The Institute of Contemporary Arts presents In formation III, the third iteration of a discursive platform emphasising collective production and learning, and forms of sociality. This expansive series of presentations, workshops, performances and participatory events is collaboratively organised by the ICA curatorial team and staff members.

In formation reimagines the spaces of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, considering how they are utilised and activated by public discourse, and questioning notions of the ‘civic’ institution. Where the In formation programmes in August 2017 and January 2018 took the interrogation of institutional forms and socio-political structures as a basis for discussion and production, In formation III is galvanised by considerations of humanity and the psyche. The programme spans critical questions around the science of the mind and its fixing of notions of humanity, experiences of individual and collective care, and explorations beyond the ‘rational’ mind.

This platform considers how agency and psychic life overlap and connect, moving from the address of highly formalised systems towards considering how their logics might be internalised, resisted and entrenched by the individual and collective psyche. Exploratory discussion, sound, performance, images and oral history provide channels to map how lived experience and intersubjective consciousness impact and inform societal hierarchies and priorities.

In formation III foregrounds emergent fields of research that offer points of entry into appositional modes of thought and learning, co-creation and intergenerational work. Scrutinising capitalism through psychoanalysis, approaching historical visibility through the space of disability poetics, and interrogating the ways race and gender are policed through sound, the programme sheds light on how artists, activists and their interlocutors draw on energies that sustain counter-normative ways of organising social life.

Wednesday 29 August, 6:30pm

Thursday 30 August, 6:30pm 

Saturday 1 September, 2pm

Tuesday 4 September, 6:30pm

Tuesday 11 – Sunday 16 September

Thursday 13 September, 6:30pm

Friday 14 September, 7pm 

Saturday 15 September, 10pm