IWL at SAR Conference

Institutions as a Way of Life researchers Lucie Kolb, Jamie Allen and Bernhard Garnicnig contribute a long format session at the 10th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research at ZHdK Zurich. Their session titled “The spaces between Premisses” explores the productive gaps in the institutional spaces of research as sites where institutionality is studied and where new practices are instituted. Such spaces become constructive as they help us refuse what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten phrase as “the call to order”. Such spaces of refusal allow dissonance to continue and resonate, as they invoke sessions, conversations and exchanges which refuse the call to begin, to formalise, to order, to end.

Their session will take the group of researchers, artists in attendance to architectural gaps of ZHdK — stairwells, elevators, hallways, coffee and tea kitchens — allowing a specific conversation to emerge at each. These hallway conversations and watercooler chats open into discussion, as digression and elaboration by all participants, helping to render apparent the identity and category slippages that occur when institutional roles and scenographies are enacted and relaxed. These conversations about arts, knowledge, performance and place are our other workplaces, in the gaps of the institutions we occupy, that cannot be called to order.