Presentations & Talks

Not An Alternative’s multi-media presentations have been featured in arts and academic institutions and activist spaces around the world. The selection below covers some of the foundational themes that inform our practice.

Selected Talk

Full Title

The Visibilities and Invisibilities of a Changing Climate

In Summary

In this talk at the Miami Museum of Art & Design, Not An Alternative members discuss the politics that shape visual representations of nature, strategies for presenting scientific fact, and the responsibility of cultural institutions to respond to the climate crisis.

Themes: a Leftist account of the unknown; strategies of institutional insurgency; the problem with the disappearance of the outside.

Location

Miami Museum of Art & Design

Date

April 14th, 2019

Full Title

How Do Social Movements Communicate?

In Summary

A presentation on the Media, Communication, Outreach panel at the Global Uprisings Conference in Amsterdam, Nov 2013.

 

This session explores the many ways in which movements relate to both mainstream and social media. How did the movements reach the wider public? How did they develop new technologies themselves? What forms of face-to-face communication were essential? The speakers represent a mix of experiences and positions vis-à-vis the media. Some of them engage with the mainstream media in creative and subversive ways, others develop humorous campaigns with a spectacular elements to attract the attention of the public as well as mainstream media, while still others develop alternative channels of communication to reach the public through social media, video and blogs or by designing software and hardware tools to facilitate communication within, between and from the movements.

 

Speakers: Not An Alternative (New York City, US); Leonidas Martin (Enmedio, Barcelona, Spain); Salma Said (Mosireen, Cairo, Egypt); Hassen Hajbi (Revolutionary Cultural Movement, Tunis, Tunisia)
Discussant: Jerome Roos (ROAR Magazine)

 

http://www.globaluprisings.org/global-uprisings-event-balie-amsterdam

Location

De Balie, Amsterdam

Date

November 16th, 2013

Full Title

The Split Institution: From Occupation to Counter-Power Infrastructure

In Summary

Not An Alternative member Jodi Dean presents a talk on the strategy of institutional occupation at the Art & Activism panel at Manifesta 10, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art.

The institution is a site of collective power that can be seized. Instead of an instituent practice that resonates with exodus and flight, Not An Alternative models a landless strategy of taking the institution. It seizes available signifying modes, reclaiming the communicative common of language, ideas, knowledge, and affect. For Not An Alternative, this is a politics of organization, infrastructure, and counter-power.

Date

September 19th, 2014

Full Title

On the Inside and Outside of Institutions: Politics of the Social in Contemporary Art

In Summary

Note: the embedded video features an excerpt of our presentation. Click here to hear the full audio recording of the talk. 

 

Can art intervene in social relations? What are the implications of involving art and its audiences in an ethical problem? And how do such practices relate to art’s social institutions? This symposium examines the turn towards participatory and collaborative art forms and the ethical questions that such practices raise.

 

Featuring a keynote by Professor Shannon Jackson and contributions from Wafaa Bilal, Emma Dowling, Grupo Etcétera, Gavin Grindon, Anja Kanngieser, Fran Lloyd, Renzo Martens, Not An Alternative, Luke Skrebowski, Wochenklausur and Ztohoven.

 

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/conference/politics-social-contemporary-art

Location

Tate Modern, London

Date

March 5th, 2013

Full Title

Conversations on Useful Art

In Summary

The event, held in conjunction with the Useful Art Association featured an introduction by political performance and installation artist Tania Bruguera, followed by a series of brief presentations by useful artists: Mel Chin, Santiago Cirugeda, Not An Alternative, Rick Lowe, and Patrick Bernier/Olive Martinand, Pase Usted; as well as Nato Thompson, Chief Curator at Creative Time; Tom Finkelpearl, Executive Director, Queens Museum of Art; Larissa Harris, Curator, Queens Museum of Art; and Gregory Sholette, Chair, MFA StudioArt Program, Queens College CUNY.
Claire Bishop, Associate Professor of Art History, CUNY Graduate Center, moderated a roundtable discussion with participants, representatives from local immigrant community organizations Make the Road and N.I.C.E. (New Immigrant Community Empowerment), and New York City Council Member Julissa Ferreras.

Location

Immigrant Movement International

Date

April 23rd, 2011

Full Title

Environmental Activism in the Digital Age

In Summary

A day-long conference hosted by The Department of Technology, Culture and Society at NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering examining what “works” and what does not “work” in terms of media strategies that aim to educate and to impact environmental issues. The conference brought together social scientists with expertise on behavior change and environmental education, with digital media activists and artists.

 

Not An Alternative presented research in progress that informed the development of The Natural History Museum project, including theories on the concept of nature, the history of environmentalism, and the psychologies of the climate change denial and climate activism movements.

Location

NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering

Date

April 2nd, 2014

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