Dear readers, we’re glad to invite you to our last Reading Group of the year on Wednesday, 29th November, 4-6pm. The final session of 2023 is led and co-hosted by two guests – artist-researcher Mireia c. Saladrigues and curator / writer Irina Mutt.

This reading session will activate diverse fragments of texts and articles, while addressing the ideas of genius, disappearing vs emerging, rupture and disrupting. We will intertwine the different materials with history, fiction and personal stories about how to thrive, emerge and endure in the art world (while not being a white male genius).
The idea is to dive through fragments and pieces, digital or printed texts to find materials to hang on, in attempts of resistance.  


During the Reading Group, we will be introducing fragments from several publications:

• El Dorado Commission by Scott Elliot
  An extension of Scott Elliott’s visual practice where he has acted as a facilitator for those who have incomplete or abandoned artworks, the text follows the journey of an individual acting as a conduit for one of the dead American romantic painters.
• The Hologram by Cassie Thorton
  In an era when capitalism leaves so many to suffer and to die, with neoliberal ‘self-care’ offering little more than a bandaid, how can we take health and care back into our hands?
• Huaco retrato by Gabriela Wienner
  Alone in an ethnographic museum in Paris, the writer is confronted with her unusual inheritance, tracing a legacy of colonial violence, abandonment, love and race.

Additionally, we will be linking the selected publications to an article by art historian and critic, Linda Nochlin ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, that explores an understanding of how systemic social, cultural, and political barriers barred women from partaking in the art world in numerous ways. You can read it HERE.

This reading group and work with Irina Mutt is part of a reflection for a future book ‘Martellata’ that will be launched in 2024-2025.

Reading Group is a chance to meet informally and discuss ideas and topics that arise from selected publications, sharing knowledge and being together. The Reading Groups are free and open to all. No previous experience or knowledge of the books required. 

Bios

Mireia c. Saladrigues
Mireia c. Saladrigues is an artist and researcher, or rather, an artist-researcher. Her projects build on extensive inquiries while the particular research methodologies are based on her artistic practice. She defends that the artistic research is fundamentally different from the traditional academic research, since the first is interrelated with the creative processes and the particular languages of art, incorporating aspects that cannot be directly addressed from formal knowledge or written language. Saladrigues is a candidate of the International Doctorate (DFA) of the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of the Arts Helsinki. Behaving Unconventionally in Gallery Settings documents cases of (human and non-human) alteration in cultural practices, proposing an artistic and theoretical re-reading of inconformity.

Irina Mutt
Irina Mutt is a curator and writer from Barcelona currently living in Helsinki. Her practice is based on different strategies and tools for the research and distribution of artistic projects that often come from non-academic sources and references such as fanzines and comics, video games or in areas such as representation of intimacy, affections and desires of non-hegemonic identities.

This Reading Group session is funded by Taike.