This year, Aleanca Kundër Diskriminimit të LGBT, an LGBT rights organization from Albania, has teamed up with The Unstraight Museum from Sweden to organize two weeks of events around the exhibition entitled Art. 1 (Article 1), presented in The National Historical Museum in Tirana.

The exhibition consists of two parts. The first part comprises exhibitions from different Swedish museums, addressing the topic of homosexuality within the context of museum and curating practices. This part is organized by The Unstraight Museum in collaboration with the Swedish Institute, and after its inauguration in Stockholm in 2008 it has visited Latvia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Russia. The participating museums in this edition are the The Swedish Police Museum, The Royal Armoury, The Nobel Museum, The National Museum of Science and Technology, The National Sports Museum, and The Swedish History Museum.

The second component of the exhibition is organized in collaboration with LGBT communities worldwide, in this case the Albanian LGBT community, which contributes several prints from the exhibition Kukafshehti (Hide and Seek) and a collection of everyday objects of the community that express the desires, experiences, memories, and thoughts of a community that is all too often neglected. In Tirana the exhibition is supported by the Embassy of Sweden.

Taking the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as its point of departure, Art. 1 wants to be a small step in the long struggle to secure equal rights for all mankind.

Since old, the Bosphorus has figured as site, metaphor, and material of Istanbul as a city on the border of continents, religions, and languages. For millennia, Istanbul, the old Byzantium and Constantinople, has been the capital of empires, and again today, it finds itself as a major city in one the fastest growing economies in the world.

In the fluid history through which Istanbul is still moving, the Bosphorus, its location, geography, and weather, has been one of the main actors: inhibiting or facilitating migration from West to East and vice versa, trading between the Euxine and Mediterranean Seas, as locus of economic circulation, urban gentrification, and drifting populations, as symbol of division and cohesion. In all its continuously changing appearances, it has remained paradoxically the only continuous factor in the successions of historic ruptures.

On another level, the water of the Bosphorus also symbolizes to incessant mixing, and sulandırılmış (“watering down”) of ethnic, political, and religious movements that bridged its flow. Whether court plots slowly sinking into marshes of political intrigue, the washing away of urban liberties by rural customs, or the dilation of ideological motives in the whirlpool of economic boom.

Due to its geographical positioning, its form and shape, the Bosphorus cannot be ignored in daily Istanbul life. It needs to be crossed by boat or by bridge, housing prices depend on its view, and suburbanity is defined by its absence. No longer a border, it is of constant influence on everyday movements, slowing down traveling time as a relatively empty interpunction between cars and crowds, a flat surface as a counterpoint to the hills rising up on both shores. The Bosphorus allows Istanbul to breathe.

The research project Bridges across the Bosphorus, initiated by the Interfaculty ArtScience from the Royal Academy of Arts (The Hague) in collaboration with the T.I.M.E. department of the Royal Conservatoire (The Hague) and the Fine Arts Faculties of Marmara University and the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts (Istanbul) attempts to investigate and engage the Bosphorus in its metaphorical, site-specific, geographical, economic, and historical aspects. How does the Bosphorus operate as actor within contemporary Istanbul, not unlike the body of water Xerxes was so eager to punish after a storm had destroyed the bridge he had built to invade Greece with.

Four weeks of in situ research will form the basis of a series of interventions whose documentation will be presented in an exhibition entitled Su Iş (“Water Work”) in Siemens Sanat Art Gallery, on the shores of the Bosphorus (March 8 – April 14, 2013).

continent. Year 1: A selection of issues 1.1-1.4 collects a variety of thoughts and tropes from the 2011 issues of continent., ranging from work on Greek poetry to deep brain recordings, from speculative realism to the fragments as a unit of prose, and from queer theory to mass murder. This collection presents the fruits of an intense collaboration throughout the different zones of the Academy.

With contributions by Jamie Allen, Alain Badiou, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, A. Staley Groves, Graham Harman, Nikos Karouzos, Evan Lavender-Smith, Renata Lemos-Morais, Feliz Lucia Molina, Timothy Morton, Gregory Kirk Murray, Maggie Nelson, Michael O’Rourke, Gilson Schwartz, Ben Segal, Nick Skiadopoulos, Karen Spaceinvaders, Phillip Stearns, John van Houdt, and Ben Woodard.

Between these two chronological coordinates, These and Other Works is concerned with social and political engagement in Belgian art, and aware that the definition prefaced by its title can only be incomplete, or partial. An interest in works that re-negotiate the conditions for their social impact, that set the stage for symbolic intervention in the political sphere, can be understood as an eccentric concern – foreign to notions such as visual immersion or subversion, the question of a national identity composed of mismatched halves, the convulsions of history or any of the tropes, self-deprecating or self-aggrandizing, that drive the master narrative of Belgian art. Alien-ness and unfinished elucidation are thematized here via the figure – both real and allegorical – of the foreigner, whose effort to make sense of a cultural and affective landscape is marked by the foreigner’s own preconceptions, fixations and anxieties. This project endeavours to weave a dialogue between internal outsiders and external insiders, exemplary artistic positions and interrupted storylines, between the ins and outs of arts and lives.

The exhibition brings together the results of conversations had at Extra City over the last months with remarkable – and remarkably generous – artists and art historians. Each of the dialogues forming the live, contentious bibliography of the project focused on a different point of entry into the subject matter, on other ways in which images and the cultural and ideological conditions of their making contaminate each other. This ‘impurity’ situates most of the practices presented at Extra City in a territory between militant rhetoric and a melancholic poetics of activism, in a continuous exercise of productive cacophony, enlightening confusion and implosive utopias.

There is a question of philology. “Where are you going to?” Socrates asks his lover Phaedrus. “I am going for a walk outside the walls,” he answers. While walking, Phaedrus tells Socrates, a “philological man,” about the conversation about love, the logos erotikos, a language of love and love for language that he had with Lysias. “Plato’s ‘philologist’ is a friend and lover of language as that which is the language of love and self-loving language. […] Language loves. Whoever loves it like the philologist, loves the love in it,” Werner Hamacher suggests in a reading of the scene. This philological text attempts to trace the reins set on this love throughout a certain fragment of philosophy, to tease out the gay science (or as Nietzsche also puts it, “queer reason”) that allows it to proceed.

Ever since the dawn of the desire for language, philosophy has tried to subject language to rules and restrictions, to logic, not in the first place because language seems to appear to us in a state that is subject to some order itself. But at the same time, it seems to escape us at every turn. One of the first attempts to hunt down language and tie it up may be located in Plato’s Sophist, where the Stranger from Elea instructs Socrates’ pupil and geometer Theaetetus in the secrets of grammatical analysis. Jacques Derrida, in his seminal essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” has dealt extensively with the implications of this dialogue for the development of occidental metaphysics, which revolve around the figure of the parricide (the Stranger is a student of the “sophistic” Parmenides, who famously claimed that non-being is not; his aim in the Sophist is to disprove his master), but I would like to zoom in on a tangential condition for the development of grammar, because it shows the entanglement of delimitation and constriction that language has been subjected to ever since.

[…]

Despite its nobility, the unicorn is a fierce animal, wounding its hunters whenever they come close. Thus, the love of language does not allow itself to be instrumentalized for any “epistemic technique,” “it creates nothing but place — philology is decreation –, it is the medium through which all languages speak,” Hamacher writes with a clear Benjaminian undertone. That the unicorn may be slaughtered once it finds where its heart belongs and reaches the high of completion, or captured once it is deceived, remains the risk to which any true gay science opens itself — to be disproven or turned into a lifeless fossil of its former vibrant self. In this context, Hamacher offers another reading of the death scene, namely as “the death of philology in the Mother-text” as a “consequence of the phantasm of semanticism, that there are original and self-sufficient meanings.” This allows us to understand the appearance of Montague’s final sentence on the unicorn: “John wishes to fid a unicorn and eat it.” The capture and consummation of the unicorn may be allegorically read as the establishment of the final and consistent meaning of language, and therefore the death of any philological pursuit. But as “The Unicorn in Captivity” shows us, the resurrected unicorn, whose wounds and traumas have transformed into the pomegranate stains of ferocious reproduction, albeit seemingly tamed and instrumentalized, may always choose to jump the low fence, uninhibited by its loose chain — it is in a state of “servitude volontaire.” But, as Thibaut warns us, whenever he would choose to do so, Danger awaits him outside the fence. The risk of the apeiron — the risk of actually being without rope or chain.

Let me now finish with precisely this risk and danger that underlie the practice of the gay science — the constant regime of testing, finding without finding, formalizations without any possible closure, walks outside the city walls –, by quoting the opening and closing fragments of what the poet Bruce Andrews writes in an ordinary, living English, “Danger Risk Jeopardy Hazard Peril,” a philological manifesto for the twenty-first century, if anything:

– Have  Having  Needful  Don’t  Nothing  Needed  Can’t  Don’t  No  Method  Vent  Another’s  Aim  Fatherless  Why  Head  Inflammable  Paradise  Known  Constituents  Quits  Existed  Sleep  Somewhere  Hoped for  Husband  Pit  Hypotheses  Vanity  Depths  Dwelling  Does  Talking  Treasure  Tales  History  Dark  Inducement  Pigment  Prongs  Offers  Nouns  Never  Noun  Eastern  Other  Remark  Another’s  System  […]  Premises  Parry  Clamours  Farther  Kin  Pass-words  Stable  Wooed  Author  Hitting upon  False-hearted  Start  Facing  Inches  Like  Quick  Scheme  Ravenous  Spectacle  Findings  Local  Mangle  Motive  Flux  Exist  Deface  Mmmm  Bonfire  Listen  Public  Teeny  Refuge  What  Questions  Talking  Plus  Legatos  Relation  Confirmed  Recursive  Light

This text, with its ruthless baring of the constituents of language, its radical equality of grammatical categories and landscape of modes of utterance, such a philology, where every declaration carries the force of an imperative, constitutes a risk that we, we fearless ones, should be willing to take, listen to, a public and open, teeny tiny refuge of what questions talking, and questions in talking not only individual words, but also their connections, their spacing, their legatos as a relation that confirms (or has always already confirmed) recursive light. Or, “lighght.”