(Festival of Para-Academia)

The Festival of Para-Academia (FOPA) is an experiment in collective equipment for an emerging cultural sphere.

A series of talks, panels, exhibitions + more will occur in Naarm between Nov 21 – 24.

FOPA is a gathering of entities responding creatively to the decay in the Australian university sector.

This event is for anyone who thinks ‘education’ ought to be done better.

1.

What is para-academia? What is the ‘educational turn’? Why are art and cultural practices increasingly intersecting with educational methodologies and frameworks? Learn more about FOPA and find out why here.

2.

Image: Nick Selenitsch, &, 2018–2020, 83 x 63 cm (framed). Image courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery. Photograph by Andrew Curtis.

Nick Selenitsch’s exhibition, &, continues the artist’s interest in refuting Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle – the notion that an idea, or an experience, must be either ‘this’ OR ‘that’. In abandoning this binary logic, his artworks playfully advocate for the importance of indeterminacy and midpoints.