6th Sharjah Biennial, 2003: Symposium

Universes in Universe / Caravan / 6th Sharjah Biennial
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6th Sharjah Biennial: International Symposium, 9 - 11 April 2003

Art In A Changing Horizon: Globalization And New Aesthetic Practice

Cultural theorists have recently ascribed to Art a series of fragmented aesthetic practices without horizon; practices which enter, arguably, at the end of the twentieth century and the close of the modern period, into the impasse of an infinite archive, immeasurable and relative.

The alert to all practitioners in the arts is to a commonly agreed necessity, one not confined exclusively to art or expert: that the changes that engulf individual cultures and the species as a whole, will determine the future horizon of the human by an uncompromising metaphysics.

While technological and scientific systems abstract the 'human', globalisation increasingly maps out its field of subjectivity. A changing horizon, measured in the parallel discourses and subject positions that thrive on mutual and unilateral disagreement, opens up a space for self-determination outside the hermetic formalism of Euro-centric plastic arts and the singular notion of history from the western perspective.

Can a question be asked of the durability of the human, that will acknowledge the need for expanding the new cognitive horizons of the global and technological culture, or, does the 'horizontality' of the 'post-human' erase the vertical axis of history, which fixes durability and meaning both particularly and universally? Does the rclativism of the post-modem signal the exhaustion of the human spirit, or in the ashes of modernity, docs a phoenix rise?

Measured in parallel to recent contemporary developments, in their vicissitudes and conflict resolutions, the question of temporality and the task of human durability is framed and posed as an aesthetic investigation. Are new subjectivities and freedoms situated in a rebirth of history and time? How do we intersect these horizons?

Amid all these questions concerning new tendencies, the International Symposium of Sharjah's 6th. International Biennial is raising for discussion a group of issues inder the title" Art in a changing horizon: Globalisation and new aesthetic practice" so as to contribute to the broader debate of understanding changes in the Arabic and international arts, and to provide a forum for dialogue and research into the contested theoretical issues of contemporary art, their significance, value and meaning on the epistemological level.

Talal Moualla
Coordinator of the International Symposium

1st Colloquium
New Aesthetic Practices
* Globalization: image - culture and its transnational syntax
* Extremity and convention: the creative process and the language of criticism
* Signals of change: discourse and recovery of the other
* Memory of the subject and the return to collective thought

2nd Colloquium
Chaos and Cultural Dialogue
* Without epoch: knowledge and uncertainty in critical theory
* The Real: re enchantment through the virtual
* Identity and difference: the aesthetics of Diaspora and social democracy
* Criticism of the message: mediation of new subjectivities

3rd Colloquium
Violence and Art
* The relation between violence and the visual arts
* Post-human: digital information, spectacle and normalization
* The contemporary Arab mood: transcendence, culture and circulation
* Practicing Utopias: ideology and mediation

4th Colloquium
Modernism, disenchantment and cognition
* Sense and non-sense: deconstruction within and beyond reason
* Duration, the task of durability
* Freedom and the horizon of the modern project: sublimation and disagreement
* Phenomenal reality and aesthetic practice: the place of philosophy

Contact: see Sharjah - Start, Organizer

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