Ballet by Szuper Gallery, ONCURATING Books

Book Launch + Talk
BALLET by Szuper Gallery
Talk by Dorothee RichterWednesday 18th June 5.30 – 7.30 pm
Institute of Contemporary Art
The Mall
London, SW1 5AH
http://www.ica.org.uk
RSVP Kiran Raja: k.raja@reading.ac.uk

A futuristic anthropology. Étant Ballet – The Cave is a rock opera performance set in a world askew with attempts and remnants of civilization. It begins with the aftermath of an incident, an explosion. A group of people run ashore an unexpected landscape. Everything is about to happen but nothing seems to have changed. The setting: a crash site, in the wild or in the rush of a blackout.

Ballet is a new publication by Szuper Gallery, documenting recent performance and installation projects at the Kunstmuseum Thun, MacKenzie Art Gallery Regina, Perm Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading as well as Szuper Gallery‘s collaboration with Michele Sereda and Curtain Razors. It contains video and installation stills, performance scripts, a series of paintings by Pavlo Kerestey and essays by Timothy Long, Dorothee Richter and Lars Gertenbach and Susanne Clausen. Edited by Susanne Clausen and designed by Fraser Muggeridge Studio.

Dorothee Richter Talk: (Im)possible communities and artistic/ curatorial practice:

After the collapse of all socialist systems in the former Soviet Union there was a strong urge by leftist cultural producers and post-Marxist philosophers to re-consider their thinking on notions of community without following the reductive path of a (arguably neo-liberal or morally conservative) communitarism and to define other, new possibilities, while opening up new spaces of thought, even if they carried melancholic undertones.

How can we deal with the fact that communities are often romanticized within the context of contemporary art production, whilst at the same time continuing to produce gestures of finalization and exclusion towards the outside and homogenization on the inside?

This is event is part of the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies, Practice-Based PhD Programme at the Department of Art at the University of Reading in co-operation with the ZHdK University of the Arts in Zurich.