Talk #149
Amanda Beech x Adam Walker
Wednesday 2 April 2025, 5.00pm
A video recording of this talk will be available from 2 May.
Amanda Beech is an artist and writer. In video, painting and other forms, her work apprehends structures that subtend and are coextensive with our lived reality. She invests in the capacity for a new form of realism that demands the invention of new explicatory forms of reason and contingency. Her work draws from philosophical theory, science, literature and real historical and contemporary political events, all hinging upon the violence of capitalism, liberalism and revolutionary thought and practice. The proposition that art can produce a form of intelligence beyond the principles of capitalism necessarily brings the work to question the limits that art has historically set for itself by means of its critiques.
She has exhibited widely in various Biennales and has written texts for anthologies and museum catalogues. She has edited numerous books including being the contributing editor of Construction Site for Possible Worlds, 2019, Urbanomic/MIT Press and Cold War, Cold World, Urbanomic, 2015. Her recent writing includes an essay on Jean Francois Lyotard’s exhibition Les Immateriaux for Beyond Matter, ZKM, Karlsruhe, NL, and recent exhibitions include Future Possessive, Front Gallery, Los Angeles, and Delphic Future, Twelve Ten Gallery, Chicago. Recent video work \ includes Map of the Bomb, 2022 a five channel video installation on encryption and feminist noir. In 2024 Beech was visiting professor at Aalto University Finland, Vienna University of the Angerwandte, and Vienna Akademie of Art, Austria. She also presented keynotes for the conferences Desire and Capitalism (Erasmus University, Rotterdam, NL) and Marxism and the Pittsburgh School ( UCL, London, UK). Forthcoming work includes a new book on art, aesthetics and philosophy; The Intolerable Image, from MIT.
Adam Walker is an artist and writer. Their practice is research-led, critically and reflexively considering structures of inequality, not least their own complicit position amidst these. Text sits at the centre of their practice, including its extensions into digital terrains as code and data. Interruption and impropriety are sought: subtexts and counter-texts which might interrupt dominant textual flows.
Their work has been exhibited, performed, published and commissioned by institutions including the ICA, Tate, Tyneside Cinema, Coventry Biennial, Serpentine Gallery, Ma Bibliotheque and NEoN Digital Arts Festival within the UK; Skelf and Hoax online; Yermilov Centre, Izolyatsia and the House of Cinema in Ukraine; and Adana Archaeological Museum in Turkey. Their book Art, Labour, Text and Radical Care was published in 2023 by Routledge. They are a Lecturer in Fine Art at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Image: still from Map of the Bomb, 2022, 1:04.00 5 channel video installation commissioned by Fieldwork Marfa
