Infectious Eflyer

Yang Shaobin, composite video images from X-Blind Spot (2008)

INFECTIOUS: crisis, contagion and communication aesthetics A one-day symposium hosted by the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics on transdisciplinary and aesthetic approaches to contemporary ‘crisis’ culture Speakers Include: Jiang Jun (Chief Editor of Urban China Magazine and lecturer at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts) David Teh (Curator of 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival and lecturer at the National University of Singapore) Zoe Butt (Director of The Long March Project, Beijing) Anna Gibbs (Cultural Theorist, Writing and Society Research Group, UWS) Jennifer Biddle (Visual Anthropologist, CCAP, UNSW) Niamh Stephenson (Public Health and Community Medicine, UNSW) Ross Harley (Media Arts, UNSW) and Gillian Fuller (EMPA, UNSW) Where: EG02, COFA When: Friday Sept 11 2009, 10am–5:30pm Symposium cost: $30/20 Enquiries: [email protected] Bookings: http://cofa.unsw.edu.au/research/centres/ccap/events/ Across the spheres and spaces of public health, finance, media and governance, responses to ‘crisis’ are often ones of panic or are tinged with anxiety. What practical and analytical methods do we have for thinking and feeling through cultural, social and political atmospheres of anxiety? How has the everyday been transformed by the emergency: real, imagined or instigated? This interdisciplinary symposium brings together researchers, artists and curators to discuss practical and analytical methods and concepts that might lead us towards different or alternative responses to crisis. It will also address artworks and themes raised in the exhibition REAL Emergency, (Ivan Dougherty Gallery, August 27–September 20, curated by Jill Bennett and Anna Munster), which features video art and post-documentary work by internationally renowned artists such as Hito Steyerl and Yang Shaobin.