The Research Centre for Identities, Politics and Cultures – IPAK.Center has the honour to announce the public lecture of prof. Jack Halberstam “On Behalf of Failure”, to be held on 20 August, at 7.30 p.m., at the Faculty of Media and Communications – SINGIDUNUM, Belgrade.

In this lecture prof. Halberstam will open discussion on the relevance of thinking failure as what prevents reinstating the zero sum logics of success. The lecture will further ask what are the politics of failure and how might failure offer us a methodology for queer studies, as well as does failure offer an epistemological framework that allows for different distributions of merit, value and relevance. Without proposing to answer all of these questions, prof. Halberstam wants to take a stab at a few of them as a way of beginning a conversation about failure, its uses, its abuses, the angle it offers us on human action and inaction and the potential dangers of thinking with and through failure as they are unevenly distributed across populations. The lecture will tackle 3 sections each framed by a question, explained by way of an example and summarized in relation to some counter-intuitive lessons about life, loss and the exquisite texture of losing.

The lecture of Jack Halberstam is integral part of the public programme of the Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics, organized by IPAK.Center, to be held in Belgrade from 18-24 August. His lecture and engagement in the frames of the Summer School has been supported by the US Embassy in Serbia.

Jack Halberstam is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of five books including: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), Female Masculinity (1998), In A Queer Time and Place (2005), The Queer Art of Failure (2011), and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (2012). Halberstam written articles that have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and collections, and has co-edited a number of anthologies including Posthuman Bodies with Ira Livingston (1995) and a special issue of Social Text with Jose Munoz and David Eng titled “What’s Queer About Queer Studie s Now?”. The main topics of interest for Jack Halberstam include: queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film, animation. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book titled “The Wild”, on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture, the visual representation of anarchy and the intersections between animality, the human and the environment.

Jack Halberstam "On Behalf of Failure"

The Research Centre for Identities, Politics and Cultures – IPAK.Center has the honour to announce the setting of the exhibition Distitled: Pieta, on 18 August, at 8 p.m., in the Cultural Centre REX, Belgrade. The exhibition will be open for visitors till 22nd of August.

Distitled: Pieta is the latest video work of the contemporary Macedonian artist Velimir Zernovski, filmed and produced in collaboration with IPAK.Centar. The video is divided in tree scenes. Inspired by the great Michelangelo`s Pieta the central scene shows a man mourning over a body, creating an atmosphere of stretched time as presented in slow motion. The video produces affective intensity that overflows and plugs in the viewer, bringing to the forth questions about loss, mourning, melancholia and futurity.

The shifting affective spectrum of the video haunts our contemporary political horizon, and make us face the grieving experiences and losses, and all their derivative backward and negative feelings that disrupt the neoliberal biopolitical demands as the means for adjusting ourselves to the happiness machine of capitalism. At the same time the menacing problem of loss is grafted onto its unavowed other, the queer losses and dispossessions, the unwritten history of unevenly distributed vulnerability that uproots the heteronormative frames of recognisability and intelligibility.

If there is a possibility for us to say ‘we’ while being affectively sucked into the unbearable atmosphere of Zernovski’s video installation, this possibility can only be found in the our common experience of exposure and being-in-relation, the double edged experience of vulnerability and transformativity intersecting through the body and our bodily life. Zernovski’s project prompts us to reimagine a political horizon starting exactly from this place where we are all undone one by each other and where we share loss and vulnerability.

The opening of the exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Cultural Center REX, and is part of the Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics, organized by IPAK.Center, to be held in Belgrade from 18-24 August.

For detailed information please contact Anđela Čeh at: andjela.ceh@ipakcentar.org or on Tel: 0616891596.

The Research Centre for Identities, Politics and Cultures – IPAK.Center has the honour to announce the public lecture of prof. Tomasz Sikora “Living with an Alien; or, (Again) Against Representation”, to be held on 23 August, at 7.30 p.m., at the Faculty of Media and Communications – SINGIDUNUM, Belgrade.

In this lecture prof. Sikora will propose a politics of queer that draws from (theorizations of) art and aesthetics rather than from the liberal-legalistic vocabulary of recognition, representation and rights. Just as an avant-garde artist, by creating modes of signification and relationality that do not fall into a pre-existing framework of legibility, addresses a (virtual) audience that is yet to come (and thus faces a high risk of failure, as the audience may never come to materialize, after all), so – Sikora will argue – queer activism (and queer theory) performs a politics that is “not the terrain of the representation of a people […] but of their creation.” Referring to the ways in which art never ceases to create (ontologically) “queer objects” (with a broad definition of object), Sikora will explore the ways in which queer politics never ceases to create queer practices, subjectivities and socialities beyond the current liberal-humanist epistemological normativities.

The lecture of Jack Halberstam is integral part of the public programme of the Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics, organized by IPAK.Center, to be held in Belgrade from 18-24 August.

Tomasz Sikora is Assistant Professor at the English Department of the Pedagogical University of Cracow (Poland). In the years 2000-2006 he co-organized, together with Tomasz Basiuk and Dominika Ferens, a series of conferences that introduced queer theory into the Polish academic landscape. Three volumes of essays collected some of the work inspired by the conferences: Odmianyodmienca/A Queer Mixture (2002), Parametrypozadania [Parameters of Desire] (2006), and Out Here: Local and International Perspectives in Queer Studies (2006). The collaboration between Sikora, Basiuk and Ferens found continuation in the creation and management of the online journal of queer studies Inter Alia (published in English and Polish), which has run six issues so far. Sikora also published Virtually Wild: Wilderness, Technology and the Ecology of Mediation (2003) and Bodies Out of Rule: Transversal Readings in Canadian Literature and Film (2014), as well as co-edited a number of volumes on American and Canadian studies, including Embracing Otherness: Canadian Minority Discourses in Transcultural Perspectives (2010) and Towards Critical Multiculturalism: Dialogues Between/Among Canadian Diasporas (2011). His main areas of research and publication include critical and queer theory, interdisciplinary American and Canadian studies, political philosophy, ecocriticism, and gothicism. He is also a part-time blogger, journalist and amateur photographer.

Przemek Branas 2014

Tomasz Sikora Open Lecture 2014 - "Living with an Alien; or, (Again) Against Representation"