Saturday at 1:00pm – 4:00pm
March 14th – Third Space Galway Co-Facilitate
GREEK DIALOGUE: From Democracy to Economy?
Town Hall Theatre Galway
An open discussion with invited speaker (via Skype) Angela Dimitrakaki and chaired by Conor McGrady and Michaële Cutaya. The event will take place in the Studio of the Town Hall Theatre on Saturday 14 March between 1 and 4pm. Greek Dialogue is facilitated by Third Space Galway, The Town Hall Theatre, Galway City Arts Office, CKI and 126 Gallery.
The victory of Syriza [Coalition of the Radical Left] at the Greek parliamentary elections on 25 January and the subsequent negotiations between the Greek government and EU officials and partners have raised issues over the economic sustainability of so called ‘austerity’. Yet of equal importance are questions over the distribution of legitimacy, strikingly summed up by the president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker as: “There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties.”
Greek Dialogue proposes to open a conversation on the political and European dimensions of the current events – in contrast to the purely economic treatment that the Greek negotiations have been given in mainstream media – with special guest Angela Dimitrakaki currently in Athens. The discussion aims at opening different perspectives on what is happening in Greece and to reflect on what it might mean for Europe, Ireland and democracy.
The discussion is open to all.
Angela Dimitrakaki is a writer and Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh. She recently co-edited the volume ECONOMY: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century (Liverpool UP 2015) as a follow-up to the exhibition ECONOMY in Edinburgh and Glasgow, which she co-curated with Kirsten Lloyd in 2013 (www.economyexhibition.net). Her other books include Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative (Manchester UP 2013) and, in her native Greek, Art and Globalisation: From the Postmodern Sign to the Biopolitical Arena (Hestia 2013). Her fiction appears also in Greek where it has been nominated for several awards. Her fifth novel, Aeroplast, is forthcoming in May 2015 from Hestia.
Conor McGrady is an artist from N. Ireland whose work examines the relationship between ideology, individual and collective psychology, and the politics of spatial control. He is editor of Curated Spaces, a regular feature in the journal Radical History Review and has published numerous articles in The Brooklyn Rail. His writing also appears in the books Ruminations on Violence (Waveland Press, 2007) and State of Emergence (Plottner Verlag, 2011). He is the Dean of Academic Affairs at the Burren College of Art.
Michaële Cutaya is a writer and researcher on art living in County Galway. She writes essays and reviews for Irish publications in print and online. She was co-founding editor of Fugitive Papers. She continues a contextual writing and discursive practice in the West of Ireland and has regularly participated in public discussions on art and its broader social and political framework. She has been invited to present ongoing research on writing and publications in art colleges.