Past Event
The Whitechapel Gallery is committed to making all of our events as accessible as possible for every audience member. Please contact publicprogrammes@whitechapelgallery.org if you would like to discuss a particular request and we will gladly discuss with you the best way to accommodate it.
– Information about access on site at the gallery is available here https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/visit/access/
– This includes information about Lift access; Borrowing wheelchairs & seating; Assistance Animals; Parking; Toilets and baby care facilities; Blind & Partially Sighted Visitors; Subtitles and transcripts; British Sign Language (BSL) and hearing induction loops; Deaf Messaging Service (DMS).
Covid Information
– We encourage all visitors to take a lateral flow test before attending events and to wear a face covering during events.
– For more information on health and safety measures in relation to Covid-19, please see: https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/visit/coronavirus-update/
About This Event
– This event takes place in the Zilkha Auditorium at Whitechapel Gallery
– You must purchase a ticket to attend the event. Concession tickets are available. If you require a Personal Assistant to support your attendance, we can offer them a seat free of charge, but it must be arranged in advance.
– This event is suitable for those over the age of 16
– We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event
– We are unable to provide live closed captioning or CART for this event.
– This event last approximately 1.5 hours. There are no rest breaks currently scheduled during this event.
– An audio recording of the event can be obtained by emailing publicprogrammes@whitechapelgallery.org following the event.
– Content Warning: This event will include some inappropriate language and depictions of nudity.
Transport
– To the best of our knowledge, there are no planned disruptions to local transport on the date of the event.
– Our nearest train station – Aldgate East Underground (1 min) is not wheelchair accessible. The closest wheelchair accessible stations are Whitechapel (15 min), Shoreditch High Street (15 min) or Liverpool Street (15 min).
– Free parking for Blue Badge holders is available at the top of Osborn Street in the pay and display booths for an unlimited period. Spaces are available on a first come, first served basis.
Live Recording
Please note: we audio record all events for the Whitechapel Gallery Archive. This audio material may also be used for our Hear, Now podcast series.
This event is now fully booked. To join the waiting list, please call the box office on 020 7522 7888 from 11am on the day of the event.
Thursday 4 May | 7pm | £5 or £20.16 (includes book pre-order, with a 20% discount)
Join theorists and curators for a panel discussion to launch the latest in the Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies, Speculation.
Engaging with the question of speculation in ways that encompass the artistic, the economic, and the philosophical, with excursions into the literary and the scientific, this collection approaches the theme as a powerful logic of contemporary life whose key instantiations are art and finance. Once social reality becomes speculative and opaque in its own right—risky, algorithmic, and overhauled by networked markets—what becomes of the distinction between not just art and finance but art and life?
Guest editor and art theorist Marina Vishmidt is joined by PiRaMMMida members – anthropologist Michal Murawski and art historian Maria Mileeva – for a wide-ranging discussion chaired by sociologist Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, on what speculation is, and what it means for artistic, curatorial, critical, and institutional practices.
Ticket information
If you select the book pre-order option with your event ticket, your copy will be available for collection from the information desk on the evening.
Marina Vishmidt is a writer and editor. She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Artforum, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, e-flux journal, Australian Feminist Studies, Mousse, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). She is a member of the Marxism in Culture collective and is on the board of the New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society series (Bloomsbury Academic). In 2022, she was the Rudolph Arnheim Visiting Professor in Art History at the Humboldt University in Berlin and will take up a professorship in art theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna in the autumn of 2023. Her research has been funded by the DAAD, the European Social Research Council and the Swedish Research Council.
Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and cities. He is Associate Professor of Critical Area Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His first book, The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed was published by Indiana University Press in 2019; and he is currently completing his second book, Putin’s Paradise: Landscaping Recolonial Russia. He is Director of the FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity; and convenor of PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics), a seminar and events platform based at UCL.
Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou is a sociologist and writer. He is an associate professor at University College London, where he directs the BSc Sociology and leads the Sociology & Social Theory Research Group. Komporozos-Athanasiou is the author of Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World (University of Chicago Press, 2022). His second book, Real Fake: An Intellectual History of Distortion, documents how financial technologies have been shaping our collective understandings of reality and truth. His public writing has appeared in The Boston Review, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, Public Seminar, Roar Magazine, and other publications.
Maria Mileeva is an Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Her research and teaching centre around postcolonial and decolonial narratives of the Russo-Soviet imperial projects and Soviet multinationalism. Maria’s current book project interrogates the linkages between the cultural policies of socialist realism and socialist internationalism in the postwar period. An aspect of this research was published as “Imagined Solidarities: Cairo-Moscow and the Struggle for Realist Art”, in a special issue of Art History entitled “Red Networks: Postwar Art Exchange”, ed. Vivian Li, 45:5 (Nov 2022). Maria is the co-convenor of PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics), UCL.
