Performance Dialogues 3: Brian Massumi

Thursday 31 October 2013, 7pm
Zilkha Auditorium, Whitechapel Gallery, London
Tickets £8/£6 concessions. Book here

Announcing the world premiere of the latest filmed dialogue engaging renowned thinkers with questions of performance.

Setting thoughts and conversation in constant motion, Adrian Heathfield and photographer Hugo Glendinning encounter the renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Brian Massumi while walking the streets of Montreal. In this relaxed but intensive exchange Massumi discusses the nature of events, their sensuous and affective forces, immaterial art practices and their critical potential under capitalism, belief and hope and their relation to political agency. Charged ideas are quietly elaborated against a restless backdrop of everyday life.

Brian Massumi is the author of major works in contemporary philosophy including Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. He is also the translator of significant works of French philosophy including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, and Jacques Attali's Noise.

This event is part of Crossovers, a DVD series of artists’ films, documentaries and dialogues generated from the creative research undertaken during Performance Matters. Crossovers includes films which look at the multiple histories of performance art as it engages with mainstream TV, appears on the internet, as subculture, in stand-up comedy, and in avant-garde art; other films explore ideas of performance in contemporary thought, in original filmed conversations with international critics and thinkers working at the forefront of their disciplines. All of the Crossovers films address marginal and untold histories of performance in inventive ways, and raise issues of performance in new directions of contemporary thought. Collectively they ask how performance matters, and to whom, by considering its value to artists working in experimental and popular cultural forms; to academics, philosophers and cultural commentators; and to a diversity of audiences.

In addition to the performance dialogue published with Hélène Cixous, a conversation between Adrian Heathfield and the anthropologist and philosopher Alphonso Lingis has been filmed by Hugo Glendinning, and a further two more filmed dialogues are planned for 2013. The Crossovers DVDs will be published in 2013.