Acts of Self Ruin Study Session

Wednesday 27 September 6-7.30pm

Acts of Self Ruin Study Session with Shahram Khosravi

Marabouparken konsthall

The study session is free but with limited spaces so please book a place by emailing osa@marabouparken.se

A discussion focused on Shahram Khosravi’s research into processes of Inaudiblizing and Unvisibizing.

Inaudiblizing – The Eurocentric knowledge production is rooted in colonial history. Based on a North-South division, theory and concepts are produced in the North and the South is reduced only to empirical data. The non-European is the one to be diagnosed by Europeans. In public debates there is an inclusive exclusion that includes the other as a unvoiced object to be debated, but at the same time excluded as a subject who can think and theorize.

Unvisiblizing – Somewhere in Plato’s Euthyphro we read Socrates saying: ‘A thing is not seen because it is visible but on the contrary it is visible because it is seen’. The other is actively unseen. Rather than being invisible, the other is unvisible: exposed to a conscious act of unseeing, excluding, and left out. The other is not unseen because he is invisible, conversely he is invisible because he is unseen; in other word unvisiblized.

Following the study session there will be opening of Robel Temesgen’s exhibition, There’s No Politics in Painting? 

Shahram Khosravi is Associate Professor at Stockholm University and Researcher at Uppsala University. He has written the books, Young and Defiant in Tehran, University of Pennsylvania Press (2008) and The Illegal Traveler: an auto-ethnography of borders, Palgrave (2010). He has been an active writer in the Swedish press and also written fictions; ‘Round Trip to Ithaca’ in Exiled Ink! Magazine (2011) and ‘The Persian Escort’ in Collective Exile (2013).

Acts of Self Ruin Study Session is part of a two year research programme at Marabouparken, exploring the struggle for collectivity and equality in an age of individualism. Through a range of activities including exhibitions, residencies and a public programme, we will explore acts in which communities and individuals have put themselves at personal risk, or social ruin in the pursuit of other ways of living, and in pursuit of equality and solidarity.