Home Workspace Program (HWP) present Animism , Curated by Anselm Franke, at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut. The exhibition is presented as part of Chapter 3 of the HWP 2013–14, led this year by Jalal Toufic and Anton Vidokle and open to all who wish to take part.

Animism has been a multi-part exhibition project realized in various collaborations since 2010. The project interrogates notions of modernity through its ‘negative horizon,’ animism. Originally an anthropological concept denoting humanity’s alleged original beliefs in an animated nature and migrating souls, this project conceives of animism not primarily as belief, but as a category in which modernity and state-reason imagined the absence or transgression of its own conceptual boundaries, chiefly between inanimate matter and non-humans, geared to delineate the status of “person” endowed with a voice and rights. The project does not ask how some people come to perceive objects or nature as “social beings,” but inverts the question to delineate how objects are made and the status of person can be withheld or withdrawn. Animism then becomes a lens through which the making of boundaries comes into view, which situates aesthetic processes, such as the effect of animation, against a historical backdrop of modern-colonial mythologies and mobilisations of science. The project seeks to register current shifts from from a critique of alienation, reification and objectification, to a cultural production under the paradigm of subjectivation and the technological mobilization of pre-individual mimesis and relationality. The works and archival documents on display interrogate the symptomatic media-effects of modern boundaries, the nexus between active and passive, poiesis and pathos, and hence recast the ecological network-paradigm of the present in terms of boundary-practices and a critique of media-technologies.

The present edition presents works that interrogate the dialectics of particular formats and genres of the modern institutional imaginary, such as the museum and its relation to time, order and transformation (Chris Marker / Alain Resnais), ethnographic film (Rudolph Poch), the mummy-complex of cinema (Artefakte), animation and the animal-metaphor (Walt Disney, Marcel Broodthaers, Jean Painlevé), labor, media and the body (Ken Jacobs), psychiatric boundaries of subjectivity (Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato), ecstasy (Yayoi Kusama), the continuum of body and technology (Daria Martin), and exemplary “scenes” exploring mediality and the enrolment of mythology and enchantment, materiality and fetishism in the re-configuration of modern power and modern frontiers (Al Clah, Hans Richter, Len Lye, Yervant Gianikian / Angela Ricci Lucchi, Adam Avikainen, Otobong Nkanga), as well as current frontiers in indigenous struggles (Paulo Tavares).

This event is part of the third chapter for Home Workspace Program 2013-14, led by resident professors Jalal Toufic and Anton Vidokle. For more information on Chapter 3 and the year’s schedule and curriculum, please see HWP 2013-14.

HWP 2013–14: Chapter 3 Program
February 25–April 4, 2014

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2014

5pm | by registration: Orientation for participants, with Jalal Toufic and Anton Vidokle | this year’s resident professors invite participants for a meeting and an introduction to the third chapter and the program

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2014

8pm | public: “Creating and Dispersing Universes that Include Dancers” | keynote lecture 3 by Jalal Toufic

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2014

6-9pm | public: Exhibition opening

8pm | public: Modernizing Animism? Specters of Superstition, Partisanship, and Rationalist Control | presentation by Anselm Franke

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2014

5-7pm | by registration: “The Whole Earth: Antinomies of the Anthropocene” | workshop with Anselm Franke

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2014

8pm | public: 2084, Episode 3: The Noosphere by Anton Vidokle & Pelin Tan, 2013, 22? | screening followed by a conversation with Anton Vidokle & Marwa Arsanios

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2014

2-4pm & 5-7pm | by registration: Internet as Ideology | workshop with Brian Kuan Wood

TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014

6:30pm | by registration | Creating and Dispersing Universes that Include Dancers | weekly seminar by Jalal Toufic 1/5

TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

6:30pm | by registration | Creating and Dispersing Universes that Include Dancers | weekly seminar by Jalal Toufic 2/5

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 2014

4-6pm | by registration: workshop with Ana Teixeira Pinto

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 2014

8pm | public: Tilikum, 2013 | screening & conversation with Jan Peter Hammer

THURSDAY, MARCH 13, 2014

8pm | public: Animism and Cybernetics | presentation by Ana Teixeira Pinto

TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2014

6:30pm | by registration: Creating and Dispersing Universes that Include Dancers | weekly seminar by Jalal Toufic 3/5

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 2014

4-6pm | by registration: workshop with Oxana Timofeeva

THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 2014

4-6pm | by registration: workshop with Sarah Rifky

THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 2014

8pm | public: Animals and Revolution | presentation by Oxana Timofeeva

FRIDAY, MARCH 21, 2014

8pm | public: Delusions of Reference: In Defense of Art (Part 2) | presentation by Sarah Rifky

TUESDAY, MARCH 25, 2014

6:30pm | by registration | Creating and Dispersing Universes that Include Dancers | weekly seminar by Jalal Toufic 4/5

TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 2014

6:30pm | by registration | Creating and Dispersing Universes that Include Dancers | weekly seminar by Jalal Toufic 5/5

Home Workspace Program (HWP), Ashkal Alwan
Building 110, 1st Floor
Jisr al Wati, Street 90
Beirut 2066-8421
Lebanon

www.ashkalalwan.org