Talk

Dea Antonsen / Laboratory of Aesthetics and Ecology: Politics of caring and hosting

These projects raise questions like: How to move beyond art as critical diagnostics of our violent capitalist and colonial realities to exhibitions that imagine and offer alternatives to a world dominated by social inequality and ecological crises? How do we work with sustained, durational practices that challenge the temporal scheme of an art world dominated by newness and fastness? How do we cultivate an art world that emphasizes collectivity, response and responsibility? And how can we stay in the struggles of building careful, caring working relations between curators, artists, local communities, audiences, across peripheral geographies, privileges and precarities in the Global North and the Global South?

The talk springs from two exhibition projects, which Antonsen is currently working on with her colleagues at the independent platform Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology: Hosting Lands, a slow-growing, decentral exhibition movement unfolding around land, the relationship between host and guest, and the link between the hyper-local and the global, and Tender Buttons, an exhibition series inhabiting a psychiatric hospital to examine questions around mental health, care work and sickness politics. The talk will discuss the possibilities and impossibilities of employing concepts and methodologies of care, regeneration, hosting politics, site responsibility and decoloniality in curatorial and exhibitionary projects. It will introduce some of the questions, challenges and tools which Antonsen and her colleagues are engaged with when trying to institute otherwise.

This lecture is a part of the Academy of Fine Art´s public program, full program can be found here: This lecture is a part of the Academy of Fine Art´s public program, full program can be found here: https://artacademycalendar.khio.no/