Lectures & Presentations

Jalal Toufic
Saving the Living Human's Face and Backing the Mortal
04. September, 6 p.m.

'You take me for granted'. 'You take yourself... in the mirror, your mirror-image facing you, for granted'. At a stage when the child still lacks coordination of motor functions, he or she anticipates that coordination in the mirror image. The anticipated motor control includesNit is disappointing, it doesn't in LacanNthe ability to turn around to answer a call. To see one's mirror-image facing oneself presupposes not only the standard Lacanian imaginary identification with the unitary mirror image, but also the Althusserian symbolic turn to answer an interpellation. It is therefore possible that what the child facing the mirror sees prior to what Lacan termed 'the mirror stage' is what the figure facing the mirror in Magritte's Reproduction Prohibited, 1937, witnesses: a similar figure but with its back turned to him. Since the mirror image facing a human is not natural, but something that has been conquered, it may fail to take place: a condition actually encountered in psychosis or undeath.

The Lecture includes a screening of two videos by Jalal Toufic:
The Sleep of Reason: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (32 minutes, 2002)
A Special Effect Termed 'Time'; or, Filming Death at Work (32 minutes, 2005)

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Lois Keidan
Live Art & Live Art Development Agency - Talk and Video Presentation
06. September, 6 p.m.

Live Art is one of the most vibrant and influential creative approaches in the UK: an artistic research engine driven by artists who are working across forms, contexts, and spaces to open up new artistic models, new languages for the representation of ideas, new ways of activating audiences and new strategies for intervening in public life. Lois Keidan will present artists such as Franko B, Curious, George Chakravarthi, Kira O'Reilly and Robin Deacon, and other artists whose work could be described as:
- working outside of the proscribed and contained spaces for art; testing new relationships with audiences; and the creative possibilities of new
cultural contexts
- working 'on the front line' of socio-political activism
- addressing the complexities of cultural identity and cultural difference

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Marc Siegel
The Ghostliness of Aids
Films & Commentaries

Talking about AIDS in Europe today is, to some extent, to invoke a ghostly subject. AIDS is viewed here as both an ever-present threat and as not quite as bad as it once was. It is there and not there, present and absent. In fact, AIDS has had a ghostly public presence since the start of the epidemic in the 1980s. It has always been something people want to relegate to a spatial and temporal elsewhere (other people, other places, other times). That this political ghost is with us today is indicated in part by the persistent rates of HIV infection; the rising tides of racism and homophobia that contribute to the scapegoating of People with AIDS and to the lack of targeted prevention information; and, perhaps most importantly, the murderous effects of capitalist greed that hinder the distribution of necessary and available medicine to the people who need it. Marc Siegel will show two films and give a talk.

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Joanna Mytkowska & Andrzej Przywara
The Edward Krasiński & Henryk Staźewski Studio
30. August, 6 p.m.

The Foksal Gallery Foundation will make a presentation about the Edward Krasiński and Henryk Staźewski studio, located on the 11th floor of a block of apartments in the centre of Warsaw. Our plans include the renovation of this studio and the construction of a glass pavilion adjoining it - a museum. We would like to discuss the idea of the museum created by the two avant-garde artists, which is due to be located on the social experimental field - a regular apartment block.

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Anselm Franke
I. Warrior Imagination
07. September, 11 a.m.

The starting-point for this workshop is David Lean's infamous motion picture Lawrence of Arabia and the writings of T.E. Lawrence himself. Both sources are ideal material for an investigation of processes of 'becoming', of imagination, and systems of orientation and navigation. The writings of Lawrence on the Arab Rebellion open up a space where the relationship between literature (invention and mimesis), war (the insurgent imagination, the delirium), and geography (the terrain, the map, the architecture of power) becomes accessible.

Based on the descriptions of physical movement and mental states in Lawrence's writings, this workshop will draw on the correspondence between a kind of physical and mental mobility Ð on travelling and tripping as journeys not only in space, but of mimesis and self-becoming.

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II. A Lecture on the exhibition No Matter How Bright the Light,
the Crossings Occur at Night
07. September, 6 p.m.

This exhibition is a collaborative project on aspectrality" developed by Berlin-based artists Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ines Schaber, and Judith Hopf with curator Anselm Franke. In this lecture, Anselm Franke will give an overview of the exhibition and of the theoretical, artistic and political practices that inform it. The exhibition, presenting specially produced projects by all three artists along with historical and other material, is an artistic investigation into what is rendered absent or invisible - an investigation of 'social death' and of the thin line dividing the actual from what lies beyond, of presence and the shadows of enlightenment.

Based on Derrida's description of the spectre as being that which is either dead and not allowed to leave or what cannot be born, the exhibition explores the notion of the address with the question of how to speak to and discourse with what is outside the magic circle of the normative, and naturalised within the social and political arena.

No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossings Occur at Night is an exhibition in KW - Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 02.09. - 31.10.2006

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Klaus Weber
On Public Sculptures
28. August, 6 p.m.

Weber presents some of his projects: Death Disco Club (2000), Demo Inverse (2001), Fountain Loma Dr / W 6th St (2002), Public Fountain LSD Hall (2003), Brutstube (2002) and talks on accidents as spectacle, social imaginaries and sculptures, staged destruction in the name of liberation and the appearance of the suppressed subconscious of the city.

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Ines Schaber
Making Visible

During the 1970s, the United States witnessed yet another confrontation in the art world, this time centring on the practice of social documentarism in photography. Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula occupy two key positions here: their special emphasis on photography from 1910 to 1940 (Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Alfred Stieglitz) led to very different points of view, best described overall as a dispute with regard to how things are 'rendered visible'.

Just after Martha Rosler wrote her famous work The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, justifying why she disapproved of fringe figures in photographs, Allan Sekula began working on his years-long project Fish Story, with its reflections and photosets that take the sea and work as their themes, and follow the tradition of social documentarism. The stands taken by the two artists - in their very different ways - give voice to what exactly is rendered visible by photography, as well as to what lies hidden in its shadow.

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