The interdisciplinary conference, “Shadowing the Scene: Negativity in Affects, Politics, Aesthetics” will be held on 26-27th of September in Contemporary art center in Vilnius. The well known scholars from Lithuania, US, and other European countries will discuss the relationship between image and body in contemporary world.

The conference will concentrate on human body and its relation to sexuality and death, as much as paradoxes that follow it. On one hand our visual spaces are filled with the spectacle of body that forms our sensibilities and comprehension of the world. On the other hand contemporary art and science insistently tries to represent and think of the bodily conditions, which are not defined by the dominant aesthetical norms, which exceed visible and rationally comprehensive body. Yet, such bodily excess – affect – and its unrepresentability become the main object of contemporary art, which nonetheless gets appropriated by aesthetic and political systems.

The conference will try to elucidate how events and insights of art, philosophy, and cinema could be employed to rethink body and its limits critically. The scholars will employ affect theory, which in the last decade became one of the most important paradigms in social sciences and humanities, yet the papers will rest on concrete life cases.

The conference will open up with the keynote lecture “Mediating Perception and the ‘Unrepresentable’ by Lisa Blackman, Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She will discuss the concept of non-representability in relation to phenomenon of voice hearing. Among the most interesting papers is the lecture by cultural anthropologist Abou Farman (Princeton University) on biotechnologies of immortality and the lecture by Eirini Avramopoulou (Cambridge University) on transsexual performance in Istanbul. Conference will close with the performance by Ute Kilter, the artist from Ukraine, on the incredible story of Joseph Beuys and Crimean Tatars.

The conference is organized by the Lithuanian culture research institute, supported by Research council of Lithuania and Contemporary art center. Entrance free.

More information
[email protected], http://lkti.lt/apie_mus/konferencijos.html