Curator’s Perspective: Jochen Volz

As part of ICI’s Curator’s Perspective—an itinerant public discussion series featuring national and international curators—Jochen Volz will speak about the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, entitled ‘Incerteza Viva (Live Uncertainty)'. This biennial sets out to reflect on the current conditions of life and strategies offered by contemporary art to harbor or inhabit uncertainties.

For his Curator’s Perspective talk, Volz will present on the development for the São Paulo Biennial, opening in September 2016. In accordance with issues that drive contemporary artistic production, Volz will discuss cosmological thinking, ambient and collective intelligence, systemic and natural ecologies as themes of ‘Incerteza Viva (Live Uncertainty)’.

Inspired by disciplines ranging from thermodynamics to the theory of information, Volz begins with the concepts of “uncertainty” and “entropy” to consider a system’s proximity to equilibrium or disorder, keeping in mind that attempts to quantify uncertainty can be seen in various disciplines, ranging from mathematics to astronomy, and including linguistics, biology, sociology, anthropology and history. According to Volz, art, unlike other disciplines, points to disorder in the system, taking ambiguity and contradiction into account. Seen in this light, the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo deals precisely with speculative disciplines, art can supply strategies for life in an era of uncertainty.

Please click here to listen to this talk.

Hosted by the Americas Society

About The Curator's Perspective
The Curator’s Perspective is a free, itinerant public discussion series ICI developed as a way for national and international curators to share their research and experiences with audiences in New York. These talks provide ICI the opportunity to assemble documentation on and disseminate information about a wide variety of international perspectives on art today. In 2016, audiences will hear perspectives on art, culture, and exhibition-making from curators based in London, Manila, Paris, and São Paulo. Practitioners will talk about what they’re most interested in at the moment, including the artists and the sociopolitical contexts that are shaping practices now.

Credits
The Curator’s Perspective series has been made possible, in part, by grants from the Hartfield Foundation and by generous contributions from the ICI Board of Trustees and ICI Access Fund.