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Berkeley at the Venice Biennale Research Pavilion

Five UC Berkeley faculty are presenting on June 10-11 in a symposium on the topic of "Exclusive Access: On the Dynamics and Vocabularies of Co-Option, Care and the Subaltern", at the Venice Biennale Research Pavilion on Giudecca Island.

Organized by the Platform for Artistic Research Sweden (PARSE), this event brings together artists, curators, researchers, and activists to consider the question of how certain modes of promoting "access" can operate as de facto modes of exclusion. The two-day symposium will focus on institutional and epistemological exclusions, colonial and master paradigms, and institutional racism, in addition to forms of exclusion produced through language as well as social, embodied, and discursive practices. 

Abigail de Kosnik is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment at the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. In collaboration with Benjamin de Kosnik, she is presenting their project, alpha60, an investigation into global media piracy using a data science tool they developed with funding from a BCNM Faculty Seed Grant. Alpha60 maps show that institutional barriers to access of media content adversely affects users all over the world, not just in the Global South, and therefore demonstrates how piracy operates as a universal, rather than localized, hack for access. 

Allan deSouza is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art Practice. His presentation, Critique as Radical Prototype, investigates the social values and artistic truth claims of terms commonly used to discuss art, such as how do schools define and evaluate "good" art, in what ways evaluations of "quality" are discriminatory, and how do schools balance "quality" with equality. Moreover, by examining the relationship between artworks and viewers, he seeks to provide a critical language for how artworks can be rethought and re-experienced.

Suzanne Guerlac is a Professor in the Department of French. Her presentation focuses on the concept of livingness, the act or process of living. Livingness implies ecological and ontological models of interactions across levels from the most simple beings to the most complex ones, as well as a political model, stipulating both interdependence and diversity towards the ends of sustainability and vitality. In the face of environmental damage and nationalist politics limiting stakeholders along racial, religious, and economic lines, livingness acknowledges that all living beings are in this together, and that the very conditions of livingness are at stake. 

Seth Holmes is the Associate Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology, Chair of Medical Anthropology, and Founder and Co-Chair of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine. His presentation, Critical Care, focuses on the ways in which care in the fields of health and art can include, foster, and reproduce exclusion, inequality, and hierarchy. He explores forms of exclusion and hierarchies of deservingness in health care especially in relation to im/migrant and refugee people, racialized individuals, and non-normative bodies in terms of gender and ability, while also exploring alternative practices of care in biomedicine and in performance.

Shannon Jackson is the Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts + Design, Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Chair in the Humanities, and Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric, and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her presentation, Public (Re) Assembly, dissects the concept of assembly in public and how it is resonant, multivalent, and productively fraught in the current moment. Joining the histories and debates of social, aesthetic, and technological concepts of assembly, this lecture considers public artists and public servants who have endeavored to re-activate public sector systems and public sector sensibilities. 

In conjunction with the Exclusive Access symposium, The Research Pavilion is hosting their inaugural exhibition, "You Gotta Say Yes to Another Access", curated by Jan Kaila and Henk Slager, presenting various ways in which Nordic doctoral students view topical themes such as transparency in art, geopolitics, and new visual technologies. Included in this art exhibition are artist team Bull.Miletic, visual artists Synne T. Bull and Dragan Miletic, who will be joining us on campus next Fall (2017) as part of an artist-in-residence program, co-sponsored by Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society and the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley.