Assistant Professor, Southeast Asian Studies, Cornell University

“Tropical Malady:  Same-Sex Desire and the Queering of Impermanence in the Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul”

Taking the 2004 film Tropical Malady as its primary case, this talk asks how independent director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work reformulates understandings of same-sex desire and queer personhood by borrowing from a Buddhist imaginary concerning loss and injury. At a time when queerness becomes a question of citizenship in the Thai public sphere as well as a matter of injury and recompense, Apichatpong invents a cinematic, affective, and political language that moves the question of non-normative sexuality beyond the frameworks of national reconciliation, legal emendation, and good citizenship. In order to intervene into prescriptions regarding sexual exemplarity, Apichatpong’s cinema borrows from Theravadin and other Buddhist imaginaries to describe an alternative (Thai) sexual contemporaneity. In this context, the director mobilizes karmic, soteriological, and other Buddhist tropes of injury and loss. Manipulating Buddhist pedagogy’s central focus on impermanence—and on the suffering that ensues from the fact of constantly impending loss—this cinema deploys non-orthodox and non-doctrinal Buddhist tropes, stories, and images to move queerness beyond binary notions of liberalism and illiberalism.

Professor and Chair, Department of History of Art, Bryn Mawr College

“Retro-Spectacles: On the Fictions of Contemporary Art Photography”

Drawing on materials from her new book, Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects, forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press, Saltzman will talk about the aesthetics and ethics of contemporary art photography.  Among the artists she will discuss are Jeff Wall, James Casebere, Thomas Demand, Gregory Crewdson and An-My Lê.

Associate Professor, Director of Program in Film Studies and Center for Visual Culture,
Bryn Mawr College,

“Beyond Repetition: Victor Burgin’s Loops”

This talk addresses recent looped video installation pieces by the artist and writer Victor Burgin. Burgin’s video loops engage in a form of repetition that eschews the logic of the death drive, the repetition compulsion, and eternal recurrence: they are more accurately described as reprises, refrains, or re-readings. Burgin’s recent video works engage with diverse, asynchronous combinations of texts, histories, and visual materials, inviting viewers to connect these materials through a spiral of repeat viewings. In this talk, King will look closely at Burgin’s A Place to Read (2011), a video work that combines a digital reconstruction of the Taslik Khave, a destroyed 1940s-era coffee house in Istanbul designed by Sedad Hakki Eldem, with texts that embed pieces of the history of this site within fragments of a fictional narrative, arguing that, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, Burgin supplies “a story [histoire] that no longer has a place…for places that no longer have a history [histoire].”

The Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber Program Curator,
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

“Some Reflections on Discursive Space”

Is it possible to forge a space for discourse within the art museum?  At a moment when buzz words such as “audience engagement” are becoming de rigueur and as programming increasingly merges with curating, what role do these activities have and what promise do they hold? Through a discussion of her past projects, Klein will reflect on whether intimate, unscripted experiences can be both catalyzed and firmly rooted within the walls of an institution while still having mobility, resonance, and relevance beyond.

Associate Professor, Department of English,
Wayne State University

“Andy Warhol’s Skin Problems”

“Andy Warhol’s Skin Problems” examines Warhol’s recurring, career-long preoccupation with the color-line, arguing that Warhol’s Pop praxis, and the centrality of liking and likeness to it, is fundamentally inflected by the racist and anti-racist politics of the early 1960s . It focuses on Warhol’s attunement to the representation and mediation of skin color, suggesting that Warhol’s work invites us to consider how the importance of media specific, aesthetic oppositions between black and white, and between black and white and color shape how we come to “know,” “see,” “feel,” and “experience” racial difference.

Daimler-Benz Associate Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum

“Max Beckmann and the ‘End’ of Neue Sachlichkeit”

This talk will examine the work of Max Beckmann and the notion of Neue Sachlichkeit, typically translated as New Objectivity, in 1920s Germany. The artist, and his 1927 Self-Portrait in Tuxedo in particular, stand at the nexus of key debates at the time about painting, the painterly, and the post-expressionist rise and supposedly swift end of Neue Sachlichkeit.