freethought invites…. Jan Verwoert  What Forces Us to Go into Abstraction

A Bergen Assembly event from freethought hosted at Hordaland Kunstsenter

Thursday 11 June 2015

19:00 Dinner served and drinks available from the HKS bar

20:00 Lecture by Jan Verwoert

Why do things work the way they do? Is it because people shape places? So there wouldn’t be a single city, institution or social structure on the planet which wasn’t a product of how people perform whatever they think is the right thing to do and life in the polis would be defined by forces that are infinitely specific. Or is it never about people but first and foremost about (super- and infra-) structures? How else could you explain that a sheer accumulation of power and money can create realities which have nothing to do with people, which are abstract beyond belief because they are manifestations of structural plotting alone, but which shape life in the city with the physical force of a slap in the face? Do we want to look closely at how people perform politics, in the flesh? Or do the structural realities created by superpower and superriches force us to go into abstraction?

Please join us for the third in freethought’s series of public lectures for the Bergen Assembly. A simple dinner will be provided and drinks will be available to buy from the HKS bar.

All welcome!

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Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory, based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor of Frieze magazine, his writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, the de Appel curatorial programme and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. He is the author of Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, MIT Press/Afterall Books 2006, the essay collection Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want, Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2010, together with Michael Stevenson, Animal Spirits —Fables in the Parlance of Our Time, Christoph Keller Editions, JRP, Zurich 2013 and a second collection of his essays Cookie! published by Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2014.

freethought invites….is a series of public events organised by freethought in the lead up to the 2016 Bergen Assembly to pursue their research into ‘Infrastructure’. These events are open to all, and include dinner, drinks and a guest lecture. Alongside this public programme, members of freethought will lead a focused seminar programme around key themes and terms relating to infrastructure with the intention of developing a collective body of research and insights. These seminars are available to anyone who can commit to following the programme in its entirety up until September 2016. If you would like to join the seminar programme, please email freethought@bergenassembly.no

You can follow the freethought Infrastructure investigation here: http://freethought-infrastructure.org

Follow at @ft-collective and facebook.com/freethought-collective

Bergen Assembly: http://www.bergenassembly.no/ and facebook.com/Bergenassembly/