Are You Ready? - Performance Lecture by Margareta Kern
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
Are You Ready? - Performance Lecture by Margareta Kern
Birkbeck Centre for Law & the Humanities is pleased to welcome Margareta Kern as the 2018-19 Artist in Residence at Birkbeck School of Law.
Margareta Kern’s practice deals with the politics of making visible forms of power and authority that are felt, yet not always easy to articulate or even perceive. In particular, her current work investigates the performative and mimetic strategies of digital capital, asking if an age of ‘fake news’ has destabilised conventions of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, what role is left for art? What kind of images and approaches do we need to cultivate, to counter reactionary and rightwing imaginaries generated by post-truth politics?
As an introduction to her work and ideas, Kern will present the performance-lecture ‘Are You Ready?’ on Thursday 8 November 2018, 6-8pm, at Birkbeck Cinema. First performed at Whitstable Biennale in June 2018, the lecture draws seemingly disconnected material together, from corporate literature and political speeches to undersea cables, planning applications, and sea monsters, to deliver a ‘pitch’ for a fictional libertarian tech-conglomerate building a new island-nation in a special seazone of the Channel.
The year-long residency will build on these ideas and questions, involving a number of events addressed to Birkbeck students, staff, and open to the general public. In particular, it will include a workshop based on a close reading of an Interim Report: Disinformation and ‘fake news’, recently published by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee. A result of an extensive inquiry, the report contains disturbing evidence of the use of psychological warfare online, to manipulate voter behaviour by companies such as SCL Group/Cambridge Analytica (most notably involved in both Trump’s election in the US, and the Leave campaign in Britain but have conducted behavioural change programs for the governments and military organisations worldwide). Kern’s residency will critically and collaboratively explore the legal and performative potentialities of an inquiry, informing the development of new work.
Performance-lecture on the 8th November 2018 will be followed by a conversation between Margareta Kern, Başak Ertür, and Bernard Keenan and general discussion.
Kindly supported by the School of Law, Birkbeck and the Arts Council England Project Grant.
About The Participants
Margareta Kern is a visual artist and researcher based in Cornwall and London, originally from Bosnia-Herzegovina. She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and Visual Anthropology at UCL. Kern’s multi-disciplinary practice includes film, photography, performance, drawing and installation. Her works have been exhibited and screened extensively including at Tate Modern, The Photographers Gallery, Impressions Gallery, Rivington Place and many others.
Başak Ertür is a Lecturer in Law and co-director of the Centre for Law and the Humanities at Birkbeck. She is the editor of Manual for Conspiracy(2011) and co-editor of Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said (2008), as well as Something Is Rotten in the State (2017), a special issue of Theory & Event.
Bernard Keenan is a Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck. Prior to his academic career, he worked in radio at the BBC in Belfast. He trained as a solicitor with Wilson Solicitors LLP in London, specialising in immigration and asylum, crime, and public law. Bernard has appeared on television and radio commenting on issues in UK national security law, secrecy, and immigration.
This event is free however booking is required via this page.
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