Decommissioned: Mick Wilson

What is to be undone? 

Mick Wilson discusses some figures of resistance and escape in contemporary art, from 'lines of flight' to 'homo absconditus'.

This presentation looks at some of the different ways in which strategies and tactics of withdrawal, refusal and escape are figured in contemporary culture, with particular reference to questions of institution and institutional practices. What are the differences operative across this range of figures? What is at stake in the currency of these figures?  Should we (not) relate these figures to contemporary processes of  'Bourgeois revolt'?

Artists and thinkers whose work and strategies Wilson will discuss include Robert Barry, Lee Lozano, Maddie Leach, Lisa Soskolne, Frederico Morais, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Mladen Stilinovic, BAVO, Gerald Raunig and Simon Critchley.

Mick Wilson is an artist, educator and researcher based in Sweden and Ireland. He is currently the first Head of the Valand Academy of Art, University of Gothenburg and editor-in-chief for the PARSE Journal. Edited volumes include: The Curatorial Conundrum (2016) with Paul O’Neill and Lucy Steeds; Curating Research (2014);Curating and the Educational Turn (2010) both with Paul O’Neill; and SHARE Handbook for Artistic Research Education.

He was co-curator with Daniel Jewesbury of Re : Public (2010) an expanded exhibition platform on the nature of public culture and urban politics and he is co-curator of The Food Thing (2011-2013) a project investigating contemporary food cultures and politics. Find out more.

Read Mick Wilson and Paul O’Neill’s 2008 ICA Blog article on Curatorial discourse.

Read an inquiry by Wilson into public-ness, political imagination and agency.

In a series of ten lectures, Decommissioned seeks to address how strategies of disavowal, inactivity and transition are employed in contemporary art and design. When encountering cultural bias, uncertainty and co-option across the arts, how can the dominant flows of information, language, policy and ideology be circumvented? Curators, sociologists, artists, politicians, academics, queer-thinkers, bio-designers, film-theorists and others will respond through diverse fields of exciting and critical research.    

This series is curated and convened by Dr. Stephen Wilson and is staged in collaboration with Chelsea College of Arts Postgraduate Community and the University of the Arts London, CCW Graduate School.