Model for a public space [knot] can be reserved for up to three hours. Please contact Maiko Tanaka at
info@extra-curricular.info.

Special Programming for MPS [knot]:

Two conversations about love and politics in relation to contemporary art practices.

Organized by Christine Shaw and Adrian Blackwell.

1. Love is a force that acts as the productive
motor of every emancipatory politics.
Thursday, March 18, 2010, 7:00 pm

What we are looking for—and what counts in love—is the production of subjectivity and the encounter of singularities, which compose new assemblages and constitute new forms of the common.
-Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

Can love untie the knot of the identitarian politics of the family or the nation? What would it mean to love the stranger? Can love become a material, political force that holds the potential to create new compositions? This conversation will offer new ways of thinking, envisioning and enacting love beyond the stubborn imperative to love those most proximate.

and:

2. Love is an event ignited by the
distance between two polarities.
Thursday, March 25, 2010, 7:00 pm

Love comes to compensate for the lack of a sexual connection
-Jacques Lacan

As parallel, yet separate, discourses, what common features do love and politics share? What is produced in the mismatch, or missed appointment, between the desires of individuals and communities? How are both intimate and political relations inevitably tied to the complex interactions between two bodies? This conversation will focus on the productive contradictions, antagonisms, and antinomies that underlie relations of politics and love.
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Adrian Blackwell is a visual artist and architectural and urban designer whose work has been exhibited at artist-run centres and museums across Canada. He is a member of the Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry and the editorial collective of the journal SCAPEGOAT: Architecture, Landscape and Political Economy. In 2009 he collaborated with Jane Hutton to design and build Dymaxion Sleep for the International Garden Festival in Metis, Quebec. He teaches architecture and urban design at the University of Toronto.

Christine Shaw is a curator, educator, and organizer. Her projects experiment with organizing devices for curatorial practice and creative pedagogy that moves beyond the acoustics of administration towards new operations of relation. Such initiatives include Public Acts 1-29, a trans-local exhibition of 29 artists and collectives across the Trans-Canada Highway. Shaw currently organizes events and exhibitions with Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry, She has lectured widely in Canada, the USA, and Spain and teaches Visual Culture and Communication at the University of Toronto. In 2007 she gained a PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University.