Fri, Oct 24, 2008
7:30 PM

New Museum theater (directions)

Night School Public Seminar 9: Sleepwalking in a dialectical picture puzzle Natascha Sadr Haghighian with Thomas Keenan and Avery Gordon

Part of Night School, Museum as Hub
 
Discussions

Day 2
40 minutes between the shelves, Part 1
A conversation with Thomas Keenan

The corridors of a nearby store serve as the matrix for a conversation and critical reflection on presenting and representing as two different approaches to the political. Referring to concepts of the performativity of language and the operative and transformative power of “speaking the object,” Thomas Keenan and Natascha Sadr Haghighian discuss political agency that overcomes the distance of representation. 
Haghighian and Keenan navigate through a selection of the store’s objects and functions, which serve as coordinates for the conversation, while a video image of the store’s interior is broadcast in the auditorium.

Day 1
40 minutes between the boards
An introduction by Natascha Sadr Haghighian

Day 3
40 minutes between the shelves, Part 2
A conversation with Avery Gordon

Night School is an artist's project by Anton Vidokle in the form of a temporary school. A yearlong program of monthly seminars and workshops, Night School draws upon a group of local and international artists, writers, and theorists to conceptualize and conduct the program. This month’s seminar is conceived by Natascha Sadr Haghighian.

*This event is free with Museum admission, but tickets are required. Tickets can be reserved online or at the Museum prior to the seminar's start.

Sponsors TOP

Night School is part of the Museum as Hub, which is made possible by the Third Millennium Foundation.

Seeds of Tolerance

With additional generous support from Metlife Foundation

Additional support is provided by the Asian Cultural Council, National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund, and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.

Profiles TOP

Natascha Sadr Haghighian

Natascha Sadr Haghighian works in the fields of video, performance, computer, and sound, and is primarily concerned with the sociopolitical implications of constructions of vision from a central perspective and with abstract events within the structure of industrial society, as well as with the strategies and returning circulations that become apparent in them.

Instead of a CV, Natascha Sadr Haghighian started bioswop.net, an Internet platform for CV-exchange where artists and other cultural practitioners can borrow and lend CVs for various purposes. The aim is to have more and more people exchanging their CVs for representational purposes.  For more information go to bioswop.net


Thomas Keenan

Thomas Keenan is Director of the Human Rights Project and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Bard College. In the field of human rights, he has worked with the Soros Documentary Fund, WITNESS, and the Journal of Human Rights. He is the author of Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (1997), and editor of New Media, Old Media (2005), and The End(s) of the Museum (1996).