Global Futures Speaker Series - Verina Gfader Event

Overview:

This presentation takes account of animation’s malleable character and its dedication to reproduction and lifelike-ness in an expanded knowledge space. Tracing the current state of art corrupted by the market, with modes of resistance being formed around representations of cultural difference (Chris Kraus), the paper’s trajectory passes from Osamu Tezuka’s 1963 ‘TV manga’ Tetsuwan Atomu—an early example where a work/image/animation, a serialised mode of production, and an investment of rationalisation merge into an indiscernible unity—into contemporary anime, via a vital moment of multi-layered cultural investment in 1960s Japan. Incorporating anime in these various creative endeavors, and making a claim for animation’s proliferating vocabularies and narratives rewriting history, the talk posits that this inherently reproductive force calls for experimental analytical models. In addition, the simultaneous refusal, necessity, and drive for these models produce an imaginary realm for such undertakings; Paolo Virno’s new places for intellect, where “special places” of discourse dissolve and are replaced by “common places,” speak to such undertakings.

Projects of Verina's practice accompanying the lines on animation feature the two paper-works, GRUND RISSE (2013) and Solo, Scores, Stop (1995).

Biography:

Verina Gfader is an artist and writer, currently Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield and Visiting Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is organised around questions of what strategies and interventions one takes in relation to everyday systems, subsumed in narratives of agency and activism. Postdoctoral research after studies in visual media, photography and fine arts, includes a residency at Tokyo University of the Arts (Geidai) to explore the structural coherence between non-commercial Japanese animation and geographical, institutional and social ideas. Her current fellowship develops from a publishing practice focusing on collective imagination and fictional collectivity, the immediate architecture of text, and the accumulative nature of knowledge in art. She is also creative director of EP, a book series from Sternberg Press, Berlin, founded by Alex Coles.