Jill Bennett

What approaches to creating exhibitions do justice to the complex ecologies and formal processes of the Anthropocene? A lecture in the framework of SYNAPSE – The Internatonal Curators’ Network.

Jill Bennett explores how and why the notion of the Anthropocene is changing cultural practice. Professor for experimental art, curator, and author of Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art After 9/11 (2012), Bennett looks at the extent to which art can be considered part of a material cycle that expands beyond the exhibition space into other realms of life. Her lecture will provide insights on the internal workshop of the international curator network Synapse: eleven curators will discuss questions pertaining to curation on the border between art and science in the so-called “age of man”.

The internal SYNAPSE workshop includes prominent curators, artists, and scholars In a five-day, non-public workshop, eleven up-and-coming international curators will discuss questions of curating in the so-called “Age of Man” at the cutting edge between art and science with a team of renowned curators, artists, scientists and other experts. It will include lectures and discussions with Dr. Bergit Arends (Curator for contemporary art, Natural History Museum London), Dr. TJ Demos (Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art, University College London), Prof. Diedrich Diederichsen (Co-Curator “The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside” and Professor at Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna), Jens Hauser (Curator, Paris), Prof. Natalie Jeremijenko (NYU Steinhardt School), Katrin Klingan (Head of Literature and Humanities Dept at Haus der Kulturen der Welt), Dr. Petra Lange-Berndt (Lecturer HAMS Programme - History of Art with Material Studies-, University College London), Armin Linke (Photographer and filmmaker, Anthropocene Observatory), Chus Martínez (Chief curator, El Museo del Barrio, New York), Agnes Meyer-Brandis (Artist, Berlin), Richard Pell (Director of the Center for PostNatural History, Pittsburgh, PA) and Christian de Lutz & Regine Rapp (Art Laboratory Berlin).

Jill Bennett, art historian, cultural historian and curator, is a founding director of the National Institute for Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales. In addition to numerous publications on contemporary art and new media, she also published “Living in the Anthropocene” for dOCUMENTA (13). She has also been active as a curator of events including Prepossessions (Sydney and Belfast, 2005) and African Marketplace (Sydney, 2002). She is currently working for “Curating City”, a project investigating strategies for the use of art and design to reshape cities in the era of climate change. She has also conducted further interdisciplinary research projects devoted in particular to the role of aesthetics in the light of environmental challenges and social conflicts