OFFICE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART NORWAY ANNOUNCES
a lecture by Judith Butler as part of 'The State of
Things' in the 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di
Venezia
Wednesday, 7 September / 18:00
Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Campo Santa Maria Formosa,
Castello 5252, Venice
The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), as commissioner of
Norway’s representation at the 54th Biennale di Venezia, would like
to announce ‘The Politics of the Street and New Forms of
Alliance’, a lecture by Judith Butler within the lecture
series ‘The State of Things’.
Wednesday, 7 September / 18:00
Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Castello
5252, Venice
About ’The Politics of the Street and New Forms of
Alliance’
Although some have argued that the politics of the street has been
replaced by new media politics, it seems that the public sphere
within which politics takes place is now defined by a specific mode
of bodies interacting with media. Hannah Arendt once argued that
there could be no exercise of freedom without the creation of a
'space of appearance' and even 'a right to appear'. How do we
understand those new forms of democratic insurgency that form
alliances that are not in coalitional forms? Who is the embodied
'we' on the street transported through media, and yet in place and
at risk?
About Judith Butler
Judith Butler (b.1956, Cleveland, Ohio, USA, lives
and works in Berkeley, California, USA) is Maxine Elliot Professor
in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the
Co-Director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of
California, Berkeley. She is the author of, among others,
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
‘Sex’ (1993), Excitable Speech (1997) and Is
Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech
(co-written with Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and Wendy Brown in 2009).
She is also active in gender and sexual politics and human rights,
anti-war politics and Jewish Voice for Peace. Butler is presently
the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic
Achievement in the Humanities.
About The State of Things
'The State of Things' is a series of public lectures that is
held throughout the biennale period, reflecting upon themes such as
diversity, the environment, peace-making, human rights, capital,
migration, asylum, Europe, aesthetics and revolution. Each
presentation aims to tackle the ‘state of things’ today, drawing
from the speakers’ fields of activity and research, and from what
they consider the intellectual and political priorities of today.
The programme takes its cue from the Nansen Passport, created by
Norwegian diplomat and explorer Fridtjof Nansen at the end of World
War I in an attempt to enable refugees move across borders in
search of political and intellectual shelter.
Norway’s representation in Venice in 2011 is commissioned by OCA
and organised by its director, Marta Kuzma and its associate
curator, Pablo Lafuente, together with Peter Osborne, director of
the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston
University, London. Norway’s representation at the 54th
International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, also includes
‘Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about
AIDS’, a graduate programme by Bjarne Melgaard at the Faculty
of Design and Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia.
‘The State of Things’ has been generously supported by Fritt Ord.
