Conference times/dates:

• Friday 16 June, 12.00 - Sunday 18 June, 16.30

Registration:

• Registration closed on 21st May (but all presentations are open to visitors to ARoS as long as there are seats available)

Venue:

• ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aros Allé, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark

The research project The Contemporary Condition at Aarhus University presents the conference The Contemporary Contemporary: Representations and Experiences of Contemporaneity in and through Contemporary Arts Practice, June 16-18, 2017, at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Ina Blom (Oslo), Raqs Media Collective (New Delhi), Dexter Sinister (New York/Liverpool), Knut Ebeling (Berlin), and Peter Osborne (London).

The conference includes conference papers by AA Animate Assembly, Rosa Barba, Sabin Bors, Roy Brand, Mihaela Brebenel, Rebecca Carson, Simon Roy Christensen, John Dummett, Nicola Foster, Catherine Grant, Christian Grueny, Nicola Guastamacchia, Ayesha Hameed, David Hodge, Erik Granly Jensen, Rahma Khazam, Mara-Johanna Kölmel, Tue Løkkegaard, Andrew Prior, Scott William Raby, Vincent Roumagnac, Judith Schwarzbart, Trine Friis Sørensen, Tomasz Szczepanek, Anette Vandsø, Riccardo Venturi, Jason Waite, Birk Weiberg, and Alexander Wilson. Additionally it includes the presentation of artworks by Dexter Sinister, Scandinavian Institute of Computational Vandalism, Fergus Daly & Katherine Waugh, and Winnie Soon.

The conference programme is available for download as a PDF here. 

What constitutes the contemporary present? The contemporary present seems to be characterized by con-temporaneity. However contemporaneity is not to be understood ahistorically as simply the state of belonging to the same time or period, or existing or occurring at the same time, but rather as the coming together of a multitude of different times and temporalities in the same historical present. This is the contemporary contemporary. [...]

The purpose of the conference is to investigate and discuss this phenomenon and/or concept of contemporaneity and how it has come and still comes into being, and, not least, how it relates to and appears in contemporary art. How does it affect our experience(s) of time and contemporary formations of subjectivity? What are the consequences for concepts of history and for understandings of time itself? For art history? What is the role of media, and planetary-scale computation in the production of contemporaneity? How does it relate to current forms of capitalism? What are the implications for social imagination? Image-politics? Artistic practice? With the overall aim of analysing, articulating, and discussing contemporaneity and its relationship to contemporary art, paper proposals and artistic contributions address these issues.