Weaponising Speculation: Exhibition

national | arts and media | event notice Thursday February 21, 2013 01:39 by Michael O'Rourke - DUST (Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought)

The Weaponising Speculation exhibition is an accompaniment to the conference of the same name organized by D.U.S.T (Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought), an art/theory collective recently founded by Michael O'Rourke, Paul Ennis and Fintan Neylan.

D.U.S.T (Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought) presents:

Weaponising Speculation Exhibition

VENUE: BLOCKT, Smithfield Chambers, Smithfield Square, Dublin 7
OPENING: Saturday 2 March
TIME: 8 pm-10pm
COST: Free
Weaponising Speculation continues March 3 (6-8pm); March 4-March 6 (11am-6pm) and March 7 (11am-8pm)

http://blockt.ie/BLOCK_T/HOME/HOME.html
http://dublindust.wordpress.com/

Exhibiting Artists:

Alan Boardman
Teresa Gillespie
Ciara McMahon
Rob Murphy
Alice Rekab
John Ryan
Andy Weir

Speculation: to think the world of experience, beyond such experience. But how to seize this reality, how to speculate upon that which the academy and the art world has prohibited? Before the storm the para-academic and the artist need to equip themselves. Not only with tools, but weapons. Weaponizing Speculation is an exploration of the various expressions of art and theory operative in the elsewheres, the shafts and tunnels of the para-academy; an expedition armoured with techniques of thought that go beyond the institution, beyond the linguistic, beyond the human, to the far reaches of the incommensurate and the extinct; it builds a conceptual arsenal which will aid thinkers in the siege to reclaim the real.

The Weaponising Speculation exhibition is an accompaniment to the conference of the same name organized by D.U.S.T (Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought), an art/theory collective recently founded by Michael O'Rourke, Paul Ennis and Fintan Neylan. The primary aim of DUST is to stage dialogues between disparate groups of people—artists, aestheticians, philosophers, non-philosophers, theorists—who find themselves at the fringes of academic institutions and disciplines and who are also broadly concerned with speculative realism. “Weaponising Speculation” features paintings, sculptures, video and sound works by seven artists who are also speaking at the conference which will take place at Independent Colleges on March 2nd and 3rd. The show is a loose collocation of works which cluster around a shared set of interests including speculative realism, object oriented ontology, post-continental philosophy, new materialisms, systems theory, transcendental nihilism, and para-academic practices.

The exhibition will conclude with a conversation amongst the artists about how the exhibition as a “coreless experiment” isonomic with the Weaponising Speculation conference has succeeded or failed and will also consider the future trajectories of speculative thought and art/theory.