VIENNA ART WEEK: Levitate Symposium

Venue: Baroque Suite A, 1st floor MQ – MuseumsQuartier Wien
Free admission
Registration: Q21tours@mqw.at

The symposium creates a conceptual and philosophical framework for the exhibition “Levitate?, focusing on the history of levitation, colonisation of sleep, gravitational aesthetics and lucid decapitation.

Participants: Alexei Penzin, Julijonas Urbonas, Aaron Schuster, Karthik Pandian.
As part of the Vienna Art Week

Alexei Penzin is Reader in Art at the University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton and Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. His major fields of interest are philosophical anthropology, Marxism, Soviet and post-Soviet studies, and the philosophy of art. Penzin has written numerous articles and is author of Rex Exsomnis: Sleep and Subjectivity in Capitalist Modernity (2012).

Julijonas Urbonas is an artist, designer, researcher, engineer, lecturer, writer, Vice-Rector for Art at Vilnius Academy of Arts, and PhD student in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art, London. His work was featured at Design Shanghai 2013, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, 2013; Oneiric Hotel, Water tower in LX Factory, Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Lisbon, Portugal, 2013; Urban Sounds, House of Electronic Arts, Basel, Switzerland, 2013, among others. His recent projects include Oneiric Hotel and Gravitational Dream Lab

Aaron Schuster is a writer, philosopher and currently a theory instructor at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. His doctoral dissertation, The Trouble With Pleasure: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, examined the concept of pleasure in the history of philosophy, concluding with Freud and Lacan. He is currently preparing a book on Deleuze and psychoanalysis, and a study of the history of levitation in twentieth century thought and culture.

Karthik Pandian is an artist, who also teaches at the Bennington College, USA. He has held solo exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Bétonsalon, Paris; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis and White Flag Projects, St. Louis amongst others. His work was featured in the inaugural LA Biennial at the Hammer Museum and La Triennale: Intense Proximity at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris as well as in group exhibitions such as Film as Sculpture at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Repertory at the Palazzo Cavour, Torino and the 4th Marrakech Biennale.