Final event Anna Ådahl – Default Characters

Please join us for a final event to round off of Anna Ådahl’s exhibition ‘Default Characters’, Saturday 25 August 2018, 3–5pm (the exhibition ends 26 August)!

Free admission!

Political issues: What type of power arises when people synchronise their actions? To what end can this power be used?
Aesthetic issues: How can social and political processes such as these be formed, framed, explored and mediated? Perhaps they can even be activated?

Stefan Jonsson – On Anna Ådahl’s Masses

Stefan Jonsson, professor in migration at Linköpings universitet and Esther Leslie, professor in political aesthetics at Birkbeck University in London will present two brief lectures, followed by a conversation with Anna Ådahl in connection to the exhibition and their respective ongoing research with focus on crowds and new technologies.

Anna Ådahl is an artist and researcher working in various mediums such as film, installation and performance. She uses the tools of assemblage and montage where found footage meets newly shot images and where ready-mades are used as props in spatial narratives. Her ongoing Fine Art practice-based PhD at the Royal College of Art in London, UK, addresses the aesthetics and politics of digitised simulated crowds, while using the body as tool and reference. She focuses on the identity and human representation in crowds generated and supervised by new computational technologies.

Stefan Jonsson is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society, REMESO, at Linköping University and a writer and cultural critic at the daily Dagens Nyheter. He has written about modernity and modernism, racism and the colonial world order and European ideas and fantasies about people, masses and democracy from the French Revolution until today: A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions (2008) and Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism (2013) both published by Columbia University Press. He is currently completing a book on the aesthetic dimensions of collective protests.

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthectics at Birkbeck University, London. She has research interests in Marxist theories of aesthetics and culture, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Other research interests include the poetics of science, European literary and visual modernism and avant gardes, animation, colour and madness. She is the author of many books, articles and pamphlets. Recent titles include: Walter Benjamin, On Photography (2015), Reaktion, London and Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (2014), Unkant, London. Her next book is on the poetics and politics of liquid crystals. Leslie is actively involved in editing the journals Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, Radical Philosophy and Revolutionary History.