calendario eventi  :: 

X

9/11/2010

Mieke Bal

Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz

Kunsthaus Graz in cooperation with the University of Graz is pleased to announce a series of events featuring the academic and artistic work of acclaimed cultural theorist, critic and writer, Professor Mieke Bal. Conducted within a frame of the University's Winter 2010/11 Semester Master Class on "Interdisciplinarity. Narrative and the Question of Method", Mieke Bal's multileveled seminar "Auto-theory. Audio-visual thinking and migratory culture" develops her term "auto-theory" understood as a form of thinking which integrates Bal's own practice of art-making and the reflection upon it. Bal concentrates on understanding migration culture as the culture of movement, which can be best captured in moving pictures. Analysing the ways in which movements of pictures and people mutually illuminate each other, she considers the reciprocal effects by means of which works of art and other material artefacts can contain, stimulate and generateideas. Furthermore, Bal casts a ne w look at our own theoretical convictions in the light of encounters with otherness, including our own.

The seminar program includes an introduction into the work of Prof. Bal and the genesis of her" auto-theory" concept in a series of public lectures as well as screenings of her filmic and video work. Bal has been preoccupied with the issues of migratory culture and migratory aesthetics, along with her interests in feminism, global politics and postcolonial thought in a number of powerful experimental documentaries, such as, "Mille et un jours" (2003), "Glub" (2004), "Lost in Space" (2005), "Access Denied" (2005), "Colony" (2006), "Un Trabajo Limpio" (2007), "Becoming Vera" (2008), or "Separations" (2009). Interculturality and identity formation conditioned by a sense of belonging, homelessness, displacement and an experience of "being away from home" constitute the leitmotives of Bal's filmic portraits of individuals and communities, as well as her explorations of sites, cities and landscapes.

Kunsthaus Graz is proud to present Mieke Bal's multiple-screen video installation, "Nothing Is Missing" (2006) - a tour de force of the artist's thematic approach. In a gallery space turned into a domestic environment of a living room, Bal positions monitors, each screen featuring women, filmed in a consistent close-up, as portraits, talking about the crucial moment in their past to a person intimate to her, who is connected to the absence in her life of the departure in migration of her child. Instead of following the migrants, the artist lets the mothers who lost their children talk. Her installation is a polyphony of trauma of abandonment and longing, grief and courage. The interlocutors are close to each of the women, relatives and intimate family members whose relationship with the mothers has been interrupted by a sudden, deliberate or forced, departure from home. The installation is a collection of wounded biographies and personal dramas: the women are talking to a grand-child they never got to see grow up, to a child-in-law they did not choose or approve of, or to an emigrated child, sometimes across a gap of three generations. In her single camera shots, Bal concentrates on mother's faces and their eyes, generating an intimacy of a confession and thus paying a sincere homage to the women who suffered such profound losses or painful life's twists. The artist explains: "At the beginning of the present situation of mass migration, I wish to show, was an immense loss. The women who suffered the losses are still alive, and all they can do is continue their lives, minus that son or daughter. No drama, but resignation, for the sake of a better future for their loved ones: the tone of the installation is mildly elegiac, intensely personal, and discreet. In this it reflects the performativity of the making". Bal's "Nothing Is Missing" registers a human condition at its most intensely emotional moment of the broken narrative of life, facin g a void and a profound sense of hopelessness.

Furthermore, Mieke Bal presents "What Can Museums Do? Beyond the Local-Global Dilemma" - an inaugural lecture to celebrate the bicentenary of the Universalmuseum Joanneum. As Mieke Bal states: "Underlying the study of museums is the implied notion that the institution has something to say to its visitors. Museums "speak" with the voice of their curators and staff. I will address the dilemma through an underlying issue: who is the subject of museological "speech"? I will replace this notion by a performative conception of speech, and ask: who is the subject of museological speech acts, and the subsequent question: what can museums do? First of all, the metaphor of a voice with a subject needs to be unpacked and pluralised. For, the publics are as active in constituting the museum's speech acts as the museum's decision makers. Therefore, and since museums are physical, localised institutions, I will propose the metaphor of "forking paths" (Borges) to understand how museums can deal with its mission beyond the local-global dilemma".

Programme
12.10., 7pm, Mieke Bal, "Auto-theory", opening lecture (including film screening of "Glub" and "Lost in Space") & welcome, Kunsthaus Graz, Space04
13.10., 7pm, Mieke Bal, "Intercultural Story-telling", lecture, Universität Graz
10.11., 7pm, Mieke Bal, "nothing is missing", opening of the video installation and a conversation between Mieke Bal and Adam Budak, curator (duration: 11.-21.11.2010, Tue-Sun, 10am-6pm), Kunsthaus Graz, Space03
11.11., 7pm, Mieke Bal, "Facing Separation", lecture & discussion, Universität Graz
16.11., 7pm, Mieke Bal, "Becoming Vera", film screening, Kunsthaus Graz, Space04
9.12., 7pm, Mieke Bal, "Mille et un jours: The Limits of Identity", film screening, lecture & discussion, Universität Graz
7.12., 7pm, Mieke Bal, "What Can Museums Do? Beyond the Local-Global Dilemma", lecture in connection with the bicentenary of the Universalmuseum Joanneum, Kunsthaus Graz, Needle
12.1., 7pm, Mieke Bal, "Separations", film screening, lecture & discussion, Universität Graz
13.1., 7pm, Mieke Bal, "State of Suspension", film screening, lecture & discussion, Universität Graz

Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her many books include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002), Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (1996) and Narratology (3rd edition 2009). Mieke Bal is also a video-artist; she makes experimental documentaries on migration, and recently a fiction film. Her work is exhibited internationally. Occasionally she acts as an independent curator.

Image: Massaouda, nothing is missing, 2006 (Videostill)

Press Information:
Universalmuseum Joanneum Press Office
+43/316/8017-9213 and -9211 presse@museum-joanneum.at

Opening: Wednesday, November 10, 2010, 7 pm
November 11 – November 21, 2010

Kunsthaus Graz
Lendkai 1, A–8020 Graz
Opening hours:
Tue – Sun 10am-6pm
English guided tours: Sat 2pm
Admission
Adults: 7,00 €
Groups of seven or more, senior citizens, people on military or alternative service, disabled people: 5,50 €
Pupils, apprentices and students up to 27 years: 3,00 €
Pupils in school groups: 1,50 € apiece
Families (2 adults and children up to 14 years): 14,00 €
Children up to 6 years: admission free

stampa

permanent link