Art and Politics with Gregory Sholette

SIRIUS Summer School, produced by SIRIUS in Cobh, County Cork, examines the relationship between art and politics. Gregory Sholette conducts the inaugural edition, which addresses the processes and urgencies that have facilitated activism by artists and activist forms of art. Sholette leads participants in exploring the political role of artists today, for instance in Black Lives Matter and Liberate Tate, and over the past several decades. The group unpacks such themes as protest aesthetics, historical and market invisibility, and exploitative creative labor via a body of scholarly work, which ranges from Sholette’s classical notions of artistic “dark matter” and “bare art” to new concepts such as the “unpresent” and perspectives on decolonization and “deviant” curating. The sessions evolve through theoretical and methodological debates in the form of presentations, group readings and discussions, and self-inquiry.

Led by Gregory Sholette
Organized by Miguel Amado
Co-delivered by Miguel Amado, Carlos Garrido Castellano, and Georgia Perkins

Dr. Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, educator, and activist based in New York. His forthcoming book, The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art, like his earlier volumes Dark Matter, Delirium and Resistance, and Art as Social Action (coauthored with Chloë Bass), focuses on activist art, collective cultural labor, and counter-historical representation. Sholette is a cofounder of several art collectives, a professor at Queens College, and (with Chloë Bass) codirector of Social Practice CUNY, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He holds a doctorate from the University of Amsterdam and is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Miguel Amado is a curator and critic, and director of SIRIUS.

Dr. Carlos Garrido Castellano is a lecturer in the Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies department at University College Cork.

Georgia Perkins is a doctoral candidate in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a curatorial fellow at SIRIUS.

INFORMATION

20–24 June; 11 am–1 pm and 2:30–5 pm
Free
Materials are provided
Travel costs, as well as accommodation and subsistence in Cobh, are covered by participants

To register, send an expression of interest and biography to team@siriusartscentre.ie by 15 June 2022.