Dialogue
Thu 22 Jun 2023

Public talk “Temporary Stabilizations”

Museum of Modern Art Ireland, Dublin

Participants

Eva Weinmayr

Public talk “Temporary Stabilizations” at IMMA International Summer School: Art and Politics: #5 Assembly, convened by Nathan O’Donnell and Lisa Moran

In this public talk, Eva Weinmayr, discusses the social and political agency of artist’s publishing. Speaking from an intersectional feminist perspective the talk’s focus is not on the commodity genre “art publication”, but on the collective processes, exchanges, and relationships such publishing practices can enable.

The talk aims to expand and test the normative criteria of what constitutes a publication. One of the emergent questions posed was whether publishing may be seen as a verb (a process) rather than a noun (i.e. the finished object). Could practice itself be understood as a form of publishing? A teaching situation, for example – a workshop, seminar, or group dialogue, where knowledge is collectively created and shared at the same time – could this also be considered as publishing? What kinds of publics are necessary or relevant to a publication process? How fixed or stable does a transmission of knowledges need to be in order to be called a “publication”? And what is the function and effect of such stability?

In the organiser’s words:

“In recent years, when many democratic institutions and processes are coming under threat, it seems timely to consider the role of assembly in addressing these current predicaments and how can it create the conditions for new thinking and practice on collective action. New and alternative methods are being devised to bring people together, to form publics spaces and allow for decision-making and collective action. Contemporary art is a space where such methods have been developed and enacted.

Foregrounding the role of art and artists, the Summer School will explore the subject of assembly. Drawing on a range of thinking and ideas on the subject of assembly we will consider what happens when people come together to discuss, make, think, argue and be with each other in person or virtually. We will also explore the role of the museum, and the summer school in particular, as a place of assembly and consider the potential of the collective as a model for artists’ practice as well as political action.”

Let’s Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy?, HDK-Valand, 2016 R Brander, K Burathoki, MC Coble, A Engman, E Weinmayr

A Walkable Book. Let’s Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogies, HDK-Valand, Gothenburg 2016

Public Assembling Day, Let’s Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogies, HDK-Valand, Gothenburg 2016

Contributor

Eva Weinmayr

Eva Weinmayr works at the interface of art, critical publishing and radical education. Her focus is on decolonial feminist discourses, pedagogies and practices. From 2019 until 2022 she co-led the EU-funded collective research and study programme “Teaching to Transgress Toolbox” (with erg, Brussels) and co-initiated kritilab, an open-source platform and laboratory for Critical Diversity Literacy at the intersection of art and education. As part of “Ecologies of Dissemination”(HDK-Valand, 2022–24) with Femke Snelting, she develops decolonial feminist practices to Open Access.

Recent collaborative publication projects include “Noun to Verb”, a PhD thesis concerned with the micro-politics of publishing from an intersectional feminist perspective that was developed and published on a MediaWiki. She collaborates with Lucie Kolb on decolonial, feminist approaches to naming and cataloguing knowledge in institutional libraries in the Global North that led to an exhibition and the online publication “Teaching the Radical Catalog – a Syllabus” (2021–22); Further projects include “The Piracy Project” (2010–15, with Andrea Francke), an international publishing and exhibition project exploring the philosophical, legal and practical implications of book piracy and modes of reproduction.

Currently, she works as Guest Professor for Critical Access at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures, Basel Academy of Art and Design (CH) and is part of the team of the MA “Critical Social Practice in Art Education” at ZHdK Zurich. Since 2024 she is an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK).