Setting in Motion

Setting in Motion is curated and edited by Susan Jahoda and Jesal Kapadia for Rethinking Marxism, Volume 18 number 4 (October 2006) and as a screening event at the Sixth International Conference, October 2006, held at the  University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

Setting in Motion is the title for collaborative and individual projects in film, animation, video, and texts. In curating these works we draw from Jacques Ranciere’s work on the politics of aesthetics. Ranciere describes a logic that has situated and, paradoxically, grounded art’s potential for disagreement or dissensus. Thus, as art becomes increasingly about issues described as occupying politics, it becomes less polemical. What is called for is a reshaping of the space that artistic practice occupies, enabling political art to be politically effective. Together, these projects share an affective view of a global socio-political landscape, referenced through metaphor and fiction, perception, psychoanalysis, and corporeality. They address a broad range of content, utilizing diverse strategies, repetitions, reactualizations, restagings, and reenactments within the genres of experimental, underground, and activist media.

As both curators and participating artists, we have included works that individually and collectively seek an alternative economy of vision. This imaginary reconfigures political artistic practice as embodied visuality, in relation to both history and contemporary culture.

Link to Setting in Motion Rethinking Marxism Volume 18 Number 4 (October 2006), PDF

List of Contributing Artists and Writers

Ayreen Anastas, Stephen Andrews, Greg Bordowitz, Moyra Davey, Ashley Hunt, Susan Jahoda, Jesal Kapadia, Lin and Lam, Ulrike Müller, Jenny Perlin, Emily Roysdon, Jason Simon, Speculative Archive (Julia Meltzer and David Thorne), James Pei-Mun Tsang and Yates McKee.