Stefanie Hessler | Studio Seminar in Art and the Public Sphere

As of 3/10/2020 this event has been canceled per MIT’s response to COVID-19, the Corona Virus. For up-to-date information regarding MIT’s policy surrounding this, please click here. 

Who: Stefanie Hessler
What: Presentation and discussion.
When: Monday, 03/30 @ 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Where: E15-001

Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer and editor. Her work focuses on interdisciplinary processes and systems at large, be they ecological, economic, or societal. She is the director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway.

Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions “Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II” at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid (2020) and Ocean Space, Venice (2019); “Armin Linke: Prospecting Ocean” at the Institute of Marine Sciences, Venice (2018); the 6th Athens Biennale “ANTI” (2018); the symposium “Practices of Attention” at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (2018), and “Sugar and Speed” at the Museum of Modern Art, Recife (2017). Between 2017–2019, she was guest professor in art theory at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.

Hessler has edited books such as Tidalectics. Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science, published by The MIT Press (2018). Her book Prospecting Ocean with a visual essay by Armin Linke and a foreword by Bruno Latour was published by The MIT Press in December 2019.

This talk is part of 4.369/8 | Studio Seminar in Art & the Public Sphere taught by prof. Gediminas Urbonas and TA Nathaniel Elberfeld, SMArchS’20 with support from CAMIT.

4.368/9 | Studio Seminar in Art and the Public Sphere: Swamp Observatory
This course conceptually deals with new modes of public and environmental art production, programming, and publication that shifts the discussion on public space towards anthropocene public space. By focusing on the new environmentalisms this course inquires ontologies of scientific instrumentarium developed for sensing and viewing of an environment, including devices that produce and construct nature. Suggesting exploration and design of artistic sensorial devices the class encourages to tinker with experimental, artistic, and ethnographic devices, as a way to destabilize the scientific regimes of governmentality aiming at a production of alternatives in times of new climatic regime. Projects developed in this class will grapple with communication beyond humans, understanding and mapping of holobiontic relations, and other ways of knowing and doing the world.