US: Shaping Time

Saturday 20 March 2021
Time: 16.00-19.35 hrs

>> WATCH ON YOUTUBE
Language spoken: English
View photo album of the event

WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY:
(For extended information scroll down)
Oddkin, Ana María Gómez López, Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Meenakshi Thirukode, Joeri Woudstra & Robbie Barrat
uncertainty.stroom.nl

US: Shaping Time, the latest edition of Uncertainty Seminars, examines how art is able to imagine and shape the future. In a year in which the suppression of a global pandemic has been our first priority, it has often felt like we are back at square one. Spending so much time at home can feel like being slowed down at the same time as being sped up. And although this "pandemic time" may feel never ending, it also provides opportunities to imagine radical alternatives to the way we organize our societies: mass gathering, policing, office work, low budget flying, and even democracy have all had their end proclaimed recently.

For US: Shaping Time we invite eight artists, theorists, composers, coders, curators and filmmakers to puncture the bubble of "pandemic time". The program features a game on the way the Covid pandemic has accelerated the end of mink fur farming in The Netherlands; a film that challenges the notion of time itself; a discussion on the international allyships needed to remake the art world from the principles of transformative justice; a visual essay that connects the lives of dinosaurs to the possibility of outer-space utopias; and an audio-visual performance that questions why the end of the day looks like the end of the world.

PROGRAM

15:45: Live stream open
16:00-16:05: Introduction by Lua Vollaard
16:05-16:45: Oddkin: Post-Mink: Farm or Non-Farm
16:45-17:25: Ana María Gómez López: Cosmos & Paleontology
17:25-17:30: intermission
17:30-18:00: Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman: Serpent Rain
18:00-18:45: Meenakshi Thirukode: Instituting Otherwise
18:45-18:50: intermission
18:50-19:35: Joeri Woudstra & Robbie Barrat: Radiate

Oddkin
Post-Mink: Farm or Non-Farm

Game
In 2020 the Dutch government expedited a ban on mink fur farming from 2024 to 2021, because mink were contracting and transmitting Covid-19 to humans very rapidly. Oddkin will speculate on different scenarios for spaces of abandoned mink farms in the form of a scripted game. It will highlight how the former mink farms can become intensive spaces for a radically egalitarian, caring society, or remain exploited by commercial, profit oriented interests. Through the interactive live role play of a speculative mink farmer, with the help of the online audience, Oddkin will confront us with the ethical dilemma of how a series of individual decisions could invoke a collective planetary change.

Ana María Gómez López
Cosmos & Paleontology

Film screening (11 min.) + Discussion
What do science fiction and dinosaur bones have in common? This visual essay on Ivan Efremov, a Soviet paleontologist and science fiction author, interweaves his farseeing prose with archival and present-day material related to his work. Followed by a discussion with Ana María Gómez López.
Watch excerpt of the film on Vimeo

Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman
Serpent Rain

Film screening (30 min.)
This experimental film rethinks the link between memory and time, addressing this topic not only from the history of humanity, but also from the history of the ecosystem that goes beyond the human being: the land, the sea, the forests.
Watch excerpt of the film on Youtube

Meenakshi Thirukode
Instituting Otherwise

Lecture + Discussion
The platform Instituting Otherwise offers a vision of a better art world. It attempts to build eco-systems that support, provide funding, legal support, unemployment care, and new allyships from the grassroots up.

Joeri Woudstra & Robbie Barrat
Radiate

Audiovisual installation & performance
When taking a picture of the sunset, your iPhone adjusts your photos to look just like nuclear explosions. In a live performance and installation, Joeri Woudstra and Robbie Barrat present a collage of audio fragments and images from a network created by mining hundreds of shots of sunsets.
Watch new, edited version on Youtube

MORE ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Oddkin
Oddkin is the formation of Márton Kabai and Natela Lemondzhava. Their hybrid practice shifts between investigative and metaphoric approaches, operating through forensics and intuition which unfolds in critical storytelling. They depart from our apocalyptic, complex times and attempt to learn and unlearn, design and undesign radical visions and craft critical maps that de-center the human status-quo. They formulate their research in the form of books, games, videos, workshops, installations, and live performances. They exhibit, lecture, and facilitate different forms of workshops as well as collaborating with various fields of beings, cultures and disciplines.
>> oddkin.net

Ana María Gómez López
Ana María Gómez López is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher living and working in Amsterdam. Her practice is based on body-based and durational projects anchored on archival research in the history of the life sciences. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Rencontres Internationales, as well as the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Fonds d'art contemporain Genève, and the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, among others. Ana María was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten and has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. She is currently a fellow at the Mutations Theme Group at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart.
>> anamariagomezlopez.info
>> vimeo.com/amgomezlopez

Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva
Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva's academic writings and artistic practice address the ethical questions of the global present. She is a Professor and Director of The Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia, Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts, at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), and Visiting Professor of Law, at Birkbeck University of London. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race and co-editor of Race, Empire, and The Crisis of the Subprime (with Paula Chakravartty). Her art-related work includes texts for publications linked to the 2016 Liverpool and and Sao Paulo Biennales, Venice 2017, and Documenta 14, as well as collaborations such as the play Return of the Vanishing Peasant, with Ros Martin, the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), with Arjuna Neuman; and events (performances, talks, and private sessions) and texts related Poethical Readings and the Sensing Salon, with Valentina Desideri.
>> vdrome.org (interview)

Arjuna Neuman
Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. His work has been presented at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul; Sharjah Biennial, UAE; Bergen Assembly, Norway; at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; the 56th Venice Biennale and SuperCommunity; the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; at KEM, Warsaw; at Ashkal Alwan and the Beirut Art Center, Beirut; Le Gaite Lyric, Paris; the Canadian Center for Architecture; and the Rat School of Art, Seoul among others. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, and e-flux journal. He also grows tomatoes and chillies in his studio.
>> vdrome.org (interview)

Meenakshi Thirukode
Meenakshi Thirukode is a writer, researcher, educator and feminist killjoy based in Delhi. Her areas of research include the role of culture and collectivity from the POV of a queer femme subjectivity, that's located within the realm of a trans-nomadic, transient network of individuals and institutions. She runs ‘School of IO', which is a space of unlearning, dedicated to navigating ‘study', as a radical tool of political agency. Her recent projects include organizing the Here, There and Everywhere conference at MAC Birmingham, UK as part of the India-UK 70 years celebration (March 2018) and Out of Turn, Being Together Otherwise, exploring performance art histories in collaboration with Asia Art Archive (AAA) at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, India (December 15-22, 2018). Her chapter Towards a Public of the Otherwise, has been published in the Routledge Companion Series for Art in the Public Realm in 2020.
instagram.com/kanmaniponmani

Joeri Woudstra
Joeri Woudstra is a multidisciplinary visual artist and composer based in The Hague. In his work, he researches the way technological hyper acceleration and late capitalist information culture affect our perception of time and our collective feeling of generational melancholy. The ruin and relic-like collage work he creates resonates the echoes of contemporary western culture production in a future retrospect. Woudstra has realized exhibitions, screenings and performances at Somerset House, Kunstfort Vijfhuizen, Documenta 14, Kassel, DAS Bologna, Berlin Art Week, Unfair Amsterdam, Centraal Museum Utrecht, EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam, among others.
>> joeriwoudstra.nl

Robbie Barrat
Robbie Barrat is an artist and graphic designer working with artificial intelligence as a tool and a medium. He graduated high school in Shenandoah Junction, West Virginia (USA) in 2017. Since then he has worked at NVIDIA on the use of neural networks in self driving cars, at Stanford University in a research lab exploring using machine learning for drug discovery, in New York working as an artist independently, attended art school in Saint Nazaire, France. Most recently he has opened an art/design studio in Paris.
>> article on Robbie Barrat on Its' Nice That
>> instagram.com/robbie.exe

Uncertainty Seminars
Uncertainty Seminars are hybrid events at Stroom Den Haag, embracing doubt and hesitation as cultural strategy.
>> Archive Uncertainty Seminars

Graphic and spatial design:
The Rodina

Acknowledgements:
This edition of Uncertainty Seminars is made possible by Paard, BankGiro Loterij Fonds, Mondriaan Fund and City of The Hague.

PRESS
Jegens & Tevens, 22 March 2021

US: Shaping Time
photo: design: The Rodina
US: Shaping Time, live streaming (Oddkin)
photo: Naomi Moonlion, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
US: Shaping Time, live streaming (Oddkin)
photo: Naomi Moonlion, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
US: Shaping Time, live streaming
photo: Naomi Moonlion, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
US: Shaping Time, live streaming (Cosmos & Paleontology)
photo: Naomi Moonlion, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
US: Shaping Time, live streaming (Ana María Gómez López)
photo: Naomi Moonlion, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
US: Shaping Time, live streaming (Serpent Rain))
photo: Naomi Moonlion, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
US: Shaping Time, live streaming (Meenakshi Thirukode)
photo: Naomi Moonlion, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
US: Shaping Time, live streaming (Meenakshi Thirukode)
photo: Naomi Moonlion, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
US: Shaping Time, live streaming (Radiate)
photo: Naomi Moonlion, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
US: Shaping Time, live streaming (technical team)
photo: Naomi Moonlion, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
US: Shaping Time, live streaming (Radiate)
photo: Naomi Moonlion, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Window display 'US: Shaping Time', March 2021
photo: Naomi Moonlion, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Oddkin, 'Post-Mink: Farm or Non-Farm'
photo: courtesy the artists
Ana María Gómez López, screenshot from 'Cosmos & Paleontology'
photo: courtesy the artist
Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, screenshot uit 'Serpent Rain' (frozen waterfall)
photo: courtesy the artists
Meenakshi Thirukode, Instituting Otherwise
photo: courtesy the artist
Joeri Woudstra, 'Radiate', May 5th 2020 at 2.36.50 AM
photo: courtesy the artist