Joshua Simon's talk “The curatorial, the dividual and the materiality of debt” at Contemporary Art Centre Reading Room, Vilnius

7093446835415b5355bce9d2e5df6262Rupert invites you to talk by Joshua Simon at the CAC Reading Room, this coming Saturday at 4pm.

The materiality of the commodity today is not limited to labor but expands to debt. Things are the plasticized negative space of debt. In-dividual holds a double meaning – it is at the same time inseparable from itself and separated from the rest. Therefore, the individual is in itself a negation of the dividual, that which is always already part of something else. When Deleuze outlines the dividual in “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” he uses it to denote the collapse of the individual. The dividual for Deleuze is this dissected entity, roaming through networks. Converged through production protocols and the debt economy, the dividual is in constant negotiation. A mobile flow, always partial, the dividual is in the process of subjectivation. As an open form to all sorts of hybridizations, the dividual is a matter of constant production, against fixed subjectivity and rigid identity; a re-organizing, re-composing subjectivity. Not an entity unto itself apart from all the rest, but rather already in relation, always part of something. Being the materialization of our social relations, the commodity folds in itself the ever-shifting omnipresence of our shared dividuality and its connectedness. The exhibitions enable this capacity of things and objects to resonate.

Joshua Simon, director and chief curator at MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam. Co-founding editor of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa based Maayan publishing. Vera List Center for Art and Politics fellow (2011-2013). Author of Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013), and editor of Ruti Sela: For The Record (Archive Books, 2015). Recent curatorial projects include: Factory Fetish (Westspace, Melbourne, co-curated with Liang Luscombe), Roee Rosen: Group Exhibition (Tel Aviv Museum of Art, co-curated with Gilad Melzer), and The Kids Want Communism (yearlong project at MoBY).

“Interdisciplinary Art Project “Politics of Emotion: Art in the Expanded Sphere”” (No. EEE-LT07-KM-01-K-01-004) is produced under the Programme LT07 under the EEA Financial Mechanism and is supported by the EEA Grants and Lithuanian Republic.