Wednesdays, 18 and 25 September, 2 October 2019
6.30 – 9.00pm

Writer and curator Shama Khanna will lead this course considering ways of reimagining the web through curation.

Session 1: Networked Culture
This session will provide a short history of the web and networked culture to date using the website Flatness.eu as a case study. This long-term research and commissioning project addresses the conditions of working semi-digitally whilst exploring the potentials of art and its discourses to express and share subjective and collective desires within the professionalised art world.

Session 2: The Politics of the Screen
The session will ask: how do we look past the supposed neutrality of the screen interface to identify the agents contributing to its evolution as a tool for free expression and experimentation? Comparing different social media platforms’ business models and key artists’ subversion of them we will look towards possible alternatives. We will consider how marginalised artists and practitioners have been able to share knowledge and build solidarity online, to impact the wider art world.

Session 3: Non-linear approaches in image-making and curating
We will use this session to consider our relational positions, trying out non-linear, anti-colonial methodologies which are: embodied and disidentified; ‘too much’ and distasteful; supportive and distributed in order to question traditional understandings of progress and transparency. How can these approaches be applied to community, art and its legacies?

Shama Khanna will lead this course. Khanna is an independent curator, writer and educator from London. Khanna curates flatness.eu and the artists’ moving image series, Non-Linear. Related screening and discussion events have taken place at international venues including: Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen; Chisenhale Gallery and Auto Italia in London; Palais de Tokyo in Paris; Moderna Museet, Malmö; LIMA, Amsterdam; Western Front, Vancouver; Microscope, New York; Rupert, Vilnius; warehouse, Berlin; Syllabus; LUX Scotland and CCA, Glasgow.

Khanna teaches on the Curating Contemporary Art MA programme at the Royal College of Art and the Experimental Film MA at Kingston University. Recent texts have been published by Afterall, NANG, Art Monthly, The White Review, LUX, Documenta 14 and Aorist, co-edited with 7 other writers. Khanna is a Trustee of not/no.w.here cooperative, an Arts Adviser for Jerwood Arts and a curator-in-residence across Afterall and Shades of Noir.

Bursary Places:
In addition to our concessionary rate, we are offering four free bursary places on this course as part of Camden Arts Centre’s commitment to access, equality and diversity. We are specifically interested in applications from people of colour and people on low incomes.

To apply for a bursary place, please send no more than 200 words via email to: livvy.murdoch@camdenartscentre.org briefly outlining your interest in the programme and how it would benefit you.