Event overview
A Public programme panel discussion with Maria Veits, Anna Bitkina, Micha Frazer-Carroll, and Ofri Cnaani.
Recent global political developments—including increased digital control over bodies post-pandemic, the rollback of established reproductive rights, and the erosion of LGBTQ+ freedoms, particularly in conservative regimes—have exposed stark hierarchies between expendable and valuable bodies, especially in the context of ongoing military conflicts over territorial interests. These dynamics reactivate the debate over bodily autonomy and raise a crucial question: How can we resist political powers that attack and diminish our bodily rights?
The New Subject. Mutating Rights and Conditions of Living Bodies is an ongoing project initiated by TOK Curators to examine how contemporary bodies are governed, optimized, and politicized across different regimes of control. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concept of the “manufacture of a new subject,” the project explores how legal frameworks, health systems, and technological infrastructures shape the lived conditions of human and non-human bodies.
For the Visual Cultures’ public program, TOK proposes a panel discussion that would introduce the project and bring together some of its contributors, focusing on how artistic and curatorial practices respond to changing conditions of bodily autonomy, rights, and care. The panel will reflect on examples from the exhibitions and connect them to broader social and political contexts, while also giving space for contributors to speak from their own perspectives and practices.
Maria Veits and Anna Bitkina (TOK Curators duo, curators of The New Subject) will present The New Subject and their curatorial approach, highlighting key themes around the governance, politicization, and shaping of contemporary bodies. They will focus on select exhibitions and artists to provide a nuanced overview of the project, illustrating how artistic practice engages with hierarchies, bodily resistance, and posthuman entanglements.
Micha Frazer-Carroll (writer and journalist; contributor to The New Subject. Mutating Rights and Conditions of Living Bodies book published by Distanz Verlag, 2025 will explore how capitalism depends on the continual production of “normal” and “healthy” bodies. She will show how it operates as an economic technology that secures productivity while pathologizing difference. Drawing on Adler-Bolton and Vierkant’s Health Communism (2021), she suggests that normality is less a descriptive category than a vital infrastructure of capital itself—its necessary host organism.
Ofri Cnaani (artist; participant, The New Subject) reads Michael Taussig’s The Nervous System, asking how states transmit shock, fear, and information through social and biological bodies, and focusing on visual and sensory proximity to images of atrocity in an era when “bare life” is increasingly managed by computational protocols.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 20 Nov 2025 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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