PANDEMICS, REPRESENTATION, INTIMACY, CONGREGATION AND KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS
Mey Seifan/ Panelist/ 2021

Knowledge production takes time, money, and space. Pandemics do not. An invisible nonhuman agent on the edge of life and non-life can propagate and change the world politically and aesthetically faster than an artistic or an academic response could. Do our knowledge production systems today equip us to live critically within the accelerations turn that the world is witnessing, a turn that is expected to only get faster and worse? Are we all in a collective stutter as theorists, artists, and intellectuals trying to think of our world today as it continues to be reorganized politically, challenging present frames of references our knowledge production systems have offered us previously. This series of international encounters addresses representation within the political and aesthetic regimes of power, look at intimacy at times when the haptic is an infectious vector and thinks of new ways to theorise congregation within the context of imminent civil unrest, a decade of Arab revolutions since 2011, and contemporary struggles with the representative assemblies in American and European contexts.
While performance continues to ontologically transform with the digital rupture taking place since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and as theatres continue to remain shut, as borders continue to be more unjust limiting the mobility of those deemed unfavorable, and with proxy wars in Nagorno-Karabakh or in Yemen challenging how we can think of subjectivities and national frameworks of identity politics, PRICKS gathers thinkers to share their knowledge and to question modes of producing and disseminating knowledge at times of extreme crisis.
This event was curated by Ph.D. Candidate, Adham Hafez.
In Partnership: HaRaKa Platform

https://tisch.nyu.edu/performance-studies/events/ay-2020-2021/pandemics–representation–intimacy–congregation-and-knowledge-