Christopher Kulendran Thomas: Ecology, Democracy & Art After Spectatorship

Monday, May 6, 7:00pm

10 Shekel, Free for Friends of the CCA
The talk will be held in English

Beginning with a discussion of his current exhibition at CCA, Christopher Kulendran Thomas will extrapolate from his work an ecological conception of art beyond spectatorship. Derived from theatre through broadcast media, our received ideas about spectatorship in the gallery may not necessarily be appropriate for the big media of our day. Today our most ubiquitous social networking technologies take us not simply as their spectators but also as their very materials for all sorts of algorithmically-processed purposes we see little of. As art’s existing institutional forms, such as the gallery, are reconfigured within the broader ecologies of a globalising art system, how might we understand the reality of art’s networked interdependencies and consequences? And what possibilities might emerge from networks, as sites of intersection between human and non-human materiality, for art instituting its reality rather than representing it.

Opening remarks by Alan Gemmell, Director of British Council Israel at 7:00pm