The R3turn Call: Singularities in Transit is an exhibition of original artworks, which attempts to explore and understand the transitional stage of waiting in relation to recentred spaces with a reordered time of accelerated contemporaneity. The R3turn Call is an answerback, a repayment, a return from me to you and back again. To be more precise, it is the absolute priority that compels the self to answer its call. 

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The exhibition considers the issue of non-places; these specific spaces that cannot be defined as relational, historical, or concerned with identity: the transit points, the temporary abodes, the dense network of means of transport, the web’s social event spaces. It addresses the non-place as the opposite of utopia; it exists, but it contains no material of organic society, a place where individual’s trajectories are intersected but the self is only indirectly connected to others and their purposes.

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Reflecting on practices of mobilities and dislocations in the era of supermodernity and on contact shaped in an alternative non-places matrix per se, the exhibition shifts the focus to factors of singularity that constitute a counterpoint to the procedures of de-localization. This bounds to be a claim of rhetorical territory rather than a geographical one. What kind of meaning can be derived from our being-together, our being-in-common through self-empowered departures, our being in singular-plural form? The law of touching is separation and it is particularly this heterogeneity of surfaces (these artworks’ identities’ touching difference) that contact each other.

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Music for Theodoros Giannakis piece was composed by Petros Papavasiliou

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Speaker: Dr. Irit Rogoff

Lecture: Participation: A User’s Guide

Held: 22 February 2011 - 19:00 - British School at Athens - small reception will follow

                                      

 

Dr. Irit Rogoff, Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College London University, will frame the closing of the exhibition with a lecture on Participation: A User’s Guide.  The event is supported by the British School at Athens and the British Council.

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What does it mean to take part in Culture? Beyond the roles that culture allots us for taking part in it; beyond being viewers and voters, listeners and demonstrators, visitors and protestors? Are we finding new modes of engagement within the spaces of contemporary art, perhaps even by galvanizing the attention that these spaces demand, for some other form of inhabitation? Over the past few years of thinking and writing about ‘participation’, I have been struck by just how much our terminology of ‘art’, ‘exhibition’, ‘audience’ etc. fails to capture the emergent dynamics within the expanded field of art. This talk explores the different models of participation, which we forge through affective regimes, sites of knowledge production and circulation, conversation and unexpected exchange, as well as the possible new vocabulary we need in order to work critically with it.

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Irit Rogoff is a theorist, curator and organizer who writes at the intersections of the critical, the political and contemporary arts practices. Rogoff is Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College London University, a department she founded in 2002. Her work across a series of new 'think tank' PH.D programs at Goldsmiths (Research Architecture, Curatorial/Knowledge) is focusing on the possibility of locating, moving and exchanging knowledges across professional practices, self generated forums, academic institutions and individual enthusiasms. Publications include; "Museum Culture"  (1997) "Terra Infirma - Geography's Visual Culture" (2001) , "A.C.A.D.E.M.Y" (2006) "Unbounded - Limits Possibilities" (2008) and forthcoming "Looking Away - Participating Singularities, Ontological Communities" (2009). Curatorial work includes; De-Regulation with the work of Kutlug Ataman (2005-8) ACADEMY (2006), "Summit - Non Aligned Initiatives in education Culture" (2007).

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Founded in 1886, The British School at Athens promotes research in all disciplines relating to Greek lands, from fine art to archaeometry and in all periods to modern times. Its newly created art studio will be inaugurated on the occasion of Irit Rogoff’s lecture.

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The British Council is The United Kingdom’s international organisation for educational opportunities and cultural relations. It connects people with learning opportunities and creative ideas from the UK and aims to build mutually beneficial relationships between people worldwide.

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