Art Post Capitalism

6 Oct 2016

Discussion presented by artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas, who is joined by professor Suhail Malik and writer Tirdad Zolghadr on a panel chaired by curator Isobel Harbison.

The term ‘contemporary’ has been used throughout the last half-century to refer to art being made at the time. But perhaps this is no longer what the term means. Perhaps Contemporary Art has become a genre - one that came about in the era of broadcast media through economic liberalisation led by the West. However, today’s media, rooted in all-encompassing data flows, is producing a different type of viewership as the technological acceleration of the fourth industrial revolution brings about new and inescapable kinds of globalising economies. So could the era of contemporary art be disintegrating; and with it the fantasy of ‘critical’ distance that characterised it? And if the profound entanglement of art and commerce was accepted, then what might a new art be for beyond received modes of critique?

This event marks the publication of both Tirdad Zolghadr’s Traction (Sternberg, 2016) and Suhail Malik’s edited collection The Time Complex. Post-Contemporary ([NAME] Publications, 2016).

Speaker biographies

Dr Isobel Harbison

Dr Isobel Harbison is a critic and curator based in London. Harbison regularly contributes to catalogues, journals and magazines including Art Monthly, ArtReview, frieze, Kaleidoscope Modern Painters, Tate Etc, and Rhizome, among others. Recent exhibitions include Pre-Pop to Post-Human: Collage in the Digital Age (Hayward Touring, 2014-5) and Ericka Beckman, Image Games (Tate Modern, 2013). In 2014 she was awarded the inaugural Arts Foundation Fellowship in Arts Journalism and in 2015 received her doctorate in the Art Department, Goldsmiths, where she was AHRC scholar. Harbison is currently completing her first monograph, Performing Image, which identifies a movement in contemporary art where moving image and performance are brought together in response to a whole new image economy powered by image-performers, or ‘prosumers’.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas

Christopher Kulendran Thomas is an artist who works through collaboration and/or exploitation to manipulate the processes through which art produces reality. Exhibitions include the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016), the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2016), Bread and Roses, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2016), Co-Workers: Network As Artist, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2015) and Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making, Tate Liverpool (2013). Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof and Tensta Konsthall.
Suhail Malik

Suhail Malik is Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies, and was 2012-15 Visiting Faculty at CCS Bard, New York. He has written widely on contemporary art and philosophy, and is co-editor of Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg, 2015) and Genealogies of Speculation (Bloomsbury, 2016)
Tirdad Zolghadr

Tirdad Zolghadr is a curator and writer. His most recent book is Traction, Sternberg Press 2016. Zolghadr is director of the Summer Academy Paul Klee in Bern and associate curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. He teaches at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem.