[Minorcompositions] Two Upcoming Events: Elements of the Revolution Open Peer Review / Enduring Otherwise

[Minor Compositions]

Hellos... Here's information on two upcoming events this month.

In collaboration with COVER, the commons research centre 
<https://www.essex.ac.uk/centres-and-institutes/commons-organising-values-equalities-and-resilience>
Elements of the Revolution: The International Constructivists and the 
Prehistory of Artistic Research 
<https://www.essex.ac.uk/events/2026/06/17/elements-of-the-revolution>
Tobias Dias, Aarhus University
Wednesday 17th June @ 12PM UK Time, Online 
<https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/94138698095>

This seminar takes the form of an open peer review and discussion of a 
forthcoming book to be published, /Elements of the Revolution: The 
International Constructivists and the Prehistory of Artistic Research/, 
which offers a critical history of the “research program” and political 
epistemology that emerged in the largely forgotten milieu of the 
International Constructivists in the early 1920s. It provides a novel 
narrative and theoretical elaboration of this transnational milieu, 
which included artists such as Hans Richter, Raoul Hausmann, El 
Lissitzky, and László Moholy-Nagy. It traces the dialectics of 
deskilling and reskilling that underpinned their artistic practice, 
thinking, and subjectivity by considering their engagement with 
technoscientific and epistemic issues of the interwar period.

Examining the artist’s attention to what they called “elements of the 
world,” such as rhythm, light, movement, and gesture, whether manifested 
in geometric lines and spirals on the pictorial surface, photographic 
abstractions, or the living images of cinema, the book tracks and 
conceptualizes how such an elementarism functioned as a revolutionary 
grammar in the “European civil war” from the late 1910s to the late 
1930s. This elementarism, the book suggests, could be understood as a 
critique of dialectical materialism and other prominent scientific 
strands of the socialist and communist movement, and thus essentially as 
a “self-critique of the revolution” in the sense of an ambiguous and 
contradictory examination of what a revolutionary process would entail. 
Based on archival research and detailed historical and theoretical 
analysis, the book thus unearths a revolutionary form of artistic 
research that both sheds new critical light on key figures of the 
“historical avant-gardes” as well as on contemporary discussions on 
“artistic research” and “knowledge production.”

*Bio:* Tobias Dias is a writer, critic, editor, and educator based in 
Aarhus, Denmark. His research concerns the history and theory of the 
avant-gardes and contemporary art, the history and theory of aesthetics, 
and the politics of knowledge in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is 
currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University and 
as a Lecturer at Jutland Art Academy. His work has been published in 
journals and magazines such as /e-flux/, /Art-Agenda/, /Texte zur 
Kunst/, /Periskop/, /ARKEN Bulletin/, /Passepartout/, and /kritische 
berichte/. He has written the afterword to the first Danish translation 
of Theodor W. Adorno’s /Ästhetische Theorie/. He’s the editor and 
co-author of /En anden økologi: Anticapitalistisk håndbog/ (A Different 
Ecology: Anticapitalist Handbook).

If you would like to receive a copy of the draft manuscript to read 
before the event email saying so.

§§§

*Enduring Otherwise: Muslim Queer and Trans Worldmaking*
29/6 @ 7PM UK Time, Online <https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/93212366688>
Ferdiansyah Thajib


For this event, we are joined by Ferdiansyah Thajib to discuss his new 
book /Enduring Otherwise: Muslim Queer and Trans Worldmaking in 
Indonesia/. Drawing on ethnographic research across Indonesia, the book 
explores how queer and trans Muslims navigate the complex intersections 
of faith, desire, gender, and sexuality in a social context where these 
identities are often cast as fundamentally incompatible.

Rather than focusing solely on narratives of exclusion or resistance, 
Thajib examines the everyday practices through which people endure, 
improvise, and create livable worlds amidst conditions of 
marginalization. Some distance themselves from religious institutions, 
others seek to transform them from within, while many continue to 
inhabit the tensions and ambivalences between faith and identity. 
Through these experiences, the book offers a rich account of how queer 
and trans Muslim subjectivities are forged through hope, exhaustion, 
piety, failure, and collective worldmaking.

Join us for a discussion of religion, sexuality, affect, endurance, and 
the possibilities of creating forms of life that exceed the limits 
imposed by dominant social norms. Event will be recorded for an episode 
of the Minor Compositions podcast.

-- 
Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
https://www.minorcompositions.info

Linktree of all our stuff:https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions
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