Contemporary Art & the Peripheries

“Contemporary Art & the Peripheries” is a Conference in celebration of the 10th Anniversary of The New Centre for Research & Practice, to be held in Porto, Portugal, on October 4th and organized in partnership with ESAP (Escola Superior Artística do Porto).The event will feature talks and roundtables with Eduarda Neves, Joel Blanco & Miguel Leiro, Jordan Strom, Mohammad Salemy, Né Barros, Reza Negarestani, and Shaun Dacey. This informal Conference gathers art practitioners and theorists who inhabit a peripheral place within the global contemporary art world, featuring representatives from Richmond Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, Mayrit Biennial, and also from the local context of Porto. Each guest will bring together theoretical models with case studies and practical experiences. Focused on the claim that “another art world is possible” and exploring the direction of art in the 21st century, the guests depart from two provocative metaphors: Reza Negarestani’s Human Centipede and Eduarda Neves’ Minor Bestiary: Time and Labyrinth in Contemporary Art. These works offer a lens through which we can better understand contemporary art’s often exploitative dynamics and attempt to use philosophy to renew and reshape the field. In Human Centipede, Negarestani uses the grotesque image of a human chain stitched together, each body part feeding and being fed upon by the next, to depict the functioning of art discourse as it moves from one institution and curator to another. In this vision, artists, curators, critics, and collectors feed from each other, forming a parasitic relationship where creative output is consumed, processed, and regurgitated to sustain the field.

+ info : https://thenewcentre.org/public/esap/ | @esap_porto | @new_centre