The Vancouver Institute for Social Research (VISR) is an independent, para-academic, graduate-level, theory-based free school that began in Feb. 2013. Our intent is to move beyond the borders of the traditional university and to open up a more accessible platform in the city for the engaged discussion of critical theory.

The Institute’s third session, which will be organized around the theme of “Aesthetics and Politics,” will be held from Sept – Dec, 2014. Once a week on Monday evenings from 7-9 pm at the Or Gallery (555 Hamilton Street), we will be inviting professors to present on topics of their choice over this period.

Though we have an operational budget of $0, the seminars will be free to the public. All professors will be offering their services on a voluntary basis.

Organized by the East Vancouver Young Hegelians
Chapter 13 (Negating the Negation Faction)

Amy Kazymerchyk — Surface Tension: Up Against a [White] Wall

In states of illness, pain, delirium or trauma, infallibility is often suspended. Perceptual and sensorial systems may distort. Emotion and intuition may become highly sensitive or muted. Cognition may slack. The capacity to view, annunciate or gesture may be halted or restrained. One’s relation to aesthetic, social and political spheres (shaken by the trembling of others) are often ruptured, or severed even. In convalescence (singular and collective), the last infallible is the wall: the bedroom wall– the hospital wall–the prison wall–the analyst’s wall–the military wall–the wall of language–the gallery wall. Surface Tension will consider experience (visual, ideological, rhetorical, reflexive, kinetic) up against these walls.