Paranoia: a symposium

Paranoia: a symposium

Questions like “What does this mean?” are central to our encounters with art. “How are these signs connected?” or “Does every symbol fit into an unstated scheme?” are the foundational concerns of aesthetics. Yet when the same concerns crop up regularly in almost any other part of life we give the mode of perception a clinical pathological name: paranoia.

Paranoia is an attempt to drag the dark suspicious paranoiac impulses that animate all artistic interpretation into the open. Via the time-honoured method of the symposium Verdurin becomes a meeting space for artists curators literary scholars philosophers and paranoiacs of all stripes to rehabilitate suspicion as an object of study and scrutiny. 

Why have so many artists and writers gravitated towards conspiracy and intrigue as a metaphor for aesthetics? Are art and literature exempt from the now constant ‘debunking’ and ‘fact-checking’ of every public utterance? And might our most paranoiac fantasies – from shadowy conclaves controlling global events to monsters hiding under the bed – be in their own way a kind of art?

The symposium will examine art’s role in the germination of conspiracies art as a tool for decoding conspiratorial behaviour and the artistic as inherently conspiratorial. It will bring together rational reflections provocations and dispatches from the depths of unreachable paranoid network minds.

Tickets £10

Host or Publisher Verdurin