Artists Space presents a series of four talks and discussions led by Suhail Malik, writer and Co-Director of the Critical Studies Program at Goldsmiths, London, based on his research and writing on the conditions and shortcomings of contemporary art. Beginning on Friday May 3 and extending over a six-week period, the format provides scope for sustained dialogue and responses to Malik’s propositions. Each session will involve the participation of guest artists and writers as respondents.

This series proposes that for art to have substantial and credible traction on anything beyond or larger than itself, it is necessary to exit contemporary art. An exit that requires the revocation of contemporary art’s logic of escape. If the demand here has an appeal and deserves attention—and it need not since the current constitution of contemporary art serves very well the aesthetic, intellectual, and sociological forms that sustain prevalent power in and through the art field, including all prevalent forms of critique—then this demand must be placed not just on the art itself but also on the ideas it invokes, as well as the social structures and ethos sustaining this configuration. The question then is what this art other to contemporary art’s paradigm of escape can be? What other kind of social structure and distribution of power than that prevalent in contemporary art would support it? What should an art that is not contemporary art do? Of what would its traction consist and amount to?

Friday, May 3, 7:30pm 
1. Exit not escape 
In which the necessity for art’s exit from contemporary art is derived.

Friday, May 17, 7pm 
2. The problem with contemporary art is not the contemporary 
In which contemporary art’s attribution of its limitations to the contemporary is disputed.

Friday, May 31, 7pm 
3. A history of negations 
In which the exit from contemporary art is shown to not be art’s negation.

Friday, June 14, 7pm 
4. Institution 
In which art's avowal of its institutionality is shown to grant art the traction contemporary art seeks but must deprive itself of.

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