Shadowboxing, 1-5 (2011)

Shadowboxing brings together projects by four artists, Mariana Castillo Deball, Sean Dockray, Marysia Lewandowska and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, in an exhibition developed in collaboration with the graduating students of the Royal College of Art’s Curating Contemporary Art MA. Using different strategies – from tinkering to direct confrontation – each of these artists considers how the media and institutions that control our behaviour and ideology can be disrupted. The ideas behind the project are further explored in a five-part publication and a series of events.

The publication makes visible the processes of discussion, collaboration and production between artists and curators at different moments between February and June 2011. Contributions take the form of artists’ commissions, interviews and conversations with relevant people from the cultural and political field, as well as essays by the curators.

Issue 1, February 2011

The dialogue prompted by Giorgio Agamben’s text ‘What is an Apparatus?’ has been central to the development of SHADOWBOXING. Issue 1 reproduces this text including questions posed to the four artists as part of the invitation to collaborate with the CCA students and Marysia Lewandowska’s annotations, which reflect her reading of the text in response to the invitation.

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Issue 2, March 2011

SHADOWBOXING has developed as conversations have unfolded between the artists and curators. What has transpired from this approach over the past months is an exploration of the different ways in which artists enact critique within certain parameters, and an awareness of the paradox: how can one challenge forces that have become so internalised that they are indistinguishable from one’s own shadow? Issue 2 reflects through images and texts the research and the production process of SHADOWBOXING. It also includes the exhibition guide and the programme of events and film screenings.

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Issue 3, May 2011

The act of publication, as defined by the writer Matthew Stadler, constitutes a deliberate political strategy, which enables the formation of a public space through an ongoing circulation of ideas, texts and conversations. Much in line with his thinking, Publication is conceived as a snapshot of the unfolding dialogues that have shaped and continue to inform SHADOWBOXING. The contributions in this issue reflect upon the boundaries between private and public spaces, and how these can be tested or made contingent.

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Issue 4/5, July 2011

A Structure that Wants and To be Another Structure has been conceived as a double issue, where the content of the publications run in parallel. As a whole it both reflects, and confronts the terms used throughout SHADOWBOXING. It includes a text by Wendelien van Oldenborgh and interviews with Lis Rhodes and Rainer Ganahl.
Issue Four/Five is edited by the graduating students on the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, 2011 and is designed by James Langdon.

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Edited by the graduating students on the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art
Published by the Royal College of Art, London, 2011
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution

authors

Mish Mash, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol 17 Issue 1 (2011)

A collection of articles, reviews and opinion pieces that discuss and analyze the complexity of mixing things together as a process that is not necessarily undertaken in an orderly and organized manner. Wide open opportunity to discuss issues in interdisciplinary education; art, science and technology interactions; personal artistic practices; history of re-combinatory practices; hybridizations between old and new media; cultural creolization; curatorial studies and more.

Contributions from Frieder Nake, Stelarc, Paul Catanese and other important cultural operators.

Editor-in-chief: Lanfranco Aceti
Co-editor: Paul Brown
Managing editor: John Francescutti
Editors: Martin John Callanan, Connor Graham, Jeremy Hight, Özden Şahin
Published by Leonardo/ISAST, San Francisco; with Sabanci University, Istanbul; and Goldsmiths, University of London; August 2011
ISBN: 978-1-906897-11-6
200 pages

authors

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Jane Bennett: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010)

“In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.

Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.”

Publisher Duke University Press, 2010
John Hope Franklin Center Book series
ISBN 0822346338, 9780822346333
200 pages

interview (Peter Gratton)
the book’s reading group: announcement, wrap-up, final overview

Publisher

PDF, PDF (thanks to esco_bar; updated on 2012-7-25)