Éric Alliez, Étienne Balibar, Drucilla Cornell, Olafur Eliasson, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, David Harvey, Bruno Latour, Catherine Malabou, Achille Mbembe, Sandro Mezzadra, Ernesto Neto, Luiz Alberto Olivera, Suely Rolnik, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Peter Sloterdijk, Nigel Thrift, Shiv Visvanathan and Peter Weibel are among the leading intellectuals, artists and writers who will be coming to Tate Modern as part of the Topology project.
Mathematicians in the first half of the twentieth century constructed Topology as a general theory of space. It initially emerged as an understanding of space in terms of properties of connectedness and invariance under transformation. Within a few years of its inception, psychologists, psychoanalysts, architects, artists, scientists and philosophers had started to use the conceptual language of relationships, intensities and transformations of this new theory outside its original field of mathematics. Limit, boundary, interior, exterior, neighbourhood, disconnection and cut were central notions that became ways of describing the fields of forces experienced by individuals. Static ideas of space as a container were replaced by understandings of movement-space, of multiplicity, differentiation and exclusive inclusion that in turn have led to new ideas of power, subjectivity, and creativity.
Topological theory has thus come to serve as a link in a network of disciplines: in each case the multiplicity of space and the formal analysis of its relations has proved illuminating. Few commentators have made explicit the nature of this topological grounding however, and in many ways these mathematical realities have been allowed to fade into the background. The Topology series of events renders explicit what has been lost sight of in this process by inviting contemporary intellectuals, artists and writers to discuss how they make use of topology in their thinking, writing and making.
Initiated by Jean Matthee. Curated by Jean Matthee with Bernard Burgoyne, Marko Daniel, Julian Henriques, Celia Lury and Brian Rotman.
- Topology: Spaces of Transformation: Borders Saturday 5 November 2011
- Topology: Secrets of Space Seminars Saturdays 12 November 2011 to 5 May 2012
- Topology: Embodying Transformation Saturday 19 November – Sunday 20 November 2011
- Topology: Spaces of Transformation: Edges of the World Saturday 21 January 2012
- Topology: Spaces of Transformation: Continuity/Infinity Saturday 3 March 2012
Topology: Spaces of Transformation: Contemporary Art as the Space of Liturgy Saturday 31 March 2012- Topology: Spaces of Transformation: Epistemologies of the South: Reinventing Social Emancipation Saturday 28 April 2012
- Topology: Spaces of Transformation: The Vast Space-Time of Revolutions Becoming Saturday 12 May 2012
- Topology: Spaces of Transformation: Spatialised Immunity Saturday 16 June 2012
