PIET ZWART INSTITUTE – MASTER OF FINE ART PRESENTS:

Joshua Simon's Neomaterialism: The Unreadymade and the Dividual

Time: 19.00 hr
Date: Wednesday January 22nd, 2014
Location: Piet Zwart Institute Master Fine Art
Address: Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam

In MATERIALITIES, a lecture series organized by the artists enrolled in the Master of Fine Art program at the Piet Zwart Institute 

As an art institute fueled by our research and practice, we have collectively found ourselves considering, on a daily basis, how research is materialized and how, in turn, the material realm drives research. Theoretical, contextual, and material concerns are equally expressed in our work and we have identified a number of materialities that have crystallized out of negotiations between them. These materialities include material as methodology, research material, the material of language, the ruins of material, the material experiential, and theory of the material. The emergence of these multiple threads in our own research and practice has consequently led us to query this seemingly material moment. This series of public conversations opens up a dialogue around the material, investigates such materialities, and explores why materiality matters, now.

We are delighted to launch this series with Joshua Simon's lecture Neomaterialism: The Unreadymade and the Dividual:

Following up on ideas presented in his book Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013), Joshua Simon will engage with notions of the commodity, the general intellect, debt, labor, subjectivity, thingness, the dialect of material and dialectical materialism. With labor moving from production to consumption, the meaning of it shifts from alienation to debt, and things, actual things, change. With an overqualified generation subjected to a debt economy, we will look at how post-appropriation display strategies such as the unreadymade are introduced, and how by a series of conversions we now face ourselves and things as dividuals.

Joshua Simon is director and chief curator at MoBY – Museums of Bat Yam. He is co-founding editor of Maayan Magazine for literature, poetry and ideas, Maarvon (Western) – New Film Magazine, and The New & Bad Art Magazine, all based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Simon is a 2011-2013 fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, New York, and a PhD candidate at the Curatorial/Knowledge program at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the editor of Solution 196-213: United States of Palestine-Israel (Sternberg Press, 2011), author of Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013), and co-curator of Goods (together with Liz Hagag), which is now on view at MoBY.

Future speakers include: Caroline Bergvall, Geoffrey Farmer, Mark Leckey, and more…