Presented as part of Knot Project Space’s Video in the Public Sphere Speaker Series – a program of lectures that ran from October 2018 – April 2019. The series ran concurrently with a year-long public art commissioning program which culminated in the exhibition Knot Projections 2019: Imagining Publics featuring five large-scale outdoor video projections installed at four sites/surfaces throughout the city. The speaker series stimulated critical thinking during these commissions by bringing to Ottawa five national and international artists, curators and critics who were thinking through questions of publicness, site-specificity and civic engagement in their respective practices. Each delivered a talk in the project space and at times conducted follow-up seminars or workshops with the group of commissioned artists and other artists in the community. Each speaker also offered a reading list of texts related to their ongoing research.
Promiscuous Publicness and the Uncommon In-Common
Firstly, this two-part talk introduced the general framework of Public Art Munich 2018 (directed by Joanna Warsza), a performative series of art and discursive events that took place over a three-month period during the summer. As the theory researcher for the series, Reed discussed some of the concepts concerning our understanding of ‘publicness’ today that helped to contextualize the diverse artistic interventions, each of which occurred in a unique location across the city of Munich. The second part of the talk addressed the transformation of the public sphere in view of networked communications technologies, arguing for the need to grasp publicness today through the logic and political dynamics of the platform.
Patricia Reed
Patricia Reed (b. Ottawa, Canada) is an artist, writer and designer based in Berlin. As an artist, selected exhibitions include those at the Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź; The Future of Demonstration, Vienna; The Museum of Capitalism, Oakland; Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa; Home Works 7, Beirut; Witte de With, Rotterdam; HKW, Berlin; and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart. Recent writings have been published in Post-Memes (Punctum Books); Para-Platforms (Sternberg); Distributed (Open Editions); Xeno-Architecture (Sternberg); e-flux Architecture; _AH Journal; Cold War Cold World (Urbanomic); Moneylab #2 (Inst. of Networked Cultures) and The Neurotic Turn (Repeater Books). With V. Ivanova, she co-curated the 1948 Unbound: Tokens session as a performative symposium with the House of World Cultures team, Berlin (2017), and was a theory researcher for Public Art Munich 2018. Reed is also part of the Laboria Cuboniks (techno-material feminist) working group, whose 2015 manifesto was reissued by Verso Books in 2018.
Related Programming
Exhibition: Volatile Prophecies, Patricia Reed. Oct. 10 – Nov. 17, 2018. Knot Project Space.