CVC Lecture | Working with Resistance Towards a Non-Dual ‘Poetry’ – and Politics – ‘of Truth’

Join us this Thursday, Feb. 8 at 3:30 PM in Memorial Library 126 for this Center for Visual Cultures event in the series on Labor and Resistance, a public lecture by Dr. Jorella Andrews, Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Professor Andrews draws on her work in phenomenology and her art practice to ask: what happens to “work”, “resistance”, and “truth” when non-dual, transcontextual models are foregrounded, with their attendant ambiguities, their detours/detournements, and their hospitality to what the French realist author Stendahl called “true little incidents?” Particularly within contexts of public space and public discourse? Dr Andrews will consider these questions by foregrounding expressions of “paraconsistent logics” and pictorial rationalities discoverable in the work of phenomenological, (new) materialist, and indigenous thinkers. Specifically, she will foreground insights from the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s short essay “On New Items” from 1954, in which [competing] aesthetic/anaesthetic approaches to the stewardship of public space are identified and untangled. She will also reflect on a personal, informal example of object-making involving the delicate intra-actions of clay, a support, air, and sandpaper – my Holdings (2020-23) which offer a material meditation on the politics of open-handedness. They were exhibited in a group show about touch, Behold, at Hypha Studios, London, 2023.