freethought Invites…
TOM MCCARTHY

19.2.2016, 7pm
Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen

7pm Communal supper hosted by TASC Ablett & Brafield
8pm Tom McCarthy in conversation with Mao Mollona and Adrian Heathfield

Please join us for the sixth in this series of guest lectures organised by freethought for the Bergen Assembly, which invites responses to the term ‘infrastructure’. The event is hosted by TASC Ablett & Brafield and drinks will be available to buy from the HKS bar.

All welcome!

Writer and artist Tom McCarthy joins Mao Mollona and Adrian Heathfield of freethought to respond to the term ‘infrastructure’ as the means through which our unknown futures are constituted. How can fiction disclose the underlying conditions of the past in the present and cast light on the emergent conditions of contemporary life?

Sampling readings from McCarthy’s work and influences, the conversation will navigate through questions in philosophy, economics, anthropology and fiction, to locate some knots of thought and test sites of experience where futurity is most at stake.

ABOUT TOM MCCARTHY

Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, Remainder, which deals with questions of trauma and repetition, won the 2008 Believer Book Award and was recently adapted for the cinema. His third, C, which explores the relationship between melancholia and technological media, was shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. McCarthy is also author of the 2006 non-fiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, an exploration of the themes and patterns of Hergé’s comic books; of the novel Men in Space, set in a Central Europe rapidly disintegrating after the collapse of communism; and of numerous essays that have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s and Artforum. In addition, he is founder and General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network of writers, philosophers and artists whose work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Palais de Tokyo Paris, Tate Britain and Moderna Museet Stockholm. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction by Yale University.

ABOUT TASC ABLETT & BRAFIELD

TASC Ablett & Brafield is a collaboration between two Bergen based artists, Amber Ablett and Stacy Brafield. As well as sharing artistic interests in conversation and performance, the two artists found that they also shared a background in and a love of food. Ablett and Brafield began TASC in 2013 to explore how sharing food could be a way to open up discussion around art, culture and society. Since then, TASC have worked within Norway and across Europe on projects, events and performances that use food, taste and the social dynamics of the dining table as tools to focus and prompt dialogue.

TASC Studio at Hordaland Kunstsenter will be Ablett and Brafield’s first permanent space. As well as acting as the café for the arts centre, it will also be a place of investigation, exploration and discussion; an open space where TASC invite others to join them in eating, drinking, talking and thinking.