Talk

Critical Tools: Morgan Quaintance: Discursive Weapons

Over the past five years a political turn has altered the focus of attention for the UK art world’s established centre.

Over the past five years a political turn, that is an engagement with politics in general where there previously was none, has altered the focus of attention for the UK art world’s established centre. However, the politicised stance adopted has, for the most part, sought to focus on addressing demographic shortfalls (including putting different faces and bodies in previously monocultural spaces, exhuming overlooked artists and movements, pulling the margins into the centre and so on) in order to sidestep the sector’s structural and systemic failures and institutional complicities. For the past five years I have been tracking this, using my position as a critic of contemporary art to analyse and identify the key behaviours that are making this performed engagement possible. In this talk I’ll introduce some of the ways I’ve been trying to achieve this and why.

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely with presentations in 2020 including: Curtas Vila Do Conje, Portugal at which he received the Best Experimental Film award, and CPH:DOX at which he received the New Vision Award, both for the film South (2020). In 2021 he is shortlisted for the Ammodo Tiger Short Film Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam, and has been commissioned to present new work at this year’s Borås Biennial.

The talk will be moderated by Associate Professor Lisa Rosendahl.

This lecture is a part of the Critical Tools seminar series organized by the Fine Art Academy at KHiO. Critical Tools invites artists, theorists, curators and other practitioners to share the tools they find most critical for navigating art and society at this present moment.