Event overview
A lecture by Adrian Heathfield
Looking at processes of collaborative creation in performance, in particular the works of the 40-year-old experimental theatre collective Forced Entertainment, I examine how senses of ending have shifted in this oeuvre, reflecting contemporaneous life-threats. I will trace the filaments of this company’s catastrophic imaginary - at times anguished and melancholic, joyous and ecstatic - as it runs, shudders and morphs through the body of their work. How does the attunement of a performance aesthetic – its temporal, corporeal and affective registers - relate to the political forces of the coming catastrophe?
Adrian Heathfield writes on, curates and creates performance. He is the author of Out of Now, a monograph on the artist Tehching Hsieh, editor of four books (Things That Go through Your Mind When Falling, Ally, Live: Art and Performance, Small Acts) and co-editor of the collections Perform, Repeat, Record and Shattered Anatomies. He co-curated the Live Culture events at Tate Modern, London (2003). He was curator of Doing Time, the Taiwan Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), attaché for the Biennale of Sydney (2016) and with freethought, an artistic director of the 2016 Bergen Assembly. Heathfield is Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths 23/24.
This talk is part of the Spring Term Public Programme titled, sensing ends — outliving wreckage, organised by Adrian Heathfield.
Senses of the ending are once again everywhere in contemporary life. To live now, is not just to navigate the memory and consequences of a devastating global pandemic. It is to live with the awareness of endemic wars, mass species erasure, resurgent fascism, the renewed threat of nuclear annihilation, re-intensified colonial violence, extreme climate events, and the obscenities of disaster capitalism.
How does outliving the catastrophic shape witnessing and testifying to it? Is outliving more a matter of surviving than of living well? What role does creativity play in such processes? How can art be resistant to the etiolation and despair inherent to cultures of catastrophe? What does it mean to encounter the catastrophic from already impoverished, toxic and violent conditions rather than from the position of privileged yet threatened security?
This talks series gathers artistic and theoretical voices to address various historical and recent, ‘natural’ and human generated disasters, as well as singular instances of catastrophic imaginaries. As human extinction awareness thickens and extends across the globe, the series asks in what ways we can respond to and surpass the growing material wreckage and its shadows.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Feb 2024 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
