Under Fire - The Organisation and Representation of Political Violence

Under Fire is an ongoing <b>art and research project</b> that explores contemporary militarisation and political violence. It delves into the structural, symbolic, and affective dimensions of contemporary armed conflicts: the organisation, representation, and materialisation of war.<br> <br> This session of Under Fire will focus on the status of political speech -- the operations of power that determine the legitimacy of action, and the conditions that render speech and action intelligible as a political force. From this basis, it will explore the <b>dynamic between politics and violence</b> and look at the way that new political spaces are opened or invented. Overall, it will foreground structural conditions of the new global landscape, exploring the nature of contemporary power and situating cycles of violence within the modalities of a global system.<br> <br> Under Fire revolves around <b>questions of representation</b>. It explores the role that representations play as registers of symbolic meaning and as agents of cultural change. Yet at the same time, it acknowledges material, affective realities that resist symbolisation, but which nonetheless play a powerful role in shaping consciousness and the belief systems that motivate action. It this sense it probes into the dynamic between discourse and affect, between larger rhetorical strategies and ineffable states of expression, and moves toward a performative politics that can accommodate a multiplicity of somatic and symbolic registers.<br> <br> Presentations by:<br> <b>Anselm Franke</b>, curator and critic<br> <b>Brian Holmes</b>, essayist and activist-researcher<br> <b>Thomas Keenan</b>, lecturer, author and editor<br> <b>Gema Martin Munoz</b>, Professor of the Sociology of the Arab and Islamic World at Autonomia University of Madrid, author and journalist<br> <br> Organized by: Jordan Crandall and Anselm Franke