May 24 – October 26, 2018.

Since Spring 2017, The Serving Library has been in residence and hosted a series of free events including workshops, talks, performances, and screenings, at Exhibition Research Lab. Now, under the auspices of Liverpool Biennial 2018, the organisation and ERL have assembled a new programme of talks designed to complement the exhibitions and projects elsewhere in the city.

This year’s Biennial is based on a line from a poem by German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759 –1805) 
that was later set to music by Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797–1828): “Beautiful world, where are you?” At irregular intervals between May and October, an eclectic list of speakers from fields as diverse as economics, biology, linguistics, media theory, architecture, and painting are invited to directly address or indirectly refract Schiller’s hanging question.

Programme:

May 24
Native Economies: From the Potlatch Ban to the Masks of Beau Dick
A performative talk by Candice Hopkins (Art Historian and Curator, Toronto)

 

June 7
Forensic Aesthetics
A talk by Eyal Weizman (Founder, Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths College, London)

 

June 28
Outside the Hit Factory
A talk by Alexander Provan (Editor and Co-founder, Triple Canopy, New York)

 

July 5
Moonlight and LED
An exchange between Liverpool Biennial 2018 artists Ei Arakawa (New York) and Silke Otto-Knapp (Los Angeles)

 

July 26
Climate Grief and the Visible Horizon
A talk by Meehan Crist (Writer-in-residence in Biological Sciences, Columbia University, New York)

 

September 13
Self-Repairing Cities
A talk by Mark Miodownik (Professor of Materials and Society, University College London)

 

September 27
The Fabric of the Planetary Surface
A talk by Jussi Parikka (Professor of Technological Culture and Aesthetics, University of Southampton, UK, and Docent of Digital Culture Theory, University of Turku, Finland)

 

October 11
A Great Enchanted Garden: Can AI Give Us Back Our Sense of Wonder?
A talk by Ryan Avent (Senior Editor and Free Exchange Columnist, The Economist, Arlington, USA)

 

October 18
Reclaiming Beauty as a Public Good
A talk by Angela Nagle (Writer, author of Kill All Normies, Dublin and New York)

 

October 26
The Linguistics of Arrival: Aliens, Fieldwork, and Universal Grammar
A talk by Jessica Coon (Associate Professor of Linguistics, McGill University, Montreal) and a conversation with Vincenzo Latronico (Writer, translator and guest co-editor of The Serving Library Annual 2018/19)