Talk: DIAGRAMS, WHAT WE KNOW AND HOW WE FEAR IT with Tosia Leniarska - 11 November

DIAGRAMS, WHAT WE KNOW AND HOW WE FEAR IT

with Tosia Leniarska 
Monday, 11 November
6.30-8.30pm

Polish-born, London-based writer and curator Tosia Leniarska will give a ‘non-specialist lecture’ (a format she explored at Kem School, the performative experimental pedagogy program in Poland she helped set up) about the history and recent popularity of diagrams. Her notorious Instagram account @textbasedposts_ has been an ongoing project for the past five to six years, and through this time she believes we have witnessed a massive rise in the online popularity of diagrams. 

The attempts at communicating complex ideas online through diagrammatic images keeps re-emerging through the decades as a kind of internet infatuation with the format and its teetering on the edge of clarity and esotericism. While there is a history to it, explored in part through other talks in this series – on cosmology, illuminations, our expressions of complex world-beliefs and existential humour – this particular recent rise overlapped with the rise of some other modes of thought online. Various strands of religious mysticism and conspiratorial thinking have grown alongside a returning interest in 20th century's schizo-theories – or at least their aesthetics. This love of mystification can perhaps be looked at holistically as something deeply human: the simultaneous desire to know and give up knowing.

Bio:
Tosia Leniarska (b. 1997, Poland) is the assistant director of Emalin, London. She is also a writer, curator, and internet user. Recent projects include curating the group exhibitions One for sorrow, two for joy with Lauren Auder at Emalin (2024); World as diagram, work as dance, Emalin (2023); Gnosis Show, Daisy's Room and online (2021); and setting up the first editions of Kem School, an alter-institutional artist residency program of critical practice and expanded choreography based in Warsaw (2020-ongoing).

Instagram: @tosialeniarska @textbasedposts_

Note: STUDENT/UNWAGED discount of 33% 
Use the code: student-33 at checkout
The studio is on the 1st floor with no lift