The Life of Forms, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism

The Life of Forms, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism

23 June–02 July 2013

Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa | Website

Life of Forms, Johannesburg Worskhop in Theory and Criticism

The goal of The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism is to open up questions that are fundamental to contemporary aesthetic, philosophical, political, literary, ethnographic and ethical inquiry – questions that potentially point to new paths for critical theory at the interface of local, regional and global circuits.

The 2013 programme will span ten intensive days of lectures, seminars, public events, exhibitions and performances. It will also include explorations of Afropolitan Johannesburg.

Parallel to the workshops, there will be a program of exhibitions, stagings and interventions held at the Goethe on Main project space in the Maboneng district, which is located in the JHB CBD. The Life of Forms Project Space aims to develop the relationship between theory and arts based practice. Speakers in the workshop will be invited to extend their theoretical work in the project space. Here, the concept of form will be critically developed through visual, audial, performed and spatial dimensions. The project space becomes a platform for theoretical/aesthetic model building, a laboratory for practice-based theory or a stage for concepts to be performed. The space will function as a fluid, modular or easily reconfigured set of devices that will allow an evolving confluence of images, texts and staging’s that draw on the workshop’s themes, energy and intellectual debates.

Speakers
The 2013 Session will feature Arjun Appadurai (New York University), Teresa Caldeira (University of California at Berkeley), David Theo Goldberg (University of California at Irvine), William Kentridge, Jane Guyer (John Hopkins University), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths College), Ato Quayson (University of Toronto), Achille Mbembe (University of the Witwatersrand), Bernd Scherer (House of World Cultures, Berlin), Hylton White (University of the Witwatersrand), Ackbar Abbas (University of California at Irvine), Joshua Comaroff, Filip de Boeck, Ong Ker Shing, Sue Van Zyl, and many others.