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This text was performed at Royal College of Art, Visual Cultures Lecture Series: Entanglement
Research Group. 25 January 2018 | 6.30pm – 9pm with Leo Costner / Amir George / Manu
Luksch / Martin Reinhart / UBERMORGEN. Organised by: Johnny Golding, Aura Satz, Margarita
Gluzberg and Nigel Rolfe.
The Lecture is based on a Invocation by UBERMORGEN, held at HKW Berlin for the ‘1948
Unbound’ Conference, Nov 30–Dec 2, 2017, Switches Discursive installation, Thursday, Nov 30,
7 pm, with Morehshin Allahyari, Marie-Luise Angerer, Elie Ayache, Anna Echterhölter, Thomas
Feuerstein, Alexander R. Galloway, Johnny Golding, Orit Halpern, Marian Kaiser, Giuseppe
Longo, Gerald Nestler, Julian Oliver, Sophia Roosth, Sarah Sharma, Felix Stalder,
UBERMORGEN
The PhD dissertation takes art as enactments of different theories of materialism – both new materialism(s) and historical materialism, to provide conceptual tools through which both material agents and socio-political processes could be understood in emergent, relational and dynamic ways. The dissertation examines the politics of language and how the materiality of language could transgress political boundaries by focusing on Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s works. The problematisation of language as a signifier continues with bioart works engaging with DNA technology from Paul Vanouse and Spiess/Strecker, which also challenge organic death and the capture of life under necropolitics with hypernature. This is followed by an analysis of Geumhyung Jeong’s choreographic works with machines, which highlight the relational co-emergence with the man-machine assemblage. The dissertation ends with Ho Tzu Nyen and Royce Ng’s transhistorical works on Southeast and East Asian modernity, with the figures of the tiger and the vampire embodying the free flow of desire in capitalism. Traversing different histories and geographies while interweaving diverse topics including animism, technology, colonialism and Confucianism, the core question remains the same throughout the dissertation: to locate the agency in the material and the (in)dividual bodies.