Power, Mimicry, and the Institutional ‘Frame’: Is there a way to think outside the institution while being embedded within it?

Long interested in mimicking power structures and embedding projects into institutions in order to reflect on or critique their hierarchies, artist and UC Berkeley Professor Stephanie Syjuco will discuss the problematics that arise from being housed or sponsored by the very institution a project seeks to examine. She will be joined by Shirin Towfiq, who along with a social practice class at Berkeley formed ART SCHOOL X as a way to provide alternatives to the existing curriculum. The students’ difficulties in developing a framework outside of the institution, their reiteration of the system, and the project’s “collapse” will be the starting point for a group discussion around these questions: How do the very questions framed under the umbrella of the institutional “problem” come to conscript the project results, and how can leveraging existing institutional resources be productively detourned?

 Conversation series events are limited to 30 participants on a first-come, first serve basis.