Video, Past Event, Arts & Culture, Social Justice
Jaleh Mansoor: The General Strike - An artist talk on the work of Santiago Sierra & Claire Fontaine
SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and the Audain Gallery presented a talk by Jaleh Mansoor.
The General Strike, the organized refusal to work among a critical mass of labourers, has been attendant upon and responsive to the capitalist form of accumulation since the latter’s inception. Having variously emerged and receded as a broadly recognized means of resistance since the mid-19th century, the potential of a general strike to precipitate capitalism's inherent tendency to crisis was forcefully expressed by the anti-austerity movement in Greece and in Spain in 2012. A general strike interrupts the availability of labour foundational to the production of value which enables capitalism to valorize things over people, and to press other life processes (politics, love, art, science) into the service of itself – that is, profit maximization. This talk referred to the work of Santiago Sierra and Claire Fontaine, with responses from Randy Lee Cutler and Jeff Derksen. Moderated by writer and critic Kathleen Ritter.
Speaker Bio
Jaleh Mansoor completed her PhD at Columbia University in 2007. She has taught at SUNY Purchase, Barnard College, Columbia University, and Ohio University before coming to the University of British Columbia.
Having worked on materialist abstraction in the context of Marshall Plan Italy, she is interested in complicating the discourse on abstraction, totality, universality, labor, and mere life in contemporaneity. Her areas of teaching and research include modernism, critical theory, historiography, and critical curatorial studies. She works as a critic for Artforum and is a frequent contributor to October, Texte Zur Kunst, and, more recently, The Journal of Athestics and Protest. Mansoor wishes to occupy and dilate the relationship (and tension) between activism and scholarship. She has written many catalog essays, including that on Blinky Palermo for Dia (2009) and Agnes Martin, also for Dia (2011). She has also produced monographic studies on, among others, Piero Manzoni, Ed Ruscha and Mona Hatoum. She co-edited Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (2010) available on Duke University Press. She is preparing a book that addresses formal and procedural violence in the work of Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni and another on Mere Life in the Work of Santiago Sierra. She is preparing a book that addresses formal and procedural violence in the work of Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni and another on Mere Life in contemporary Feminist practices.
Co-Presented by
SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and Audain Gallery
