Implications. Theories and new perspectives on art studies
Implications is a roundtable on current humanities research with an interdisciplinary orientation that PASS has been organising since 2023. We are particularly interested in recent literature where critical theory can meet insights from a wide range of disciplines and can both be informed by and inform the development of knowledge through artistic, museum and curatorial practice. We meet physically - not online - three times in spring and three times in autumn, three hours each time. The conversations are in English and always take place on Wednesdays at 13-16. The venue is University of Copenhagen, Søndre Campus. Participants enrolled as PhD students receive ECTS points for attending three sessions. But everyone is welcome, regardless of profession and background, and we are happy when we manage to attract mixed groups where several types of professional experience and practice are present in the room. The discussions revolve around what implications the books we read might have for the way we think and work, whether we are visual artists, publishers, university researchers, consultants, urban planners or something else entirely.
In Implications, we basically read an entire non-fiction book each time. If you don't have time to read it all or just want to participate as a listener, that's fine too. But the discussions always benefit from participants bringing their own work experiences and perspectives into play so that what we read is related to specific issues and life experiences.
Target group
The seminar is open to PhD students and other early-stage researchers in the fields of art history, visual culture and practice-based research. Max. participants 15.
Purpose
- To introduce new, transdisciplinary perspectives on arts and practice-based research through shared reading and discussion of key works by authors in fields such as geography, geology, sociology, black studies, and anthropology.
- To allow participants to discuss their own research projects considering current theoretical and analytical positions and in light of urgent issues.
Course teacher
Professor Mikkel Bogh
Registration
Please register via email to pass@hum.ku.dk latest one week before each session.
ECTS credits
- 2 ECTS (for attending three times)
- 4 ECTS (for attending all six sessions)
Workload
Presence total 18 (9) hours + preparation total 94 (47) hours.
Programme
Autumn 2025
9 October. Implications: Fred Moten: In the Break. The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003)
6 November. Implications: Achille Mbembe: Out of the Dark Night. Essays on Decolonization (2021)
11 December. Implications: Françoise Vergès: A Programme of Absolute Disorder. Decolonizing the Museum (2023)
This semester’s Implications reading seminar engages three seminal works that, from different vantage points, address the urgent task of decolonizing art practices and institutions. Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003) explores the entanglement of performance, improvisation, and resistance in the history of Black artistic and intellectual production, proposing an aesthetic that is inseparable from political struggle. Achille Mbembe’s Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (2021) reflects on the unfinished project of decolonization in the 21st century, calling for new forms of planetary consciousness and freedom beyond the colonial matrix of power. Françoise Vergès’ A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum (2023) offers a sharp critique of the museum as a colonial institution and sketches disruptive strategies for transforming it into a space of justice, plurality, and repair. Together, these three books invite us to think about aesthetics not only as a field of representation, but as a mode of action - reimagining how art, institutions, and publics might be reshaped in the wake of colonial histories.
Every time at KU in room: 24.4.11 from 13-16
Past activities
Spring 2025
Session 1 (26 February): Saidiya Hartman, Lose your Mother, 2007
Session 2 (9 April): Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, 2019.
Session 3 (11 June): Discussion with Saidiya Hartman
Every time at KU in room: 4A.0.26 from 13-16
Autumn 2024
Session 1 (30 October): Fred Moten / Stephano Harney: The Undercommons, 2016.
Session 2 (27 November): Tina M. Campt: Listening to Images, 2017.
Session 3 (18 December): Christina Sharpe: Ordinary Notes, 2023.
Every time at KU in room: 21.3.04 from 13-16
Spring 2024
Session 1 (6 March): : Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 2015.
Session 2 (8 May): Sara Ahmed: Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, 2006.
Session 3 (19 June): Dipesh Chakrabarty: The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, 2021.
Every time at KU in room: 16.03.09 from 13-16
Autumn 2023
Session 1 (11 October): Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, 2004.
Session 2 (15 November): Doreen Massey, for space, 2005.
Session 3 (13 December): Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 2018.