Nottingham Contemporary

This series of study sessions explore notions of ‘opacity’, ‘imperceptibility’ and ‘disappearance’ from a number of different perspectives, and in relation to questions of ethics, politics and aesthetics.

In collaboration with Centre for Critical Theory, University of Nottingham and M3C.

Starting From the Self to Depart From the Self, with Helena Reckitt

For this session, participants will be encouraged to consider how subjectivity is increasingly exploited as a resource and a commodity. Drawing on Reckitt’s experience curating the exhibition ‘Getting Rid of Ourselves,’ 2014, the session will explore tactics of delegated, diffused and obscured authorship and identity. It will highlight practices of Human Strike developed by one of the exhibiting artists, the readymade collective artist Claire Fontaine. Discussing Human Strike as a form of affective withdrawal, Reckitt will show how it aims to resist stereotypical norms and behaviours so that new, unexpected and less defined subjectivities might emerge. These ideas will be related to collective practices developed by Italian feminists in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, through discussion of how women undertook a radical understanding of the self and interpersonal relations, while also shifting the emphasis beyond individual preoccupations and identities.