The Cost of Living: Metastasising Epistemes and Social Crisis is a seminar convened by Bill Balaskas on Thursday 11th April, 6 pm at the Royal College of Art, South Kensington, Stevens Building, Humanities Seminar Room. Participants: Professor Lanfranco Aceti, Professor Johnny Golding, Dr Marquard Smith and Professor Julian Stallabrass. In absentia: Dr Tom Corby. This seminar will investigate the way in which artists can employ different media in combination with scientific methods and data in order to express a critique of the socioeconomic environment they live in.

If we were to draw a parallel between the human body and the social body, today’s economic evaluations and parameters argue in favor of discarding from the social body those elements that are defined – in economic terms – as unproductive and dysfunctional.

The Cost of Living will adopt as its starting point two recent exhibitions by British artist Tom Corby: No Detectable Level, taking place online, at the Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC); and Body of Evidence, which takes place at Kasa Gallery, Istanbul under the directorship and curatorship of Lanfranco Aceti. Using the condition of his own body as the ‘raw material’ of his work, Corby blurs the boundaries between medicine, data, documentation, economics and art and invites us to experiment with visual languages and communication tools.

The event aims at exploring interdisciplinary modes of working by addressing a diverse audience of artists, designers and theoreticians. It will bring together academics and artists working in a variety of institutions in view of forging new collaborations, through highlighting the common preoccupations that the ongoing economic crisis has generated.

Museum of Contemporary Cuts: www.museumofcontemporarycuts.org

Curatorial team: Lanfranco Aceti (Kasa Gallery Director and Senior Curator), Vince Dziekan (Associate Curator), Ozden Sahin (Curator) and Jonathan Munro (Curator).

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