Städelschule :: Geeta Kapur

06. October 2006

documenta und Städelschule laden herzlich ein:

Lecture
Geeta Kapur: Hidden Face
Friday, 6 October, 19 h, Halle

Die Veranstaltung findet in englischer Sprache statt.

A question that documenta 12 asks--What is bare life?--leads us to a consideration of the cruelly exposed status of the citizen-subject in the contemporary political, and how this may be apprehended in the possibility of the practice of art.

By acknowledging the precariousness of life within a global dystopia, acts of representation may be seen to offer a re-constitutive promise for the threatened body, for bodies made unreal by the exercise of violence in the name of sovereignty. But does representation convert, too quickly, the condition of vulnerability into an erotic of pain, into asceticism, into a freedom in extremis, into an emancipatory project? I refer to acts of representation as one might to acts of mourning or, on the other hand, to optimistic acts of the political will. And I suggest we seek in the core of such representation, both, the subliminal truth-value of autonomous subjectivities, and the failure of representation to humanize discourse, the failure to embody an ethics of interdependence.

How does art help to find the face, to perform the ceremony of facing up to, of recognizing the de-humanization that the very rhetoric of sovereignty, and the State apparatus it commands, so well conceals?
The structure of address in discourse and in art involves norms inherent in ethics and aesthetics alike. I refer to work produced in India that reflects on the question of address as part of the struggle for representation: in the documentary form of Amar Kanwar (Night of Prophesy/To Remember); in object-based and video-based installations of artists Vivan Sundaram (Memorial/The Brief Ascension of Marian Husain), Navjot Altaf (Lacuna in Testimony), and Atul Dodiya (Broken Branches); in the performative mode of theatre by Anuradha Kapur (Centaurs/Antigone).

Der Vortrag findet im Rahmen einer Präsentation der documenta 12 magazines statt, einem diskursiven Netzwerk von weltweit mehr als 80 Redaktionen, das die Leitfragen der documenta 12 diskutiert und mit dem jeweils spezifischen, lokalen Wissen anreichert.

Presentation: Roger M. Buergel, Ruth Noack, Georg Schöllhammer

Ort

Städelschule, Dürerstrasse 10, 60596 Frankfurt

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