A little while ago, a famous art personality was due to lecture in Rotterdam and a group of us made the trip specifically to hear them. Only moments before the presentation, the speaker cancelled and left us disappointed and a little frustrated. However, in the time that followed we had an engaged discussion of our own, loosely related to the topic which was meant to be addressed in the lecture that night. The basic premise of this project therefore lies in the largely untapped wealth of insight and experience present in audiences attending art lectures across the Netherlands. Often times those listening are as informed and engaged in a certain field as those being given the microphone. In a series of ‘non-lectures’ we propose the mock staging of a lecture where we “invite” intellectuals who are perhaps dead or never likely to turn up (Edward Said, Hegel, Naomi Klein as examples), and when they never pitch, hold a round-table discussion of our own with those guests who are actually present and who could speak around the topic already laid out for the evening (themes such as: postcoloniality in European exhibition-making; art’s autonomy or lack thereof in upcoming biennales; new institutionalism). These discussions will be held in a less formal setting – a café, bar or restaurant near the supposed lecture venue in an institutional auditorium. Given five or ten minutes each member of the audience (now the discussion participants) are offered a platform to contribute their perspective on the specific theme of the evening and use this to generate further dialogue. The model will hopefully inspire cross-pollination between disciplines and provide a forum for less established creatives and thinkers to air their views while being balanced by other more experienced members of the art community. Challenging top-down modes of knowledge exchange these sessions opens up art conversations to encompass the shifts in audience-institution, curator-artist, east-west, centre-periphery and public-private binaries.
Usual Suspects logo designed by Rachel Griffin
This project is made possible with the kind sponsorship of Fonds BKVB
