Pedro Reyes | Art as Conflict Resolution
April 24
artworld agent, agent of social change
counter-intel, counter-aesthesis
insinuation, infiltration
artist, provocateur
What makes a double agent in art? What drives them? ACT’s Spring 2017 Monday Night Lecture Series, Double Agents, invites three renowned artists whose respective works provoke and thrive in the tension between competing systems of power, production, and exhibition. At play in these discussions is the role of ethics in political art amidst shifting forms of governance, suppression, and repression.
Feb 13
Jill Magid | Permission as Material
With responses from Hashim Sarkis (MIT, Dean of SA+P) and Lars Bang Larsen (Curator)
Jill Magid is a widely celebrated MIT alumna now based in New York City. Her dynamic practice is deeply interrogative, forging intimate relationships within bureaucratic structures—flirting with, seducing, and subverting authority.
March 13
Tania Bruguera | Can Aesthetics Disarm Oppression?
Co-hosted with MIT Global Studies and Languages (GSL)
With responses from Paloma Duong (MIT, GSL) and Laura Genes (MIT, SMACT ’18)
Tania Bruguera is an American-Cuban installation and performance artist and the current Elizabeth S. and Richard M. Cashin Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her practice and research explore the ways in which art can be applied to everyday political life and civic literacy.
April 24
Pedro Reyes | Art as Conflict Resolution
With responses from Doris Sommer (Harvard, Cultural Agents) and Lawrence Susskind (MIT, DUSP)
Based in Mexico City, Pedro Reyes joined MIT in 2016–2017 as an ACT lecturer and the inaugural Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at CAST. His practice is highly eclectic and socially minded: he produces sculptures, theatre, musical instruments, puppets, therapy sessions, graphic novels, and many other things to promote social and economic justice, particularly in Mexico.
About the ACT Monday Night Lecture Series
ACT’s Monday night lecture series draws together artists, scholars, and other cultural practitioners from different disciplines to discuss artistic methodologies and forms of inquiry at the intersection of art, architecture, science, and technology.
ACT’s Spring 2017 series is conceived by Gediminas Urbonas, ACT Director, and coordinated with Lucas Freeman, ACT Writer in Residence, and Laura Knott, ACT Consulting Curator.
This series is made possible with the generous support of The Council for the Arts at MIT (CAMIT).
