The Vera List Center for Art and Politics presents Owed to a Certain Emptiness: Infra-structuring the Conflictorium in collaboration with Avni Sethi, recipient of the 2020–2022 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, at the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Parsons School of Design, The New School, 66 5th Avenue, New York, from October 9 to 24.

Inspired by Conflictorium, a museum of conflict Sethi founded in 2013, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat India, the exhibition environment in the Aronson Galleries has been conceived to be a space for pause, presence, and emptiness to reflect on Conflictorium as a practice. Ten years into instituting and infrastructuring Conflictorium, the artist has requested a self-directed (rather than pandemic-imposed) pause to reflect deeply on the potential of cultural organizations to address conflict and an expanded notion of “infrastructures” for such work.

Sethi, an interdisciplinary practitioner working between culture, memory, space, and the body, established Conflictorium as both a physical site in a historically marginalized area of Ahmedabad, as well as a conceptual project that centers conflict as integral to life and peace. By resonating with concepts of dialogue and community participation prevalent at Conflictorium, the exhibition also provides a remote space of reflection and pause, while probing the potential of presence and emptiness in artistic contexts and museum practice.

The installation includes several elements and features from Conflictorium, most notably its immediate physical environment—the street in Mirzapur where the museum is located, in the old part of Ahmedabad. A 24/7 livestream projects the streetview outside Conflictorium inside the Aronson Galleries at The New School, where the visible time zone difference of 9 hours and 30 minutes simultaneously highlights and collapses geographic distance, the space between the two contexts. Conflictorium’s interior has also been extracted, almost surgically, with photographs of its walls covering the gallery, creating a shell, a container for emptiness. The museum’s Memory Lab, a community art installation that invites visitors to leave behind objects they associate with conflict in their own lives—placing them at the center of conflict, and conflict in the realm of the personal—is also reconfigured for this exhibition. Small objects by noted artists, academics, thinkers, and journalists invited to be in conversation with Sethi on notions of infrastructure will fill the empty exhibition jars.

The collectively produced installation of objects, stories, experiences, and conversations slowly materializes emptiness, and provides for alternative approaches to conflict, infrastructures, and museums. As a collaborative effort with Sethi, Owed to a Certain Emptiness: Infra-structuring the Conflictorium offers us a moment to recalibrate our tools for designing new protocols and structures for transformative processes at and beyond the museum.

Listen to or Watch Daily Conversations on Infra-structuring:
Saturday, Oct. 9 Carin Kuoni (Listen) (Watch), Senior Director and Chief Curator, Vera List Center
Sunday, Oct 10 Hrag Vartanian, (Listen) (Watch),  Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder, Hyperallergic
Monday, Oct. 11 Shaun Leonardo, (Listen) (Watch), artist, co-director, Recess
Wednesday, Oct. 13 Shannon Mattern, (Listen) (Watch), Prof. of Anthropology, The New School for Social Research
Thursday, Oct. 14 Manan Ahmed, (Listen) (Watch), historian and Assoc. Prof., Columbia University
Friday, Oct. 15 Amar Kanwar, (Watch), artist and filmmaker
Sunday, Oct. 17 Robert Sember, (Listen) (Watch), VLC Fellow, member of sound-art collective, Ultrared
Monday, Oct. 18 Emily Johnson, (Listen) (Watch), dancer, writer, choreographer and activist
Tuesday, Oct. 19 Radhika Subramaniam, (Listen) (Watch), Assoc. Prof., Visual Culture, Parsons School of Design
Wednesday, Oct. 20 Kemi Ilesanmi, (Listen) (Watch), Executive Director, The Laundromat Project
Wednesday, Oct. 20 Paloma McGregor, (Listen) (Watch), choreographer, artistic Director of Angela’s Pulse
Thursday, Oct. 21 Tamara Oyola Santiago, (Listen) (Watch), public health educator and activist
Friday, Oct. 22 Jennifer Tipton, (Listen) (Watch), lighting designer
Sunday, Oct. 24 Eriola Pira, Curator, (Listen) (Watch), Vera List Center