Artist Talk - Arjuna Neuman

Please join the Or Gallery for an artist’s talk by Arjuna Neuman on Thursday, March 22 at 6:00PM.

Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker and writer. He works with the essay-form across these mediums and through his collaborations. This form can hold a multi-perspectival and mobile approach, where essay comes from the French essayer, “to try”. The essay, then, is an inherently future-oriented and experimental mode, both argumentative and (somewhat) scientific, but also personal, confessional and lyrical. This holding together of different registers is continued in his research, which shifts between the bodily, haptic, and affective through to the planetary, cosmological, and geopolitical. For example, he has been developing the idea of “cloud subjectivity” in response to the resurgence of nationalist and racist claims on the sovereign body and state (i.e. bloodletting): in place of these inherently violent constructions, “cloud subjectivity” recognizes the bacterial universal of all organic and inorganic matter; in particular, that bacteria is both an agent of feeling and an agent of the weather. This provides the ground to speculate on a different organization of life.

At the Or Gallery he will present a selection of past and future works, remixed.

Neuman’s recent presentations include those at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Museum of Image and Sound, Sao Paolo; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; MAAT and Docslisboa, Portugal; Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE; Bergen Assembly, Norway; NTUCentre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; the 56th Venice Biennale and SuperCommunity; Industry of Light, London; the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt; Home Works Forum 7 at Ashkal Alwan and the Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon; Le Gaite Lyric, Paris; the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the Rat School of Art, Seoul, among others. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings at Contour 8 and e-flux.