Vulnerability, Animality, Community with Terike Haapoja

"Vulnerability, Animality, Community" An online talk by visual artist and fine arts professor, Terike Haapoja.

ABOUT THE TALK
Vulnerability, Community, Animality – The Art of Being Here with Others approaches questions of animalisation, law, interspecies communality, vulnerability and ethics in relationship to art and its role in political change. The talk follows Haapoja’s 15 year exploration of multispecies relations through video installations, political interventions and imaginary museums that recognize more-than-human agency in our shared world.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Terike Haapoja is a visual artist based in New York. Haapoja’s large scale installation work, publications, writings and political projects investigate the mechanics of othering with a specific focus on issues arising from the anthropocentric world view of Eurocentric traditions. Haapoja represented Finland in the 55 Venice Biennale with a solo show in the Nordic Pavilion, and her work has been awarded with several prizes, including ANTI prize for Live Art (2016), Dukaatti-prize (2008) and Ars Fennica prize nomination. Gustafsson&Haapoja, Haapoja's collaboration with writer Laura Gustafsson has been awarded with Finnish State Media art award (2016) and Kiila-prize (2013). Haapoja is an adjunct professor at Parsons Fine Arts and NYU, New York. She is currently working on an art and research project Animal Capitalism that approaches the exploitation of the (human and nonhuman) animal body as foundational to capitalism.
Visit her website: www.terikehaapoja.net

DISCUSSANTS
EBEN KIRKSEY (He/Him)
EBEN KIRKSEY is an American anthropologist and Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has been published in Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian and The Sunday Times. He is sought out as an expert on science in society by the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Democracy Now, Time and the BBC, among other media outlets. He speaks widely at the world’s leading academic institutions including Oxford, Yale, Columbia, UCLA, and the International Summit of Human Genome Editing, plus music festivals, art exhibits, and community events. Professor Kirksey holds a long-term position at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.
Personal website: https://eben-kirksey.space/writing/

HEMANT SAREEN (He/Him)
HEMANT SAREEN is a New Delhi-based independent writer, editor and artist based in New Delhi. He writes on modern and contemporary art, photography and moving image. He was associated with Art Asia Pacific magazine as a contributing editor and an associate editor in 2010 and 2011. Sareen has been a mentor in art writing workshops organized by New Delhi-based Take on Art. Recently he designed and taught courses on global humanities, ‘Globalization and Photography,’ and ‘Global Cultures of Exhibition and Viewing,’ at Ambedkar University, New Delhi, 2021. He is the contributor-editor of Ranbir Kaleka: Moving Image Works, Kerber Verlag (2018). In his 2013 solo show Zoopoetics: A New Subject for the Next Revolution in a non-commercial space, Sareen proposed a link between perceptual environments, ecology of signs, and photography by examining questions around the human-animal relations through habits of looking. Zoopoetics also problematized language, and visuality in taking cognizance of the other or an alternate subjectivity.
Instagram profile: @sareenhemant

MAYA KÓVSKAYA (Femme/They/Them)
MAYA KÓVSKAYA (PhD in Political Science at UC Berkeley, 2009) teaches Multispecies Anthropocene Studies; Science, Technology, and Society (STS); Ecological Feminist Theory, Semiotics, Political, Cultural, and Visual Cultural Theory at Chiang Mai University in the Faculty of Social Science. They have published widely on the intersection of the political, cultural, semiotic, and ecological with performative and visual culture under the Anthropocene condition. Current research entails multispecies ethnographic work on what they call "feral agency," "eco-performativity," and "more-than-human speech acts," towards a "rethinking of the human in a more-than-human world" and conceptualization of a "politics beyond the human and multispecies polity." Alongside this work, at a different register, is a conceptual examination of the etiologies of the "Anthroposupremocene" through its philosophical underpinnings. Interrogating the workings of the invidious, hierarchical, dualist division between humans and the more-than-human world, Maya's current work traces the historical, contingent, constitutive species-rupturing alienation of Western Humanist "Man/Anthropos" from "Nature," and the unfolding catastrophic consequences for the planet. Maya has also been a curator, and art critic since 2005. They have lived and done research in St.Petersburg Russia in the early 90s, China (1996-2009), and India (2009-2018) before moving to Chiang Mai. Maya founded and heads the AMOR MUNDI Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab.