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Hegemony Machines – Book presentation and talk

Sunday, Feb 5, 2023, 7 pm

Book presentation, Talk
Event on site
In German

With Oliver Marchart (Professor for Political Theory at the University of Vienna) and Sabeth Buchmann (art historian and critic, Professor of Modern and Post-Modern Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), moderated by Dorothee Richter (Professor of Critical Curating at the University of Reading and Professor at the Zurich University of the Arts) on the occasion of the publication of Oliver Marchart, Hegemony Machines. documenta X to fifteen and the Politics of Biennalization, edited by Dorothee Richter, OnCurating.org, and Marius Babias, n.b.k., Zurich, Berlin, 2022

Oliver Marchart takes an analytical and provocative look at the last six documenta exhibitions in his 2022 essay Hegemony Machines. documenta X to fifteen and the Politics of Biennalization. Based on the theories of Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Marchart describes museums and biennials as national and global hegemony machines that reproduce bourgeois dominant culture, but also make it vulnerable to attack. Along with documenta’s recent history, Marchart traces a canon shift in the art field with regard to political art practices, theory, art education and the decentering of the West. Another focus of the presentation is the antisemitism debate surrounding documenta fifteen.


Free admission


Video documentation of the event on February 5, 2023


Participants


Oliver Marchart is professor of political theory at the University of Vienna since 2016. Among his numerous publications are: Conflictual Aesthetics. Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere (Berlin: Sternberg Press 2019); Thinking Antagonism. Political Ontology after Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2018); Das unmögliche Objekt. Eine postfundamentalistische Theorie der Gesellschaft (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2013); Die politische Differenz. Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010).


Sabeth Buchmann is an art historian and critic as well as professor of Modern and Post-Modern Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is co-editor of PoLyPen – eine Reihe zu Kunstkritik (Berlin: b_books), advisory board member of Texte zur Kunst and board member of the European Kunsthalle. Publications include: Broken Relations: Infrastructure, Aesthetic, and Critique (co-editor, Leipzig: Spector Books, 2022), Putting Rehearsals to the Test. Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film. Theater, Theory, and Politics (co-editor, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016). In 2023, she’ll publish the volume Kunst als Infrastruktur (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König).


Dorothee Richter is Professor of Critical Curating at the University of Reading (UoR), as well as Professor at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), she leads the PhD in Practice in Curating (UoR), the MAS in Curating (ZHdK) and is the editor of OnCurating.org. Together with Ronald Kolb she published the essay film FluxUsNow, Fluxus explored with a camera in 2013. Recent publications include: documenta fifteen - Aspects of Commoning in Curatorial and Artistic Practices (OnCurating #54, ed. with Ronald Kolb, 2022), Instituting Feminism (OnCurating #52, ed. with Helena Reckitt, 2021), Fluxus Perspectives (OnCurating #51, ed. with Martin Patrick, 2021).