12.4.2025
4pm

Who is making such a racket at the door?:
Parasitical inhabitations in contemporary art

This lecture will look at how artists have operated as ‘parasites‘ by intruding into spaces where they are not welcome, parodying and inverting certain languages/ roles/systems/formats/contexts, and redistributing resources from one space to the next. Expanding on Chris Fitzpatrick and Post Brother’s 2011 essay A Productive Irritant: Parasitical Inhabitations in Contemporary Art (as well as subsequent seminars conducted by Post Brothers), the presentation will introduce a wide range of tactics for creative infiltration and will consider what these acts tell us about how systems work.

We will examine logics of inclusion and exclusion by introducing some artists who have intruded into gallery spaces, public spaces, or media spaces. We will also analyze markers of authority and authenticity, reviewing a range of artists and activists who have appropriated and parodied the voice of power by exaggerating or faking expertise, forging documents, or changing their names.

The lecture will also address the hidden pacts of hospitality in art contexts, and will consider issues of unequal exchange, complicity, dependence, and over-identification by looking at instances where institutions invited the parasite in, where artists addressed a system from the inside, or integrated their workings with industry or government (running the risk of becoming instruments of the very structure they sought to critique). The parasite will be shown as not only a means to take advantage and exploit a system, but also as a way to understand our own dependencies, complicities, and assumptions regarding the world around us. Through this, we will explore methods of survival and subversion in an increasingly flexible, yet precarious, world.

Post Brothers is a critical enterprise that includes Matthew Post, an enthusiast, word processor, educator, and (co)dependent curator often engaged in artist-oriented projects or occupying the secondary information surrounding cultural production. In 2016–19, Post Brothers was the curator at Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany, and in 2021–23, they were ssociate Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark. They have curated numerous exhibitions and projects across the world, and regularly publish essays in artist publications, exhibition catalogues, and art and cultural journals. They also participate in exhibitions with text-based and performative contributions, and lecture in art and educational contexts across Europe.

Born in Los Angeles, Post Brothers completed their BFA at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver (2006), and an MA in Curatorial Practices at California College of Arts, San Francisco (2009). They live in Kolonia Koplany, a small village near Bialystok in eastern Poland.