ONLINE Reading Session
with Tirdad Zolghadr
Fri 21 January, 7 p.m.
Register in advance here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0sfu2grj4jGtJR_jymFIkBRERVZoccOFJC
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Language: English
Join us for an online Reading of three short essays that address the topic of land grab economies – and for a group effort to imagine alternatives in conversation. For Alicja Rogalska’s ongoing exhibition From Ground to Horizon, Temporary Gallery. Centre for Contemporary Art commissioned “You’re Welcome”, a fictional piece by Tirdad Zolghadr, which dovetails with ongoing work on Headbanger, his third novel.
When invited to discuss the piece for this Reading Session, Zolghadr also proposed essays by historian Simone Hain and by the late Marion von Osten. Hain’s “To Conquer a Province Peacefully: How the Seizure of Land on the Rivers Oder, Netze, and Warthe Drove a Government to the Brink of Ruin” will be published by Hatje Cantz as part of the forthcoming reader „REALTY: Beyond the Traditional Blueprints of Art & Gentrification” (Berlin 2022). A revised version of artist and curator von Osten’s “Pigeon Towers & Donkey Paths” (Park Books, Zurich 2020) will also feature in the reader, alongside additional materials.
These three texts have emerged as part of REALTY, a long-term curatorial program by Zolghadr, which explores ways to transcend the usual extractive patterns of Fly in Fly Out – even by means of art. Instead of theorizing our failures yet again, the question is how the current traction of Contemporary Art can be used to better effect.
Participants are asked to read all texts in advance. The articles are available here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1CiXD-cPxULrQPRAgkTvZUwYSPvcj5oFj?usp=sharing
About the Reading Sessions:
“The need for discussion and its important function does not come from the desire or craving to push someone’s views on any matter (though it is true that many discussions are held for this reason), but from the limitations and imperfections of the creative and, in particular, cognitive powers of an individual.”
Roman Ingarden, A few words on a fruitful discussion, 1961
Recent studies have shown that due to our increasingly digitized lifestyle we are losing focus after about eight seconds. This is less than the average attention span for the notoriously poorly concentrated goldfish. To combat this condition, Temporary Gallery continues with its informal, self-educational initiative – the Reading Sessions. Their goal is to deepen and intensify discussion of the themes related to contemporary art and art theory as well as the program of Temporary Gallery. The Reading Sessions in 2022 accompany the solo exhibition of Alicja Rogalska at the CCA Temporary Gallery in Cologne. The next one (on 3.02 at 7 pm) moderated by Alicja Rogalska and Aneta Rostkowska will be dedicated to the politically transformative function of performing fictions and will involve following texts: David Burrows “Performance fictions” and Valeria Graziano “Towards the Theory of Prefigurative Practices”. During the Session on 10.02 as well as the subsequent ones, moderated by Aneta Rostkowska, we will discuss contemporary concepts of class and inequality.
The admission to every Reading Session is free, but we would be grateful for a donation to our institution. Even small donations count. You will find our bank details here:
https://www.temporarygallery.org/en/about/contact/
In case you need a donation certificate, please write to: bo@temporarygallery.org.
To receive information about next Session, order a newsletter of the Temporary Gallery here: https://www.temporarygallery.org/en/about/newsletter/
Image:
Alicja Rogalska: From Ground to Horizon, 2021 (installation view)
Photo: Simon Vogel, Cologne
