26 MAY 2016 – 9.00-6.00 PM
PHD PROGRAM IN THEATRE, THE GRADUATE CENTRE, CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
Call for papers:
The work of Belgian visual artist and theatre maker Kris Verdonck is characterized by the premise that objects and subjects are no longer two distinct categories. Humans are objectified and objects are livelier than we usually suspect them to be. Performative objects and human performers entangled with objects or technological devices – all indicated with the term ‘figure’ (Eckersall, Van Kerkhoven, van Baarle) – populate Verdonck’s body of work. His installations and performances relate in an innovative way to theories of posthumanism and deal with the political, social, economic and ecological contexts of contemporary technologies while fundamentally questioning the “human” as a distinct category. Verdonck operates on the frontier between visual arts and performing arts, often with works indicated as ‘theatrical installations’, presented in both theatre and museum dispositives. A dramaturgy of objects relates the socio-political and the aesthetic issues and redefines what performs and in which kind of space and time. This international symposium invites contributions reflecting on the various aesthetic, dramaturgical, political and philosophical aspects relating to Verdonck’s oeuvre.
We invite papers and presentations on topics including but not limited to:
• How to create with technology as an active agent?
• How does Verdonck’s work think beyond the cyborg in a contemporary posthuman condition?
• How does installation as performance suspend the divide between disciplines?
• What dramaturgies of objects are at work?
• The presence and liveliness of objects is often partially generated by audience perception. What is the importance of projection and the desire to anthropomorphize as a spectatorial activity?
• What are the politics of performative technology and objectified performers within the frame of a biopolitics expanded to a psychopolitics (Stiegler, Han) in a society of control?
• What is the position of the human – on stage, vis-à-vis the technology, in the world and in the theatre – in Verdonck’s work?
• How is presence mediated by the screen, beyond the live/virtual opposition?
• How is technology used as form and what is the performativity of the presentation of technology?
• What are related themes in visual and performing arts – before, during and after Kris Verdonck?
• Notions of labour, techno-science and capitalism in the work of Kris Verdonck and/or intermedia performing arts.
• Art, performance and the non-human turn.
Please send proposals including title and an abstract of between 50-100 words to Kristof van Baarle kristof.vanbaarle@ugent.be by the 31st of March. During the first week of April participants will be notified.
We aim to select presentations at the symposium to be written up as contributions to a new publication on the work of Kris Verdonck .
Kris Verdonck will also be in conversation in a public lecture on 25 May 2016 6.00-8.00 PM at the Martin E Segal Theatre Centre http://thesegalcenter.org/event/kris-verdonck-artist-talk-listen-to-the-bloody-machine/.
ORGANISED BY PETER ECKERSALL AND KRISTOF VAN BAARLE AND HOSTED BY THE PHD PROGRAM IN THEATRE, AND THE MARTIN E SEGAL THEATRE CENTRE.
Further information please contact: peckersall@gc.cuny.edu or kristof.vanbaarle@ugent.be.
PHD PROGRAM IN THEATRE, THE GRADUATE CENTRE, CUNY,
356 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10016
Submitted by: Peter Eckersall