Seminar 14 // 23, 24, 25 January 2009 // London
Seminar 14 // 23, 24, 25 January 2009 // London
London location tba
1. Guest Speaker: Ariella Azoulay, Program for Culture and Interpretation, Bar Ilan University, Israel
2. Irit Rogoff session on Subjectivity; screening of Hila Peleg's A Crime Against Art, 2008.
3. Student Panel: Janna Graham & Emily Pethick
Further information about the sessions can be found below:
THURSDAY 22 JANUARY: Cinema
5-7pm MA Guest Lecture Series: Ariella Azoulay Who Needs the Truth (in Photography)?
"In the first part of the lecture I will address this question through reading a series of photographs from the history of the Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Territories. My attention would move from the photographed persons and their claim to and through the camera to the figure of the spectator and her position as a citizen in "the citizenry of photography." In the second part of the lecture I will analyze the specific nature of the civil gaze. Drawing on some of Hannah Arendt's insights on "vita active" I will introduce the gaze – lacking in from her account – into the realm of practice and use it to deconstruct the opposition between the aesthetic and the political."
FRIDAY 23 JANUARY: location tba All-day session with Ariella Azoulay
11am-2pm Discussion of her recent book, The Civil Contract of Photography, (Zone Books, 2008)
"In my The Civil Contract of Photography I developed a concept of citizenship through the study of photographic practices and proposed to study photography within the framework of citizenship as a status, an institution, and a set of practices. In my lecture I will present 3 curatorial projects on which I have been working during the last few years (“Act of state – 1967-2007”, “Architecture of Destruction” and “Constituting Violence 1947-1950”) in which the theoretical perspective on the relations between photography and citizenship frames the curatorial work and guides various curatorial practices.
3-5pm How to get rid of the distinction between the aesthetic and the political?
This distinction continues to frame the discussion on art in general, and photography – in which I have a special interest – in particular. In the first part of my talk I shall analyze the distinction itself. In the second part I shall draw on some of Arendt's insights in order to reformulate her concept of the political and offer it as a new theoretical perspective for the study of the visual.
SATURDAY 24 JANUARY: location tba
11am-2pm Irit Rogoff session on 'Subjectivity'
3-5pm Screening - A Crime Against Art, 2008 Dir. Hila Peleg, 100 min.
A Crime Against Art is a film based on the trial staged at an art fair in Madrid in February 2007. Inspired by the mock trials organized by André Breton in the 1920s and 1930s, it theatrically raised a number of polemical issues in the world of contemporary art: collusion with the “new bourgeoisie,” instrumentalization of art and its institutions, the future possibility of artistic agency, and other pertinent topics. The trial begins with the assumption that a crime has been committed, yet its nature and evidence are allusive and no victims have come forward. The testimonies and cross-examinations become an attempt by the Judge, the Prosecutors, and the Defense Attorney to unravel the nature of the mysterious “crime against art.” Set as a television courtroom drama and filmed by four camera crews, the film presents a condensed 100 minute version of the trial.
SUNDAY 25 JANUARY: location tba
Chronicle of a Summer where a group of students are discussing the war in Algeria - Sarah 2. Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 3 - Janna 3. Gilles Deleuze, Conversation, What is it What is it for? - Janna 4. Gregory Bateson's metalogues, 'Why do things get in a muddle?' and 'About Games and Being Serious' in Steps to an Ecology of Mind - Emily
