LOOKING FOR THE OUTSIDE OF MODERNITY
Irmgard Emmelhainz
Talk organized by SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art and OBORO
Thursday, April 7, 2016, 6 pm
at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art
In English
Bio
Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer and researcher based in Mexico City. In 2012, she published a collection of essays about art, culture, cinema and geopolitics, Alotropías en la trinchera evanescente: estética y geopolítica en la era de la guerra total (BUAP). Her work on film, the Palestine Question, art, culture and neoliberalism has been translated to German, Italian, Norwegian, French, English, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew and Serbian, and has been presented at an array of international venues, including the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2014), the March Meeting at Sharjah Art Foundation and the Benjamin in Palestine conference in Ramallah (2015). She is member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal, and her book The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico’s Neoliberal Conversion was published in March 2016.
In her talk, Irmgard Emmelhainz will discuss the implications of an array of contemporary phenomena in which the realms of politics and the spheres of the sensible cross over in struggles against the current neoliberal siege of forms of life and ways of making a living. Ranging from the launch of Beyoncé’s “Formation” video, her performance at the Super Bowl in February 2016 and her winks to racial justice movements; to Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2014), a film which tells the epic story of the first encounter of an Amazonian shaman and two scientists who travel on the Amazon river looking for a sacred plant; to contemporary aboriginal struggles against neoliberal extractive mega-projects; and to a struggle to save a public sculpture erected in 1979 at the National University’s campus in Mexico City, Emmelhainz will try to sketch out an answer to whether it is possible to decolonize contemporary political struggles from the Western Modern myths of emancipation and progress.
This talk will be part of Does the oyster sleep? exhibition.
Résidence
OBORO welcomes Irmgard Emmelhainz as part of the M&M Curatorial Research Residency Program supported by the Conseil des arts de Montréal.
