Talk

Open Forum: Joseph Lubitz

A lecture is not a dialogue, though like a book drawn from the unnumbered shelves it is a break in the infinite circulation of conversations.

A lecture is now a dark room, where images at the front resolve, develop, and vanish one after another. The sound is delayed slightly. But it wasn’t always this way. It was “one speaking mouth, with many ears, and half as many writing hands.”

In Puerto Vallarta, down below the resort balcony, a man at work waters the plants.

In Portland, a neon of a cowboy hangs off the corner of a building in the rain.

Complete menus of all meals served in the Japanese internment camps of the American West during WWII are housed in a box in the National Archives.

A fighter pilot in silence, receives commands through the green glow of his radio.

In this talk for Open Forum, Joseph Lubitz will speak about art works, images, texts, and histories that inform his practice as a curator, arts worker, and the co-director of the Center for Experimental Lectures. Through an engagement with questions of media and historical materialism, as well as pedagogy and performance, his work explores how life takes shape and is reproduced through its resistance and adaptation to material infrastructures. Recent projects include the exhibitions “Bangalore Flat” at Home Sweet Home, Bangalore; and “Omnipresence” at The Kitchen, New York; as well as programs at Artists Space, Kunsthaus Glarus, Haus Wien, RISD, Wendy's Subway, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has been a resident at the Onassis Foundation, a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program, an Education and Public Engagement Fellow at the New Museum, and works in the archives of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

Open forum is a student run initiative from the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, that seeks to create a meaningful exchange of ideas, a dynamic space for dialogue and debate within the academy, the art scene and a wider panorama.
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