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08.-10.11.2019
Exhibition
Black Quantum Futurism
All Time Local & Black Space Agency

K4 Gallery, Københavngata 4, Oslo
06.11.2019
Public Lecture
Helge Jordheim


Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Fossveien 24, Oslo

In societies homogenous, uniform, and stable time does not just exist or emerge; it is made, by means of what Helge Jordheim refers to as work or practices of synchronization. Some work of synchronization is performed by technological innovations such as clocks, trains, telegraph lines, phones, satellites etc. Another set of tools, however, is linguistic, made up by concepts used to make historical and political time understandable and workable. Concepts are used to order events, objects and polities temporally, thus making both them and their temporality aspects of political order. By drawing together experiences, events, and meanings from different knowledge fields or cultures, they synchronize them, aligning their speeds, rhythms, and durations. One of the most central concepts that have been used in synchronization global societies over the past two centuries is progress. In his talk Jordheim maps out how progress has synchronized temporalities on a global scale and asks whether it is in the process of being replaced by another concept: the concept of crisis.

Helge Jordheim is Professor of Cultural History at University of Oslo. He has had visiting professorships at NYU, EHESS (Paris), and ZfL (Berlin), and he is currently Professor II for German Studies at NTNU (Trondheim). He has published widely on 18th century cultural and intellectual history, as well as German literature and conceptual history. He is currently heading the Toppforsk-project "Lifetimes: A Natural History of the Present" at UiO.
09.11.2019
Screening
Black Quantum Futurism: All Time Local
14:00

THE READERS
15:00


DISMANTLING THE MASTER'S CLOCK [WORK] UNIVERSE Rasheedah Phillips (2018)

Re-Reading of Towards a conversation on Digital Resistance with collective dinner

Room for Collective Encounters, Kunstnernes Hus, Wegelandsveien 17

Towards a conversation on Digital Resistance
Ada A. (2018)

This text written in 2018 by Ada A. and published on the blog of Black Quantum Futurism poses a series of questions in order to engage with a working discourse on digital defense. Who are “we”, given that digital identities are more than ever in continual flux, negotiation and re-definition? What is the digital world and what is its history? We will read this text and use it as a starting point for diving into the notion of digital defense.

DISMANTLING THE MASTER'S CLOCK[WORK] UNIVERSE
Rasheedah Phillips (2018)

Where is the master clock? Who watches it and who keeps time? If the master clock stops, does time stop? Clocks chart hours minutes seconds, calendars, suns, planets and stars. More subtle are the ways in which time governs our social interactions, regulates are movements, frames our world views, informs our politics and leaks into our consciousness.
09.-17.11.2019
11:00-18:00


Room for Collective Encounters, Kunstnernes Hus, Wegelandsveien 17

The Library acts as a living bibliography, housing printed work from thinkers, activists, anthropologists, poets, and authors that work with notions of time, politics, speculative histories and or chronologies that operate outside of linear structures and systems. All book titles and reading material will be available through the STRUKTURA website.
10.11.2019
THE READERS
14:00


Room for Collective Encounters, Kunstnernes Hus, Wegelandsveien 17

Selection of texts from - Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance
Ellen Gruber Garvey

Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks—the ancestors of Google and blogging. From Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, African American janitors to farm women, abolitionists to Confederates, people cut out and pasted down their reading. This book opens a new window into the feelings and thoughts of ordinary and extraordinary Americans. Like us, nineteenth-century readers spoke back to the media, and treasured what mattered to them. The book reveals a previously unexplored layer of American popular culture, where the proliferating cheap press touched the lives of activists and mourning parents, and all who yearned for a place in history. Scrapbook makers documented their feelings about momentous public events such as living through the Civil War, mediated through the newspapers. African Americans and women's rights activists collected, concentrated, and critiqued accounts from a press that they did not control to create “unwritten histories” in books they wrote with scissors. Whether scrapbook makers pasted their clippings into blank books, sermon collections, or the pre-gummed scrapbook that Mark Twain invented, they claimed ownership of their reading. They created their own democratic archives. The book argues that people have long had a strong personal relationship to media. Like newspaper editors who enthusiastically “scissorized” and reprinted attractive items from other newspapers, scrapbook makers passed their reading along to family and community. This book explains how their scrapbooks underlie our present-day ways of thinking about information, news, and what we do with it.
11.11.2019
THE READERS
15:00


Room for Collective Encounters, Kunstnernes Hus, Wegelandsveien 17

Chapter 8: Pharmacopower - Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
Paul B.Preciado (2013)

Testo Junkie is a testosterone fueled “body essay,” a work of “auto-theory” that lays out contemporary understandings of biopolitics through a narrative lens of the author himself. Chapter 8 explores how systemic techno-pharma violence orders bodies through western technological power and a linear temporal regime. Power no longer operates as an external political architecture. Instead, pharmacopower moves through “a desire for infiltration, absorption, total occupation”.
12.11.2019
THE READERS
15:00


Live Reading
19:00
Tor-Finn Malum Fitje & Thomas Anthony Hill
Hyphenic

Room for Collective Encounters, Kunstnernes Hus, Wegelandsveien 17

Octavia's Brood:Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements
Edited by Adrienne Aaree Brown and Walidah Imarisha

Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time.The visionary tales of Octavia’s Brood span genres—sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism—but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be.

Hyphenic is the name of a language that appears as patterns in common household mould, a discovery that was initially made in the early 1970s. How did these hyphea signs first evolve? Is it conceivable that such a primordial organism could have developed its own syntax, and if so, how would that reshape our ideas about the origins of language? The film is the result of an artistic research project at the intersection between linguistics and biology. Through collaborations with a large number of participants: from readers and actors to witness accounts and conspiracy theorists, the movie explores the obscure history of a language that has deliberately been withheld from the public eye. Hyphenic draws its speculative narrative from the field of biosemiotics, where the exchange of signs is understood as an inherent attribute of all living organisms.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/295806372
Full film: https://vimeo.com/295410433
Password: Hyphea
Performance Moderna Museet: https://vimeo.com/316981996
Performance Hildelund: https://vimeo.com/349546726
13.11.2019
THE READERS 16:00
with Karin Keisu & Josse Thuresson


Room for Collective Encounters, Kunstnernes Hus, Wegelandsveien 17

Queer times and Queer becomings
E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (2011)
Queer Times, Queer Becomings explores queer articulations of time and becoming in literature, philosophy, film, and performance. Whether in the contexts of psychoanalysis, the nineteenth-century discourses of evolution and racial sciences, or the daily rhythms of contemporary, familially oriented communities, queerness has always been marked by a peculiar untimeliness, by a lack of proper orientation in terms of time as much as social norms. Yet it is the skewed relation to the temporal norm that also gives queerness its singular hope. This is demonstrated by the essays collected here as they consider the ways in which queer theory has acknowledged, resisted, appropriated, or refused divergent models of temporality.
14.11.2019
Performative Reading
19:00

Karin Keisu & Josse Thuresson

Room for Collective Encounters, Kunstnernes Hus, Wegelandsveien 17

Roundtable discussion by Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher S. Nealon and Tan Hoang Nguyen (2007)
15.11.2019
THE READERS
15:00


Room for Collective Encounters, Kunstnernes Hus, Wegelandsveien 17

In the novels of Octavia E. Butler, we find a distinctive engagement with time that sometimes works to disrupt received temporal regimes; probes how we experience, interpret, and shape time; allows new understanding of time and power. In Butler’s Kindred we see her use of time travel in order to explore slave narratives that have been muffled throughout previous recorded history in order to question the notion of chronological time. What is learned when questions of temporality, of relations with the past, and of forms of anticipating the future are pressed in analysis of narrative fiction?
16.11.2019
Performance
20:00

Nikhil Vettukattil in collaboration with John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdal

Room for Collective Encounters, Kunstnernes Hus, Wegelandsveien 17

Nikhil Vettukattil will present a new live performance work and listening session using sound, spoken word and the physical environment as a medium to experience the multiplicity and co-incidence of times. Using chopped and screwed re-mixing techniques, as well as the sonic appropriations of field recordings, music, and texts on the experience and nature of time. The work develops on and references forms of experiential immersion as means of forming counter-publics, such as expanded cinema, noise and psychadelia.
17.11.2019
THE READERS
12:00


Room for Collective Encounters, Kunstnernes Hus, Wegelandsveien 17

What is autonomy, feminism, ecology, cooperative economics, and ethnic, linguistic, and religious pluralism. It’s Rojava.Peace is now at war with terror. Let us understand the beauty of this community and protect it and it’s ideals.

Selection of texts from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements - Edited by Adrienne Aaree Brown and Walidah Imarisha

Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time.The visionary tales of Octavia’s Brood span genres—sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism—but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be.
29.11.-01.12.2019
Exhibition
Tabita Razaire


K4 Gallery, Københavngata 4, Oslo

Premium Connect envisions a study of information and communication technologies exploring African divination systems, the fungi underworld, ancestors communication and quantum physics to (re)think our information conduits. Overcoming the organism-spirit-device divide, this work explores spiritual connections as communication networks and the possibilities of decolonial technologies. Premium Connect investigates the cybernetic spaces where the organic, technological and spiritual worlds connect.

How can we use biological or metaphysical systems to fuel technological process of information, control and governance? Contrary to the Eurocentric-biased thinking, our information super highway might find its roots in African spirituality. Significant research attributes the birth of binary mathematics - which is the foundation principle of computing sciences - to African divination systems such as Ifa from the Yoruba people of West Africa. We have much to recover in terms of connectivity and its potentialities. As modern science just recently discovered the role of underground fungi networks used by plants to communicate and transfer information, ancient tradition have long known how to communicate with nature and download its knowledge. This study of dynamic networks from artificial, spiritual and biological environments digs into the politics of possibilities, where a techno-consciousness could nurture a mind-body-spirit-technology symbiosis.
13.-15.12.2019
Exhibition
Yin-Ju Chen


K4 Gallery, Københavngata 4, Oslo

Man models the Way of earth; earth models the Way of heaven; heaven models the Way of Tao; Tao models the Way of nature.
- Tao Te Ching

Extrastellar Evaluations III : Entropy : 2580 contemplates human civilization and humanity’s future through an investigation of space physics, extraterrestrial myths, and cosmography. By using hypotheses and prophecies founded upon a choreography of fragments of history, as well as mass media imagery and information, eponymous video Extrastellar Evaluations III : Entropy : 25800 attempts to reveal when exactly doomsday takes place. This video further adapts the notion of "entropy" from the second law of thermodynamics, and connects it to the avarice and belligerence of human nature. Interspersed in the video are the narrations of a non-human intelligence named “Ra” concerning that everything is the distortion of the one infinite Creator. In Extrastellar Evaluations III : Entropy : 2580 Yin-Yu Chen seeks to narrate – or, perhaps, excavate the narrations of – the universe so that viewers understand the geological, computational and technological realities synonymously.

Artist Yin-Ju Chen interprets social power and history through cosmological systems. Utilizing astrology, sacred geometries, and alchemical symbols, she considers human behavior, nationalism, imperialism, state violence, totalitarianism, utopian formations, and collective thinking. Recently, she has been exploring the material effects of spiritual/ shamanic practices and the metaphysical potentialities of consciousness. She has participated in many international exhibitions and film festivals, such as the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (RU, 2019), International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL, 2018, 2011), Transmediale (DE, 2018), Liverpool Biennial (UK, 2016), Forum Expanded at 66th Berlinale (DE, 2016), Biennial of Sydney (AU, 2016), "Yin-Ju Chen: Extrastellar Evaluations" (US, 2016), "Action at a Distance–Yin-Ju Chen Solo Exhibition" (TW, 2015), "The Starry Heaven Above and the Moral Law Within" (TW, 2015), Shanghai Biennial (CN, 2014), "A Journal of the Plague Year" (HK, KR, US, TW 2013-2014), Taipei Biennial (TW, 2012).
01.2020
Exhibition
Bahar Noorizadeh

Podium, Hausmanns gate 34
01.2020
Exhibition
fantastic little splash


K4 Gallery, Københavngata, 4

New Information is a series of three videos that began as a search for an alternative informational format due to a general loss of confidence in traditional formats. The hybrid news that has been generated in the process of this search tells about the main news of the present: the processes of internal emigration and ideological weightlessness; practice breaking algorithm and automating human processes; relay the manifesto of the hesitant.
02.2020
Exhibition
Bassem Saad & Edwin Nasr


Podium, Hausmanns gate 34

This Ritual I Wish You Could See (Render & File) deals with rituals of war in the rendered image. In particular, it focuses on Hezbollah’s—and more broadly, political Shiism’s—uses of virtual reality and video games as ostensibly counter-hegemonic to the domination of the American and Israeli war machines and military-entertainment complexes. Namely, these consist of VR Karbala, a virtual-reality recreation of the formative Battle of Karbala, commemorated yearly on the tenth day of Ashura, and Sacred Defence – Protecting the Homeland And Holy Sites, a 2018 Hezbollah-issued first-person shooter about the Party’s role in the Syria War. The project also surveys the US Army’s investment in commercial video games, through its America’s Army franchise, its Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) equivalent, and a virtual reality based exposure therapy tool aimed at treating post traumatic stress disorder among Iraq war veterans, VR Iraq.

This Ritual I Wish You Could See (Render & file) traces motifs such as the obscured faces of holy figures in traditional and contemporary religious pictorial representations, the textured and rendered masculinity of the soldier figure in a computer-generated war environment, and simulations of sites and territories that are central to the production of ethno-identitarian narratives and collective subjectivities. The overarching emphasis is on the implicit hegemonic constructions, temporal technics of trauma and martyrdom, and (counter-)narrations of history, carried out by way of the rendered image.

Edwin Nasr (b.1994) is a writer based in Beirut. His research focuses on cinematic modes of production in the Arab region, decolonial methodologies and praxis, the digital reproducibility of trauma, and parafiction as a form of queer opacity. His writings were featured in Jadaliyya, Makhzin, Muftah Magazine, ArteEast, and Counterpunch, and commissioned by the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Sharjah Art Foundation, and Mophradat. He has given talks at Harvard University VES, the American University of Beirut (AUB), and as part of Asia Contemporary Art Week: Field Meeting 6. Nasr is currently the Assistant to the Director at Ashkal Alwan, a non-profit organization dedicated to contemporary artistic production as well as critical discourses and knowledges.

Bassem Saad is an artist/writer born on September 11th and trained in architecture. His practice deals with future visualization and simulation, and objects or operations that distribute harm and care. He attempts to locate space and time for toying with and maneuvering within governing systems, through video, spatial installation, virtual environments, and text. His work was featured in the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennial and his video work screened in different cities. He has spoken at Harvard University VES and Alserkal Avenue, and his writing appears in FailedArchitecture, Jadaliyya, ArteEast, and unbag. He has completed a web residency with Akademie Schloss and a fellowship at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program in Beirut.
01.2020
Exhibition
Kim Laybourn


Podium, Hausmanns gate 34

Do you see the stone grow? Unveils concentrated being, the essence of materialized presence, roaming freely, like fluid rock, assimilated unbounded ambiguity. Smooth, super fluid. Spills and bleed spells. Its grown big. Its unfolding and enveloping vastness. Amorphous solid, fluid rock, never-ending-ever-changing, on a time scale, beyond comprehension, lacking definite form, formless, and unorganized body, fluid stratification. Moving. Hillsides, sequences, distribution. Secretive forms appears, then materialize, then appears, then materialize, as if it was always there. Materialize as mountain tops, materialize as shimmers in the mottled light, as particles, diffusion, visualization by seeing, establishes across distances, interlaced inter-being. Rock and solid earth. Transformative. Molten rock defined by memory. Super fluid.

Spills and Bleeds Spells portrays a phenomenological landscape, a landscape in dissolve, which cannot be defined as a place "out there", but which is everywhere in and out, in our surroundings and in our bodies. Being of the moment and in process, where the time duration is measured in terms of human embodied experience of place, movement, and memory, landscape is temporal. A landscape that moves evolves transforms at an geological rate incomprehensible for the human perception. A merging or dissolving of time.

Kim Laybourn is a Danish artist, educated form the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, where he received his Bachelor and Master's degrees, the latter completed in the spring of 2019. Laybourn work in a range of media, spanning installation, sound, text, sculpture, photography, print, animation, CGI and video. Through his practice, he conducts material-based research, with inspiration found in an intuitive approach to cinema, literature, scientific- and critical theory. All of which undergoes a process of deconstruction and transformation, to eventually be composed in eclectic video, sculpture and installation works.
19.02.2020
Public Lecture
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay


Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Fossveien 24

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay will talk about the "Ant Network Theory” that he has developed together with Geoffrey C. Bowker. Chattopadhyay will discuss how a flexible notion of multiple temporalities can be developed by playing with scales. The long history of science fictional engagement with other planetary creatures, especially insects and non-human beings can serve as a useful entry point into contemporary discussions that challenge us to think past the anthropocentrism of the anthropocene, including the discourses of guardianship and environmental care, to a de-centered and dehumanized future oriented ethics of hybridity.

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay works on Science Fiction at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. He is also Imaginary College fellow at the Centre for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. He is founding co-editor of the book series Studies in Global Genre Fiction (Routledge) and co-editor-in-chief of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. He is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council funded project CoFutures: Pathways to Possible Presents, due to start in Spring 2020.

http://bodhisattvac.com
21.-23.02.2020
Exhibition
Natasha Tontey


K4 Gallery, Københavngata, 4

Pest to Power is a science-quasi-fictional quest into a peculiar behaviour of cockroach that is constituted as an assemblage of nocturnal, habitable, homeopathic, and resourceful material. Being marginalised for thousand years as a creature carrying diseases and treated as a fearsome species by the human counterpart, the judgment toward cockroach is built by the hyper-sterilised biopolitical idea of ‘proper lifestyle’ in which overproduction of synthetic commodity and human dis-attachment to waste generates cockroach as a peripheral creature outside human’s sphere. World-building is one of the essential aspects of Pest to Power. Pest to Power's digital world, as seen on the video, consists of three main queered characters; A commune of cockroaches, Humans-without-Genitals, and Humans-leopard. These three characters each represent different features; the collective consciousness of the nonhuman agency in cockroaches, the compassionate and proponent of kinship in Human-without-Genitals, and the hubristic trait of anthropocentrism in Human-leopard.

Natasha Tontey is an artist and graphic designer based in Yogyakarta and Jakarta, Indonesia. She is interested in exploring the concept of fiction as a method of speculative thinking. Through her artistic practice, she investigates the idea of how fear, horror, and terror could be manifested in order to control the public. Her works have been shown internationally in Other Futures (2019), Next Wave Festival (2016), Australia, Koganecho Bazaar (2015), Japan, JejakTabi Exchange (2018), Indonesian Dance Festival 2018 and Instrument Builder Project: Circulating Echo at Kyoto Art Centre (2018). Her solo exhibition Almanak was held in 2018 at Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, Indonesia.
09.03.2020
Armen Avanessian


Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Fossveien 24

Christopher Roth’s and Armen Avanessian’s film Hyperstition explores accelerationist theory and politics, navigating pathways to critical theories of the future. The voices of artists, theorists, philosophers, and curators guide us through the narratives and temporalities that both condition and resist the accelerating paces of global capitalism. Hyperstition is s film on time and narrative. Of thoughts and images. On plants and the outside. Abduction and Recursion. Yoctoseconds and Platonia. Plots and anaerobic organisms. About the movement of thinking and philosophy in anthropology, art, design, economy, linguistics, mathematics, and politics. And back into abstraction. "You're always at the beginning and always at the end." (Ray Brassier) HYPERSTITION: The retooling of philosophy and political theory for the 21st Century.

Featuring: Armen Avanessian, Elie Ayache, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Helen Hester, Deneb Kozikoski, Robin Mackay, Steven Shaviro, Benedict Singleton, Nick Srnicek, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Agatha Wara, Pete Wolfendale, and Suhail Malik in 2026. Appearances: Georg Diez, Anke Hennig, Tom Lamberty, Nick Land, Quentin Meillassoux, Reza Negarestani, Björn Quiring, Patricia Reed, Tom Streidl, James Trafford, Jeanne Tremsal, Alex Williams, and Slavoj Žižek. http://hyperstition.org/

Armen Avanessian studied philosophy and political science in Vienna and Paris. After completing his dissertation in literature, he worked at the Free University Berlin from 2007–2014. He has previously been a Visiting Fellow in the German Department at Columbia University and the German Department at Yale University as well as Visiting Professor at various art academies in Europe and the US. In Berlin, Avanessian is the editor at large at Merve Verlag and in charge of the theory program at the internationally acclaimed theatre Volksbühne. He is a co-founder of the bilingual research platform Spekulative Poetik (www.spekulative-poetik.de), conducting a series of events, translations and publications. English Monographies: Irony and the Logic of Modernity. DeGruyter, 2015; Speculative Drawing. (together with Andreas Töpfer) Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014; Present Tense. A Poetics. (together with Anke Hennig), Bloomsbury 2015; Metanoia. A Speculative Ontology of Language, Thinking, and the Brain. (together with Anke Hennig) Bloomsbury 2017); Overwrite. Ethics of Knowledge – Poetics of Existence. Berlin: Sternberg Press 2017; Miamification, Sternberg Press 2017; Future Metaphysics, Polity, 2019.