Learning and Unlearning: This season, Art in General will continue to host an ongoing experimental discussion series organised by Shifter.
Sally Frater and Bruce Robbins will lead a discussion on the topic of “deep time,” a mode of investigating how our present is inextricably tied to histories long past.
The session will consider how this extended historical approach may complicate our ethical and political claims. How, for example, do we think about history – or histories – in a globalised present of conflicting claims of injustice? Is there a temporal analog to cosmopolitanism, and if so, what would it look like?
Are there new arrangements of time that are made possible when we decenter a privileged chronology? And considering the environmental impacts of rapid development, how do historical time and geological time intersect and complicate each other?
From their different perspectives and archives, Robbins and Frater will challenge us to think through our ingrained understanding of the relation between justice to time.
Unlearning Time is part of the series Learning and Unlearning organised by Shifter (Avi Alpert & Rit Premnath) in collaboration with Art in General.
More on Learning and Unlearning: Following Shifter's previous discussion-based project, the Dictionary of the Possible, guests are invited to join in a new kind of conversation. With the Dictionary, Shifter worked to unpack the many meanings of the words we share. With the new series, Unlearning, you're invited to take a closer look at the worlds we share.
The aim will be for all to unlearn our assumptions and prejudices about each other, in a time when the urgency for new solidarities has never been greater. To this end, Unlearning will ask us to abandon our default ways of speaking and thinking, and embrace new ways of communicating that draw out each person’s innate capacity for both practice and reflection.
Sally Frater holds an Honors BA in Studio Art from the University of Guelph and an MA (with Merit) in Contemporary Art from The University of Manchester/Sotheby’s Institute of Art. She has curated exhibitions for venues including the McColl Center for Art and Innovation, Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Justina M Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto, and Project Row Houses.
She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. A member of AAMC (the Association of Art Museum Curators), and IKT (Association of International Curators of Contemporary Art), Frater recently was the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, KS.
Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include The Beneficiary (2017), Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (2012), Upward Mobility and the Common Good (2007), Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999), and The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986).
His essays have appeared in n+1, The Nation, Public Books, and the London Review of Books. He is also the director of a documentary, Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists.
Art in General is a nonprofit contemporary art organisation that assists artists with the production and presentation of new work. Founded in 1981 by artists, it has been a pioneering force unlike any other institution in New York City, supporting thousands of local and international artists early in their careers.
Alongside Art in General’s exhibition programs that take place in New York and internationally, its public programs and publications examine critical and timely issues in artistic and curatorial practice. Offering support that will have a lasting impact on artists remains the cornerstone of its vision and programs.
Unlearning Time
Sally Frater & Bruce Robbins
Saturday, March 16, 4-6 pm
Art in General
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Upcoming:
Details Matter
Lise Soskolne & Laurel Ptak
Saturday, March 30, 4-6 pm
Unlearning Intersubjectivity
Katherine Rochester, Lou Cantor, & Samantha Ozer
Saturday, May 4, 4-6 pm