Bojana Kunst: WHAT HAS PARTICIPATION TO DO WITH PRECARISATION?, lecture and discussion

April 23rd, 11.00-13.00

We will reflect on the relation between two notions, precarisation and participation. The first describes a neoliberal act of governance, which governs through social insecurity, flexibility and continuous fear from the loss of stability. The other notion, participation, describes the general turn in visual arts and performance, especially in the last decade. With this turn, there is not only the opening towards the audience participation, but the notion of the audience is also strongly transformed: it is addressed as the mass of dispersed and non-organized singularities, which can form temporary alliances, or fragile communities and which has a constitutive role in the precarious and distributed experience of the work of art. But how to think this strange, not only coincidental simultaneity between the precarisation and participation? We will reflect on it through three examples which will all focus on labour: the labour of performer, the audience and the labour of a producer.

The lecture will be followed by a debate moderated by Bojan Djordjev.