of governance and subsumption, and animates their invariably compromised critical affordances.
In relation to this bigger body of work, Schmitz will present on his role as Shadow Artist for netwerk Centre for Contemporary Art, Aalst (B) and a set of contracts in Free Indirect Style developed in dialogue with Tyler Coburn.

Edgar Schmitz (D, 1968) is an artist who produces escapist backdrops from film, sculpture, animation and writing. His work is concerned with developing modes of withdrawal from the given terms of the present, and he often collaborates with protagonists, settings and matter of all sorts, to animate the infrastructures he works within to the point where they start providing the raw material for speculative, cinematic versions of the near future.

His work was part of A.C.A.D.E.M.Y (Vanabbemuseum 2006), No Soul for Sale (Tate Modern, 2010), British Art Show 7 (Hayward Touring, 2010/11) a.o., and has been presented in solo exhibitions at ICA, London (with Liam Gillick, 2006), FormContent (London, 2010), Cooper Gallery (Dundee, 2012) and Himalayas Art Museum (Shanghai, 2015). His Hubs and Fictions book (with Sophia Hao) was published by Sternberg Press in 2016. He is currently working on Alovestorysomewherearound2046 (with Pieternel Vermoortel,Choreographic (with Mårten Spångberg, Animate Assembly (with Verina Gfader and Esther Leslie) and Imminent Futures (with Sophia Hao).
Schmitz is Head of Critical Studies in Art at Goldsmiths, was Associate Researcher 2017 at Netwerk Aalst (B), and is their Shadow Artist for 2017-19.