PPV #7: Winding Ways Towards a Power Horizontal

1.3.2019, UCL SSEES. Room 433. 1pm-3pm.

Tactics and Strategies Workshop: Winding Ways Towards a Power Horizontal

With special guest Karol Radziszewski

The convenors of Perverting the Power Vertical invite you to join a roundtable discussion with fellow researchers, activists, artists, theorists, designers and other practitioners. We will brainstorm strategies for perverting power, questioning the legitimacy of the political order and resisting the enforced organicism of homogeneity in politics, culture and society at large. The discussion will serve the function of being an outset for ideas and inquiries that will play a role in forming agenda of PPV.

PPV #6: Other Ways to Pervert the Power Vertical

Thursday 28th February, 6.30pm-8pm. Mimosa House, 12 Princes Street, Hanover Square, London W1B 2LL.

(Other) Ways to Pervert the Power Vertical

Karol Radziszewski in conversation with Raju Rage

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Unedited audio of presentations available here. Please scroll down for photographs.

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Karol Radziszewski and Raju Rage will think about how their artistic, activist (and archivist) practice has attempted to pervert the Power Vertical.

How does the Power Vertical manifest itself, in their experience, in the realms of race, gender, politics, economics and aesthetics? And what tactics have they tried out to pervert the way of the Power Vertical?

Warsaw-based artist Karol Radziszewski (b. 1980) is founder, publisher and editor-in-chief of DIK Fagazine, the first and the only artistic magazine from Central and Eastern Europe concentrated on homosexuality and various shades of masculinity. He is also founder the Queer Archives Institute (QAI), a non-profit artist-run organisation dedicated to research, collection, digitalisation, presentation, exhibition, analysis and artistic interpretation of queer archives, with a special focus on Central and Eastern Europe. Both are long term projects interconnected through the common agenda of making historical and present queerness visible and documented.

Raju Rage (b. 1978, Kenya) lives and works in London. Their work focuses on techniques of resistance. They are concerned with bridging the gap between dis/connected bodies, theory and practice. Raju’s ongoing table-top artwork Under/Valued Energetic Economy (a term inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs) is an installation and work in progress featured at "Do you keep thinking there must be another way" which maps out the tangled ecology between "activism", "arts" and "academia". Presented on a trestle table top with objects and artefacts that references their interest in kitchen-table conversations and the knowledges that are produced by them, the work highlights informal strategies of organising, creativity and collectivity as valuable. It also explores alternative archiving of his/her/their stories.

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This event is part of Mimosa House's current exhibition, "Do you keep thinking there must be another way" with Georgia Horgan, Lee Lozano, Howardena Pindell, Polvo de Gallina Negra, Raju Rage, Georgia Sagri and Emma Talbot. "Do you keep thinking there must be another way" is a group exhibition that addresses strategies of representation, resistance and withdrawal. Including installation, painting, performance, text and video, the exhibition considers behaviours towards and in opposition to presiding power structures. "Do you keep thinking there must be another way" is curated by Cicely Farrer, Daria Khan and Jessica Vaughan. Generously supported by Arts Council England and Creative Scotland.

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PPV #5: Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

22.2.2019, UCL IAS. 6pm-8pm.

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

In conjunction with the 'Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East' series, IAS welcomes Francisco Martínez, to launch his new book 'Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia'. In his book, Francisco Martínez brings together a number of sites of interest to explore the vanquishing of the Soviet legacy in Estonia: the railway bazaar in Tallinn; the Linnahall venue; Tallinn’s cityscape; Narva, a city that marks the border between the Russian Federation, NATO and the European Union; and the new Estonian National Museum. The anthropological study of all these places shows that national identity and historical representations can be constructed in relation to waste and disrepair too, demonstrating also how we can understand generational change in a material sense.

🥒Francisco Martinez, Postdoctoral researcher, University of Helsinki

Discussants:

🥒Aet Annist, Senior researcher in anthropology, University of Tartu

🥒Andres Kurg, Professor of architectural history, Estonian Academy of Arts

🥒Liene Ozoliņa, Lecturer of sociology, LSE

🥒Patrick Laviolette, Editor in chief of the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia is published by UCL Press. This event has been generously hosted by the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies and supported by the SSEES FRINGE centre.

This event is free and open to all, no registration necessary. It will be held in the IAS Common Ground, South Wing, Wilkins Building

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