The Inoperative Community

3 Dec 2015-14 Feb 2016

Overview

The Inoperative Community is an exhibition of experimental narrative film and video that broadly address crises of sociality and community. It draws on works made since 1968 for cinema, television and the gallery, with subjects that range from the construction of memory to game theory, and artificial intelligence. The exhibition's title is borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy's 1986 essay of the same name, and while this connection did not determine the selection of works, they all bear witness in their own way to Nancy's characterisation of the 'dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community'. Many concern the limits of political activism and failures of the revolutionary politics of the late 1960s.