PUBLIC PROGRAM

The Failures of Electronic Discipline: A symposium of gender and sexual outlaws

TIME

4–7 p.m. May 11, 2019

LOCATION

Psychiatric Hospital Museum of San Servolo, Venice, Italy

HOW TO GET THERE

Isola di San Servolo can be reached in 10 minutes by vaporetto water bus no. 20, leaving from the ACTV San Zaccaria dock (San Marco), which is in front of Palazzo delle Prigioni, approximately every half hour, depending on the time of day.
Please check the time table here: http://actv.avmspa.it/it

The aim of this public program is to open a debate on the exhibition, fostering dialogue between international artists, critics, and visitors, and giving a discursive and performative context to Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6. The event, taking place two days after the opening of the exhibition, will be located at the historic site of the Psychiatric Hospital Museum on San Servolo island. Ten minutes away by boat from San Marco and with the Prigioni in sight, San Servolo was—from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the promulgation of the Basaglia Law in the 1970s—an island-hospital dedicated to the segregation and treatment of “mental illness.” This categorization included at the time a vast array of gender-, sexual-, and class-excluded subjects such as “repugnant poor people wandering the city,”“unruly women,”“hysterics,” and “deviants.” Thus, San Servolo provides a platform to “look at” the building and history of the Prigioni from the point of view of another disciplinary institution that historically confined sexual and gender difference. It is also a place from which to reflect on the contemporary transformation of architectures of confinement and their expansion, multiplication, and miniaturization through digital technologies of surveillance, control, and communication. Between fiction and history, critical theory and micropolitical utopia, the event takes the shape of a queer symposium involving not only contemporary critics and artists but also reviving some of the historical and contemporary characters and legal cases (including Sade, Casanova, and Foucault) which have inspired 3x3x6. Bringing all of them together into an unexpected encounter, this event seeks to break the limits between representation and action, between critical theory and art, but also between the critique of the prison complex and the invention of technologies of freedom.

PARTICIPANTS

Enrico Wey as CASANOVA X, Performer

Paul B. Preciado, Curator

Félix Maritaud as FOUCAULT X, Performer

Audrey Tang, Poetician and Taiwan’s Digital Minister

Matthew Fuller, Media Theorist

Shu Lea Cheang, Artist

Liz Rosenfeld as SADE X, Performer

Jack Halberstam, Cultural and Gender Theorist

Khaleb Brooks as D X, Performer

Aérea Negrot as B X, Performer and Musicia

(in order of appearance)

Exhibition Talk: Taiwan’s Representation at the 58th Venice Biennale

TIME

2pm-4:30 p.m. Nov 27, 2018

LOCATION

Taipei Fine Arts Museum B2, Auditorium

DEMOCRACY IN TRANSITION: FREEDOM, ART, AND COOPERATIVE ACTION IN THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
SHU LEA CHEANG, PAUL B. PRECIADO AND AUDREY TANG IN CONVERSATION

SPEAKERS

Shu Lea Cheang | Artist to Represent Taiwan at the 58th Venice Biennale, Internet Art Pioneer
Paul B. Preciado | Curator of Taiwan’s Representation at the 58th Venice Biennale, Philosopher
Audrey Tang | Internationally Acclaimed Social Innovator