Panel Discussion

17 December 2005

On Imagining (options and strategies of resistance)

“Do writers know what they are talking about?” a diplomat asks a writer in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Notre Musique (2004). “Of course not,” says the writer and he continues stating conversely, “those who act never have the ability to say or think adequately about what they do.” In the context of his philosophical treatise on war, is Godard actually making a proposition about the role of artistic and intellectual production vis-à-vis the complex political, social, and economic conditions in the present-day world? And if so, does he indirectly appeal to the very capacity of art to imagine what the world could potentially become, rather than claim to know what it is? Invited guests on the panel present research and projects that closely examine the position and character of critical artistic and intellectual practices, and attempt to rearticulate connections between the aesthetic and the political. They discuss how art can contribute to the possibility of emancipation from the current order of the world by questioning the general consensus and dominant political hegemonies. The panelists offer their views on how artists and intellectuals can offer different visions by means of employing the creative force to counterbalance the “endless destructive energy” (Notre Musique) of our age.

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Saturday, 30 September, 2023, 16:30–18:30 hrs at BAK, basis actuele kunst, Utrecht Organized by Jina Collective, a Netherlands-based feminist, leftist, anti-capitalist, anti-sexist, and pro-LQBTQIA+ action group that emerged from the Jina Uprising. This event launches a book of translated essays, co-published with BAK, which include some of the first English translations of texts by journalists […]

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09 September–29 October 2023

To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023)/Public Program

To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023) involves a hybrid off- and online sequence of conversations and screenings around discursive and artistic interventions that reimagine the social implications of watching the war through ways that disrupt, subvert, resist the media’s incessant spectacularization of war.