What do you mean it is just ‘imaginary’?

In this two-day workshop, we will explore the ’imaginary’, imagination, and the imaginal in the context of artistic practice. These terms are key because they are crucial to both conservative definitions of artistic practice and to a neo-liberal appropriation of creativity. This positions over-uses the terms and also empties them of artistic substance. The course asks to what extent can acts of imagination constitute a resistance or alternatives to the appropriation of our inherent capacity for the imaginary? Which forms, embodiments and attitudes can articulations of the imaginary take? The workshop will look at examples of art practices that make some kind of claim for imagination and the imaginary as key aspects of the art making process. Participants in the workshop are invited to share their own work in progress and consider what ways the imaginary/imagination might be useful ways of thinking about their work and its development. They will engage with practical, experimental, imaginative exercises, informed by political and psychoanalytic theory, in which they will identify, map, and politicize concepts of the imagination, the imaginary, and the imaginal in their artistic practice. 

Workshop Background

Talk of imagination has become something of an emptied cliché. An advertisement encouraging people to buy lottery tickets tells us to “Just Imagine”1; a children’s toy manufacturer promotes itself by announcing; “Just imagine building your dream career. Now make it real. Join the LEGO® team today”2; a luxury car manufacturer markets its newest vehicle by showing the car driving through a landscape, and then the camera pulls out to reveal that the scene is just an illusion with the phrase “Just Imagine” flashed across the image.  

The art theorist Mark Fisher famously described Capitalist Realism as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it”. This is imagination reduced or weakened. Some societies seem to have lost their ability to imagine. But it seems not everyone has given up on imagination. The international artist, activist and curatorial network “Institute for Radical Imagination” (IRI) claims that “we need radical imagination now more than ever – to conceive of some better, alternative, hopeful future”5 Many artists and activists appeal to ideas of imagination as something that can actually shape a better world, rather than as simply an empty fantasy or an illusion.  

What do you mean it is just ‘imaginary’? is the first joint course offered by CAPIm faculty and will be co-hosted by HDK-Valand and KKH.