If capitalism has produced two forms of property, one owned by the state (space of public authority) and the other owned by private citizens (private property), then public space is always an appropriation of one of these. Insofar as public space is political, that appropriation involves the construction of a physical space in which the paradoxical reality of capitalist society is rendered sensible.
—Adrian Blackwell, 2014
Adrian Blackwell’s Furnishing Positions explores the paradoxical relationship between publics and space through three different structures: a sculpture consisting of thirty pieces of furniture, reconfigured over twelve weeks to test the social effect of different spatial forms; a broadsheet series that interrogates six paradoxes of public space through artwork and texts by twelve contributors from diverse disciplines; and now, a set of conversations that test these ideas with an assembled public in the sculpture.
Furnishing Positions: Conversations brings together the contributors to the broadsheet series in order to test the ideas developed within its artworks and texts in dialogue with other contributors and an assembled public. The event is structured through two conversations. The first will function as a sequence of short monologues, in which each of the broadsheet contributors will present their ideas in turn. The second conversation will involve contributors and the assembled public and will be an opportunity to connect and relate these discreet provocations. Between the two conversations, there will be a break, during which time the assembled public will reconfigure the sculpture for the second half of the event.
This event is part of the exhibition FALSEWORK, curated by Christine Shaw and on view until December 7th, 2014.
Nov 22, 2014 – Nov 22, 2014
Past
Furnishing Positions: Conversations
Eric Cazdyn, Greig de Peuter, Karen Houle, Mary Lou Lobsinger, Dylan A.T. Miner, Paige Sarlin, Scott Sørli, Kika Thorne, cheyanne turions
Moderated by Adrian Blackwell
This hybrid event is part colloquium, part workshop, and part experiment.
It is a support structure for the exchange of ideas.
Moderated by Adrian Blackwell
This hybrid event is part colloquium, part workshop, and part experiment.
It is a support structure for the exchange of ideas.
Event Documentation
◌
- Broadsheets
Related Program
FALSEWORKEvent Documentation
- Participants
- Eric Cazdyn
- Greig de Peuter
- Karen Houle
- Mary Lou Lobsinger
- Dylan A.T. Miner
- Paige Sarlin
- Scott Sørli
- Kika Thorne
- cheyanne turions
Eric Cazdyn is Distinguished Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Toronto (Centre for Comparative Literature and the Department of East Asian Studies), where he teaches courses on critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, Marx and Marxism, Deleuze, film and video, architecture, modern literature, and modern Japan. He is the author of the following books: The Already Dead (Duke, 2012), After Globalization (with Imre Szeman, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Duke, 2002); and editor of Trespasses: Selected Writings of Masao Miyoshi (Duke, 2010) and Disastrous Consequences (South Atlantic Quarterly special issue, 2007). His most recent book, Nothing: Three Inquiries into Buddhism and Critical Theory (with Marcus Boon and Timothy Morton), will be published in 2015 by The University of Chicago Press. Cazdyn is also a filmmaker, and his films have been screened and performed in Japan, Canada, the U.S., Europe, and, most recently, in the U.K., as part of a two-week residency at The Cube Microcinema (Bristol) with Eric Chenaux.
Greig de Peuter collaborates on Cultural Workers Organize, an international research project exploring collective responses to precarity in the cultural and creative industries. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. He is a co-founder of Letters & Handshakes.
Greig de Peuter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He researches the contested political economy of media and cultural production, with an emphasis on work, labour, and employment. He is currently collaborating with Enda Brophy and Nicole Cohen on a multi-country study of precarious labour politics in creative industries. His most recent book, co-authored with Nick Dyer-Witheford, is Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His writing has appeared in The Fibreculture Journal, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Cultural Economy, and several anthologies. His article with Cohen and Brophy, “Interns, Unite! (You Have Nothing to Lose—Literally),” received the 2013 Canadian Association of Journalists/Communication Workers of America—Canada Award for Labour Reporting. He has been active in collectively run autonomous education and curatorial projects, including the Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (2005-2010), and Letters & Handshakes (from 2014).
Greig de Peuter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He researches the contested political economy of media and cultural production, with an emphasis on work, labour, and employment. He is currently collaborating with Enda Brophy and Nicole Cohen on a multi-country study of precarious labour politics in creative industries. His most recent book, co-authored with Nick Dyer-Witheford, is Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His writing has appeared in The Fibreculture Journal, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Cultural Economy, and several anthologies. His article with Cohen and Brophy, “Interns, Unite! (You Have Nothing to Lose—Literally),” received the 2013 Canadian Association of Journalists/Communication Workers of America—Canada Award for Labour Reporting. He has been active in collectively run autonomous education and curatorial projects, including the Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (2005-2010), and Letters & Handshakes (from 2014).
Karen Houle is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, and adjunct graduate faculty in the School of Fine Art and Music. Her areas of specialization are political theory, ethics, environmental philosophy, and feminist thought. She co-edited (with Jim Vernon) Hegel and Deleuze: Together Again for the First Time (Northwestern, 2013). Her monograph, Responsibility, Complexity and Abortion: Toward a New Image of Ethical Thought (Lexington Books, 2013) came out at the end of last year. She is the translator of a book on improvisation (forthcoming, PS Guelph, September 2014) called Lê Quan Ninh: Abécédaire d'une expérience. She has published numerous academic and non-academic articles on topics ranging from animal tracking to Foucault, from watershed ecology to Derrida, from canoe flotillas to Irigaray, from rape to Steve Reich. She is also the author of two books of poetry: Ballast (House of Anansi, 2001) and During (Gaspereau, 2008). In the Fall 2014, she will be the inaugural Eastern Comma Writer-in-Residence at North House, rare.
Mary Lou Lobsinger’s writing and research focus on the history and theory of contemporary architecture and urbanism. Lobsinger’s publications can be found in Grey Room, Werk, Daidalos, Journal of Architectural Education, Thresholds, Architecture+Ideas, Scapegoat, Transmissions, and in various anthologies such as A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture and the “Technosocial” Moment, Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture, Architectural Periodicals in the 1960s and ’70s, Import-Export: Postwar Modernism in an Expanding World, 1945-1975, Le Città visibili, Concrete Toronto, Italian Cityscapes: Culture and Urban Change, and Anxious Modernism: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture. She has two current book projects, the completed Realist Impulse (on postwar Italian architectural discourse), and one entitled Neo-avant-gardism and the Politics of Post-materialism. Lobsinger is also completing a video project presently titled Urban Economic Motor. She is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.
Dylan A.T. Miner is a Wiisaakodewinini (Métis) artist, activist, and scholar. He is Director of American Indian and Indigenous Studies and Associate Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. Miner sits on the Michigan Indian Education Council, is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, has been featured in over twenty solo exhibitions, and been an artist in residence or visiting artist at institutions across North America and Europe. He holds a PhD from The University of New Mexico and has published more than sixty journal articles, book chapters, critical essays, and encyclopedia entries, and numerous limited-edition artist books/booklets. He recently commenced the Bootaagaani-minis ∞ Drummond Island Land Reclamation Project and is uncertain if he will return to academic writing.
Paige Sarlin is an artist, scholar, and political activist. She holds a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and an MFA in Film/Video/New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her feature-length documentary film, The Last Slide Projector, premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2007. From 1999 to 2010, she was an active participant in 16Beaver Group in New York City, a platform for the discussion of the intersection of art and politics. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally, and her writings have been published in October, Re-Thinking Marxism, Reviews in Cultural Theory, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Scapegoat, and Framework: A Journal of Film and Culture. She is at work on a book-length manuscript entitled Interview-Work: The Genealogy of a Media Form. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at University at Buffalo, SUNY.
Scott Sorli’s transdisciplinary practice concerns itself with moments when form and matter engage the economic and political forces that produce the city. Activist work includes curating convenience, a window gallery that provided an opening for art that engages, experiments, and takes risks with the architectural, urban, and civic realm; working with the Toronto Public Art Committee at City Hall; chairing the peace sub-group of the Nathan Phillips Square Community Advisory Committee; and currently as president of CUPE 5524 at the University of Waterloo. He has professional degrees in process control engineering and in architecture, as well as a post-grad in design research. His work has been published in Twenty and Change 01: Emerging Toronto Design Practices; the journal Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy; the magazine Horizonte: Angst; and exhibited at the Duderstadt Digital Media Commons: Bad Infinity; Atomic Centre: Total Spectacle; Drone Research Lab: Disposition Matrix and the Albright Knox: GASP!
A settler living in Tkaronto, Kika Thorne oscillates between action and abstraction. Kika Thorne, artist, filmmaker, and curator, was a co-founder of she/TV; participated in and documented the sculptural protests of the Toronto-based October, February and April Groups; helped found the Anarchist Free Space & Free School in Toronto's Kensington Market; and, in her role as curator for VIVO Media Arts Centre, helped instigate SAFE ASSEMBLY, a fourteen-day collective program and gathering to express dissent against the effects of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. Thorne has exhibited extensively, including projects at e-flux, Kino Arsenal, and Forum Expanded, Berlin; Murray Guy, New York; The Apartment, Access, Contemporary Art Gallery and Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; and Pleasure Dome and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto. Her room-sized tensile sculptures were the focus of The WILDcraft, a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Windsor. She received her MFA from the University of Victoria, and she is currently working towards a PhD in Studio Practice at York University, Toronto.
cheyanne turions is the curator at SFU Galleries (Burnaby and Vancouver). She volunteered this text in solidarity with her collaborator, Kara Ditte Hansen, as well as TILTING contributors and the Blackwood.
- Moderator
- Adrian Blackwell
Adrian Blackwell is an artist, writer, and designer whose work focuses on the relation between physical space and political economy. His art and design have been exhibited at artist-run centres and public institutions in Canada, the UK, the US, and China. In 2014, he showed Circles Describing Spheres at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and OCAD University’s Onsite Gallery, and Furnishing Positions at the Blackwood Gallery.
Blackwell’s research focuses on the intertwined problems of public space and private property. Publications include: “Forms of Enclosure in the Instant Modernization of Shenzhen” in Volume and “What is Property?” in the Journal of Architectural Education. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. He was a member of Toronto’s Anarchist Free School and the Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry, and is an editor of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy.
Blackwell’s research focuses on the intertwined problems of public space and private property. Publications include: “Forms of Enclosure in the Instant Modernization of Shenzhen” in Volume and “What is Property?” in the Journal of Architectural Education. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. He was a member of Toronto’s Anarchist Free School and the Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry, and is an editor of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy.
Generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Department of Visual Studies (UTM).
The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Road
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
[email protected]
(905) 828-3789
The galleries are currently open. Hours of operation: Monday–Saturday, 12–5pm, Wednesdays until 8pm.
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Sign up to receive our newsletter.
The Blackwood is situated on the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat.