llegal Astronomy and Silicon Valley stardust

Presentations by curator Julia Marchand and artist Anne Haaning, with a response by Michael Guggenheim.

Curator Julia Marchand will be here to present alongside Anne Haaning (Goldsmiths) in a discussion on the intersections between Marchand’s curation of Georgian Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale on Illegal astronomy and Anne Haaning’s project ‘We Are Supernova’ on the material realities of silica investigated through video installation and underway in the Department of Art. Presentations on each project will be followed by a response by sociologist and science and technology studies scholar, Michael Guggenheim.

Please see below for bios and further information on the EU funded art research project ‘We Are Supernova’.

Organised by Nina Wakeford with support from the Department of Art, Goldsmiths.

___

Julia Marchand is a curator, researcher and broadcaster based in Venice, currently working on illegal astronomy and adolescences. She recently curated the Georgian Pavilion of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. A MFA Curating Goldsmiths graduate,  Julia Marchand was a curator at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles between 2015 and 2023 where she curated, among others, Action / Gesture / Paint: women artists and global abstraction 1940-70 (2023), Nicole Eisenman & The Modern (2022), Laura Owens and Vincent van Gogh (2021), Niko Pirosmani: Wanderer Through the Worlds (2019), Black Centuries: James Ensor & Alexander Kluge (2019), as well as Late Sun, Hot Sun (2018) and La Vie simple – Simplement la Vie (2017), with Bice Curiger. In 2016, she founded the curatorial platform Extramentale dedicated to adolescence within visual art, working on specific projects with Saradibiza (for her site-specific video games TVSF exhibited at the Centre Pompidou Metz and at the Festival Octobre Numérique – Faire Monde), Anaïs-Tohé Commaret (Centre d’Art Edouard Manet, Gennevilliers) Mohamed Bourouissa (Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles), Lisa Yuskavage (David Zwirner, Paris), Henry Darger (Galerie Sultana, Paris).

In 2020, she organized a day-long symposium on carnivalesque art at the Centre Pompidou Paris with Claire Tancons, Paul B. Preciado, Jenkin van Zyl, Mathis Colins and Jean-Baptiste Carobolante. She is currently working with Eva Brioschi on an exhibition revolving around Iliazd and the Boîte-en-Valise by Marcel Duchamp for the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare in Bolzano as well as the site-specific commission in Saint-Eustache Church in partnership with Rubis Mécénat and Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Anne Haaning is a visual artist, researcher, and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. Working across diverse forms of image production and interdisciplinary collaboration, her practice investigates extractivism, technological acceleration, and the material entanglements of digital infrastructures. Her PhD focused on Denmark’s colonial extraction of cryolite in Greenland. Her current research project, We Are Supernova, examines silica across cosmological and computational scales. Her primary medium is video installation, often incorporating computer graphics, animation, and archival research to explore these interconnected themes.

Michael Guggenheim is a sociologist who works at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths,

University of London. He is co-director of the kitchen research unit and he was co-director of the centre for invention and social process. He is the co-founder and convenor of the MA Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths. He has published widely on expertise, lay people, disasters, change of use of buildings, environmental research and food and social theory. He has developed numerous performative experiments, most recently together with Jan-Peter Voss the exhibition “Taste! Experiments for the Senses” at the Museum of Natural History, Berlin.