Publishing in Process: Ownership in Question

Publishing in Process: Ownership in Question
Florian Schneider , Antonia Hirsch, Marina Vishmidt, Matthew Stadler, Marysia Lewandowska , Laurel Ptak
29.2-24.5 at Tensta konsthall

What do notions of production, property, ownership and exchange mean to us right now? At a moment when the distribution between what is privately owned and publicly shared in society is being fundamentally scrutinized, questioned and protested in many parts of the world, such inquiry becomes urgent. Publishing in Process: Ownership in Question is a series of public seminars led by artists and writers attempting to address precisely this question. The program seeks to establish an ongoing context from February to May 2012 to investigate, discuss and recalibrate our working definition of such terms collectively. Special focus will be placed on ownership in relation to publishing.

Antonia Hirsch on Exchange
Thursday 22.3, 18:30

What is the value of the immeasurable and what is its agency?

This seminar is based on ideas that have propelled Hirsch’s The Surplus Library On Affect & Economic Exchange as well as Intangible Economies, a discoursive project she organized and edited with the magazine Fillip. These projects speculatively investigate the interrelated nature of economic exchange and affect. Rather than merely being a construct that describes the fairly abstract flow of goods and capital, an economy could be regarded much more generally as a system in which “exchange” is a dialectical operation that creates representation. The abstract and abstracting function of value becomes a fulcrum in this constellation—both with regard to its functional role in a capitalist economy and in its relevance to an ethics. While affect is to be recognized as a generator and consequence of economic exchange, it is, conversely, also the modality of those exchanges that structure affect, resulting in topographies of the sensible that underpin everyday life. The seminar also specifically considers the circulation of ideas—looking at books as “idea objects.” Libraries, understood as social sites, find their defining characteristic in the circulation of ideas and, similar to capital, the ideas contained in books must circulate to be of, or generate, value.

Antonia Hirsch is an artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her practice consistently engages with systems—economic, geographical, quantitative, syntactic—that underwrite the most basic understandings of the world. She questions the often invisible hierarchies of these epistemological structures by relating them to more familiar territory: embodied experience. Her work has been exhibited at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Power Plant in Toronto, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, among others. Her work can be found in public collections such as that of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry, Miami Beach. Her artist projects and writing have been published in magazines and journals such as Fillip, The Happy Hypocrite, C-magazine, Westcoast Line, and artecontexto. More information on Antonia Hirsch’s practice can be found at antoniahirsch.com.