Online
February 8–May 21, 2021
The Vera List Center for Art and Politics (VLC) at The New School is pleased to announce its Spring 2021 As for Protocols Seminar Series. The continuation of a two-year curriculum curated around the 2020–22 focus theme As for Protocols, each seminar brings together scholars, artists, and practitioners across disciplines and locales to examine a particular figuration of protocols and how art and artists work with or counter them. Exploring issues of autonomy and surveillance, gendered labor and political education, and social and scientific experiments, the Spring 2021 seminars offer a discursive and multi-modal framing of these topics. Considered together, the seminars underpin a larger commitment of the focus theme—the pursuit of a decolonized set of everyday protocols that aim to ensure a more livable and viable future.
Seminar 4: Reimagining Protocols: Reclaiming, Challenging, and Queering Surveillance
Monday, February 8, 2021, 6–8pm EST, Online
Surveillance has become widely accepted as a prevalent feature in both our public and private worlds. How has the field of aesthetics dealt with what scholar Simone Brown terms “troubling surveillance” in reference to the spillover of military drones into civilian lives? What artistic practices and political frameworks have they created to challenge, resist, and queer modes of surveillance? Convened with Fabiola Hanna, Assistant Professor of Emerging Media at The New School, this panel features American Artist, Media Studies scholar Shaka McGlotten, performer Margaret Laurena Kemp, and artist Abram Stern (aphid).
Seminar 5: Protocols of Revolutionary Feminisms to Re/make the World
Monday, March 8, 2021, 6–8pm EST, Online
Viewing International Women’s Day through the lens of the multi-scalar and trans-historical practices of revolutionary feminisms—political education, forms of organizing, gender representation—we consider what protocols are needed for a reconfiguration of the world focused on gendered labor, solidarity, and internationalism. Convened with New School faculty Ujju Aggarwal, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experiential Learning, Schools of Public Engagement, and Laura Y. Liu, Associate Professor of Global Studies and Geography, Eugene Lang College.
Seminar 6: Lab Work: Art of the Experiment
Monday, April 5, 2021, 5–7pm EDT, Online
Whether as a research protocol or a demonstrative pedagogical form, the uses of the “scientific experiment” as a technique and site of Empire have been queered and decolonized across history and practice. Convened with Jeannine Tang, Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies, The New School, and featuring artists fields harrington, Mary Maggic, and Claire Pentecost, this panel considers the possibilities of both amateur and professional traditions of scientific experiments and how they figure into aesthetic practices of various scales and scopes.
Symposium
To Hold Things Together
With BAK Utrecht
May 20–21, 2021, 11am–2pm EDT, Online
This first year of the seminar series concludes with To Hold Things Together, a two-day symposium on protocols of encounter and solidarity in the hyper-local and hyper-dispersed present. Organized with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, the symposium engages real and speculative community and institutional models, and proposes theoretical and practical elements of coalitional exchange. Presentations blend daily seminars led by the collective freethought with roundtable conversations, performances, and artistic interventions.
Kite: Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). A Dialogue About Making Art in a Good Way
Friday, May 21, 2021, 4–5:30pm EDT, Online
As part of the symposium, Oglála Lakȟóta artist Kite leads a conversation on Indigenous notions of ethics, protocols, AI, and how Lakȟóta ontology can inform art and world-making in a “Good Way.”
Other spring programs:
Panel discussion
Climate Relations: Indigeneity in Activism, Art, and Digital Media
A Feminist Art Project’s Affiliated Society Session during the 2021 College Art Association Conference
Thursday, February 11, 2021, 3–4:30pm EST, Online
With 2020-2022 VLC Borderlands Fellow Maria Hupfield
Panel discussion
Communication After Refusal: The Turn to Love and Polyvocality
Monday, February 22, 2021, 7–9pm EST, Online
With 2020-2022 VLC Fellow Rasheedah Phillips
Study group
Necessary Work
April 11, 15, 25 & 29, 2021, 7–9pm EDT, Online
With 2020-2022 VLC Fellow Adelita Husni Bey
Convening
NO WORK, NO SHOP. Socio Environmental Imagination and Pedagogies of Action
April 22–23, 2021, Online
With 2020-2022 Boris Lurie Fellow Etcétera
For more information, full program listings, and registration, visit veralistcenter.org.
The Spring 2021 programs of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School are generously supported by members of the Vera List Center Board, individual donors as well as the following institutional funders: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Boris Lurie Art Foundation, Dayton Foundation, Ford Foundation, Kettering Fund, Pryor Cashman LLP, Sigrid Rausing Trust, and The New School.
