Various techniques of sharing knowledge

Last week, as a part of the text Storytelling, I’ve posted an image of the piece Untitled (Ass) (2007) by Larry Jonhson. During a Skype meeting with the curators Julia Grosse and Yvette Mutamba in the class of Alya Sebti, I remembered how theorist Lee Edelman interpreted this image in the book Sex, or The Unbearable (2014).

“…But the comedy, however dark, implicit in normativity’s violence lies, as Johnson’s image shows, in the reduplication of negativity by the violence meant to erase it. The result…is that perverse enjoyment (the penetration or stimulation of the ass) and the reaction against it (the effort to erase the asshole as the site of enjoyment) can look exactly the same.” (p. 32)

Grosse and Mutamba in conversation with Alya Sebti and her class mentioned their attempt to re-narrate art history from an African approach/perspective. Their aim is to facilitate excess to information through time and create a new way of reaching to art history by using new terminologies rather than being trapped in the categorizations of the white art historians. As Sebti later described, their tactic is never to reject the existence of such a canon, rather using, say, maybe the same words by taking a critical distance and re-evaluating it. Reminiscent of the duality of the eraser in Johnson’s work, it is is a calm yet vigorous transgression within the existing norms. Another method to unlearn and delink…

Last Friday we visited the open studios of Alya Sebti’s and Ben Katchor’s classes. Although the disciplines were different from each other, performativity was in the core. Students of the curating class Curating/Translating the Polyphony of Voices created stations that I’d like to call ‘thought installations’, which you could talk to them about what they have discussed throughout the week. In a way, the act of sharing ideas transformed into a performance. The students of the class Comics in Performance performed their stories via using the techniques such as shadow theater.