In the first of a new annual LUX seminar programme, REGROUPING will look to the very structure and historical material of LUX to self-reflexively question how we, as a community and as an organisation, can continue to support a new generation of artists, writers and curators as we move forward into the present.
In 2016 LUX celebrated the 50th anniversary of its predecessor organisation, the London Film-makers’ Co-operative. Now we are thinking about what kind of organisation we need to be for the next 50 years. LUX is no longer artist-run or a co-operative but those values are still important to us and artists will always be at the centre of everything we do. We acknowledge and celebrate the subjectivities that have and will continue to shape our organisation both internally and externally. We want to ensure that our organisation and ideals remain connected to the visceral emotional, intellectual and material realities of lived experience. To define ourselves less by what we are against and more through the conversations we can make together.
This five day seminar programme marks the opening of LUX’s new building in Waterlow Park. REGROUPING will include a series of presentations, workshops and screenings with artist and writer Ghislaine Leung to generate new discussions on the relation between artists and organisations today and, through this, the current cultural politics in which we live and work.
Every time we speak of the “institution” as other than “us,” we disavow our role in the creation and perpetuation of its conditions. We avoid responsibility for, or action against, the everyday complicities, compromises, and censorship-above all, self-censorship-which are driven by our own interests in the field and the benefits we derive from it. It’s not a question of inside or outside, or the number and scale of various organized sites for the production, presentation, and distribution of art. It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.
Andrea Fraser ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’ Artforum. New York: Sep 2005
If the first wave of institutional critique, criticism produced integration into the institution, the second one only achieved integration into representation. But in the third phase the only integration which seems to be easily achieved is the one into precarity. And in this sense we can nowadays answer the question concerning the function of the institution of critique as follows: while critical institutions are being dismantled by neoliberal institutional criticism, this produces an ambivalent subject which develops multiple strategies for dealing with its dislocation. It is on the one side being adapted to the needs of ever more precarious living conditions. On the other, there seems to have hardly ever been more need for institutions which could cater to the new needs and desires that this constituency will create.
Hito Steyerl, ‘The Institution of Critique’
European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 01 2006
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Programme
Sun 23 Apr:
2pm – 8pm, REGROUPING: Propositions
Mon 24 Apr:
2.30pm – 5.30pm, Workshop: STRUCTURAL TAUTOLOGY
7pm, Screening: ARGUMENT
Tue 25 Apr:
2.30pm – 5.30pm, Workshop: NEW LABOURS
7pm, Screening: REGROUPING
Wed 26 Apr:
2.30pm – 5.30pm, Workshop: NEEDS & DESIRES
7pm, Screening: DIALOGUES or A Waist Is A Terrible Thing To Mind
Thu 27 Apr:
2.30pm – 5.30pm, Workshop: CONSTITUTIONS
7pm, Screening: THE SIXTH YEAR
