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OIKOS: Care and Crisis in the 21st Century with Mikkel Krause Frantzen and Ida Bencke
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In this seminar, Ida Bencke and Mikkel Krause Frantzen will share the scope of their forthcoming research in genres and practices of care in the arts under the shadow of the climate crisis. Using the Greek word for housekeeping, Oikos as its title, the project investigates the relationship between crisis and care in selected contemporary works, focusing on an aesthetics that not only represents, but also enacts or performs care. In this regard, the forthcoming art project Hosting Lands, recently awarded with the Bikubenfonden Foundation’s exhibition prize Vision with Ida Bencke as a part of its collective of curators, a prominent example.
The seminar is hosted by the research programme Contemporary Aesthetics & Technology in collaboration with Kunsthal Aarhus on occasion of the public gallery’s current exhibition ‘Museum of the Future’ [Museum for fremtiden], Curated by PhD student Anders Thrue Djurslev, the interconnected crises of the present and the ongoing aesthetic negotiations of care are central themes.
After a short introduction and the presentations by Ida Bencke and Mikkel Krause Frantzen, an open discussion is moderated by Anders Thrue Djurslev. Questions are welcome.
Ida Bencke is a curator, editor and co-founder of the Laboratory of Aesthetics and Ecology. Benckes curatorial practice includes experimental exhibition formats and interdisciplinary methods within a speculative feminist aesthetics. The forthcoming exhibition project Hosting Lands (hostinglands.com) explores possibilities of establishing infrastructures and keeping spaces for other pasts, presents, and futures through artistic, collective, and site-caring practices. Bencke is especially interested in marginalized and non-western aesthetics in her investigation of radical forms of collectivity and generosity within experimental and contemporary art.
Mikkel Krause Frantzen is a literary scholar, critic, translator, and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen. He has written the books The Fall of the Globe – Aesthetic and Ecological Perspectives on Oil, Plastic, and Other Hyperabjects (Laboratory of Aesthetics and Ecology, 2021), Going Nowhere, Slow – The Aesthetics and Politics of Depression (Zer0 Books, 2019), A Future Without Future ¬– Depression as Political Problem and the Alternative Narratives of Art (Informations Forlag, 2018) og Lars Skinneback – A Monography (Arena, 2013). Frantzen researches the psychopathologies of the present within literary and cultural production during capitalism, writing on care and grief, depression and hope in the shadow of the accelerating ecological disaster.
