READING AND CONVERSATION
PRODUCTION AESTHETICS: FRAMES OF ART FRAMING LIFE

In collaboration with and in the spaces of Oslo-based project room and occasional bookshop Norma T, UKS presents a reading and conversation with Danish author Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt about her book Produksjonsæstetik (Production Aesthetics), published in 2022.

The term ‘production aesthetics’ refers to the collective formation of the conditions of life in art. A production aesthetics analysis shifts the focus from the work of art (how it was composed, painted, written, choreographed) and the relationship between the work of art and its receiver (what it does to and with the spectator, reader, listener, audience) to the relationship between the work of art and its hinterlands: the relations, finances, logics, life forms, affects and products that co-(re)produce the work of art. This is a turn from intention and effect to the arrangement of the conditions of artistic production and their entanglement with larger infrastructures. A production aesthetics reading is a feminist tribute to the bearing and the bearers of the art world and a kind of conspiracy of those often rendered invisible.

 

BIOGRAPHY
Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt works with performance, curation and aesthetic theory. She is employed as Assistant Professor and Deputy Director at the New Carlsberg Foundation research centre Art as Forum at the University of Copenhagen. She has studied comparative literature, applied theatre studies and modern cultural studies in Denmark and Germany. Her interests include structural precarity, artists’ collectives, separatist organisation and diversity work in cultural policy. She is the author of the book Produktionsæstetik. En feministisk arbejdskritik mellem kunst og liv (2022), published by the Danish small press Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology.

 

*Image: Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt. Photo by Agnete Schlichtkrull