Staging Aporia

One could argue that it is precisely Art’s „impotentiality“ that gives it its greatest power and agency, in what or how „it“ does not do: With no end in sight, we are without end. Putting together impossible things, Jennifer Hope Davy stages critical encounters with works in theory and art that make tangible the untenable and the potentiality afforded therein.

How can one not infinitely arrive, and hence never arrive, at aporias? The aporia is, in part, simply the rhetorical device staged as a kind of mourning, where, like mourning, staging is a way of mobilising impasse. This enactment is set forth primarily through Derrida’s Aporias, combing through Heidegger, Levinas, Freud, and Agamben’s notion of potentiality and a poetics of inoperativity. Crisscrossing this stage are sustained encounters with works by Caravaggio, Manet, The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Duchamp, Frances Alÿs, Cezanne, Johanna Billing, and Carlos Amorales. Emphasising the gerund, these stagings are sightings and citings (Samuel Weber), where „signifiability“ is exposed in perpetuity, enabling a constant taking place, displacing, and replacing of signification.