THE BROOKLYN RAIL & THE VERA LIST CENTER FOR ART AND POLITICS PRESENT CONVERSATIONS ON FREEDOM OF SPEECH

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

Today, the Brooklyn Rail and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to announce a new programming partnership. From February–April 2024, the Rail’s daily Zoom series, the New Social Environment, will host three programs that revisit Vera List Center’s vital 2022 publication Studies into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech (co-published with Amherst College Press). Building on the VLC’s Seminar Series Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies into Darkness, the publication explores freedom of speech through the lenses of history, poetics, and social justice, bringing together the writings and ideas of dozens of contributing artists, activists, curators, and writers. Two years after its publication, its central questions have only become more urgent and timely.

For Part I of the series, on Thursday, February 22 at 11 am EST on Zoom, artist Amar Kanwar will be in conversation with curator and historian Rattanamol Singh Johal. Kanwar prompted Studies into Darkness with the question: “Is there an idea, concept, or social construct that would benefit from a retreat ‘into darkness’—into a space of profound reconsideration and rethinking?” In this dialogue, Kanwar and Johal will discuss the potentiality of darkness as a mode of reconsideration and the role of text and image in Kanwar’s work. Through examinations of Kanwar’s artworks, including Such a Morning, The Torn First Pages, The Peacock’s Graveyard, they’ll reflect on the role of art in cultivating generosity and new imaginaries.

For Part II and III of the series, we’ll invite Rail contributors to organize dialogues that examine anew, with contemporary examples, the very relevant contradictions innate to freedom of speech discussed in the publication.