HUMA 889 Exhibit: Dissident Vectors

Press Release

HUMA 889 Interdisciplinary Seminar

Celebrated The Culmination of Its Winter 2018 Activities By Organizing:

Dissident Vectors

Concordia University, April 23, 2018

Professors​: Dr. Carolina Cambre and Dr. Harry Smoak

Participating Artists/Researchers ​(in alphabetical order): Lamiae Aidi, Angie Arsenault, Khadija Baker, Johnny El Hage, Ugo Ellefsen, Shara Lange, Brieanna Lebel, Leanne Letourneau, Allison Peacock, Eleni Polychronakos, Rebecca Rustin, Emily Sims, Sanaz Sohrabi, Darian Stahl​, Rachel Thomas, Alex Tigchelaar​,​Gabriel Pena, Elizabeth White Co-curators​(in alphabetical order): Angie Arsenault, Shara Lange, Sanaz Sohrabi

The HUMA 889 Interdisciplinary Seminar, ​Representation/s Otherwise, reflected upon the predicaments of representation and expanded upon theories of representation across philosophy of art, language and semiotics, anthropology, sociology, and gender studies. Conceived within a multidisciplinary framework, the seminar unfolded and questioned the role of representation as one of the primary processes by which meaning, images, and signs are produced and exchanged. As the celebration of its end of semester activities, the doctoral students of the Interdisciplinary Humanities program brought their research-based practices together in the exhibition “Dissident Vectors.” The title of the show refers to Félix Guattari’s ​Three Ecologies, ​in which he cogitates about the possibility to revive nascent modalities of subjectivity in which different components intersect, bifurcate and branch into collective resingularities. ​Dissident Vectors ​took Guattari’s proposition as its point of departure to transgress the multitude of techno-scientific systems that constitute the modus operandi of the planet in which we live. It offered the space to transgress the binaries we face in our research, experiment with materials, documents, histories, memories, and stories in which we found ourselves entangled and whose sensibilities could not be unpacked and addressed otherwise. ​Dissident Vectors was at once a proposition to think through alternative modes of research and at the same time a confrontation with the institutionalized forms of knowledge production. It invited students to think about their research-based practice as an ongoing process of working through uncertainty and resistance rather than arriving at fixed facts and conclusions. ​Dissident Vectors ​was a celebration of the ways in which we work through unconventional materials, actions, and methods to address and unpack the political, social and cultural sensitivities we seek to address in our research.

For information regarding the PR, please contact Sanaz Sohrabi.