SONIC ACTS Academy
23–25.02.2018
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Examining artistic knowledge at the two-day Symposium

On Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 February, the Academy's two-day Symposium will take place at Dansmakers, where numerous artists and thinkers will present their practices and perspectives. Sonic Acts Academy is a new platform for speculation and reflection, focusing on critical examination of knowledge production in the field of art. It is an experimental setting free of institutional pressure and privileged classrooms, and it enables us to test and quickly react to changes in both form and content of what we should know. The Academy opts for an inclusive community; it involves those who resist or without access to the privileged spaces of academia. Today, more than ever, it is necessary to address the function of art and the artist and to expand the conversation to include the processes of the ‘decolonisation of thought’ – certainly one of the most critical factors in artistic practices today. By presenting artistic investigations and research – the processes that challenge the notions of the petrified world – Sonic Acts aims to include various dynamic perspectives to the podium. Together, we need to rethink how education can again become a tool for discovery and growth, for development and emancipation, and not just a machine that disseminates dominant modes of thinking. On Saturday, Susan Schuppli – who returns to Sonic Acts in 2018 as our symposium respondent – will introduce us to the Academy’s challenge of ‘unpacking the processes of artistic knowledge’. Gathering together threads that emerge during the symposium, Schuppli will be offering her thoughts and contextualising the talks and presentations as they relate back, in multiple ways, to the task of unpacking the processes of artistic knowledge. Among the many lectures, panel talks, and artist presentations, Logistical Nightmares will explore the increasing ubiquity and prominence of logistics as a model for organising social life and politics at a global scale; Birgit Bachler will discuss the challenges and opportunities of creating and evaluating artworks and design artefacts within a more-than-human context; and Sasha Litvintseva and Daniel Mann will attempt to define the assemblage of forces that converge around sinkholes and to propose an adequate political language that might allow us to address the presence of absence. On Sunday, the symposium delves beneath the surface of the everyday to expose the possibility and necessity of alternative perspectives. Through shared journeys and personal narratives, both imagined and real, we find ways for knowledge production to be challenged, decomposed, and rethought. More information about the Symposium can be found via the Programme page.
Sonic Acts Festival 2017 at De Brakke Grond. Photo by Pieter Kers.
Susan Schuppli at Sonic Acts Academy 2016. Photo by Pieter Kers.


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