Please join us for a buffet luncheon on Wyndham Terrace, 12:30 PM
Category Archives: Weekly Colloquia
October 4, 2023-Suzanne Conklin Akbari
October 11, 2023-Kartik Nair
October 25, 2023-Jayna Brown
November 1, 2023-Shiamin Kwa
November 8, 2023-Dr. Brittany Webb
Evelyn and Will Kaplan Curator of Twentieth Century Art and the John Rhoden Collection
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
An Evening with Leela Corman
4:00 PM
Bryn Mawr College
Old Library 224
Please join us for a reading and discussion with graphic novelist, Leela Corman, who will share work from her forthcoming book Victory Parade and other recent work.
November 15, 2023-Pardis Dabashi
November 29, 2023-Jennifer Hirsh CANCELLED
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art
Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)
“Over My Dead Body: Puppets, Performance, and Paralysis in Cardiff and Miller’s The Marionette Maker (2014)”
Best known for their interactive sound and video “walks,” interdisciplinary media artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller use musical, vocal, and mechanical sounds to complicate viewers’ perception of subjectivity, time, and place. In addition, the artists have designed a number of complex, multi-sensory installations, and tableaux vivants that include unexpectedly mechanized components. Commissioned and produced by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, The Marionette Maker (2014), the focus of this paper, is one such example. It consists of a modified caravan that incorporates multiple staged performances within its compartmentalized, dimly lit interior, wherein images of Cardiff and Miller appear, respectively: she as a life-sized reclining figure and he as diminutive marionette maker who is moved by a set of puppet strings. As this chapter argues, The Marionette Maker is thus ventriloquial not only in its forms, but also in its logic and themes, serving as the artists’ most overt engagement with a phenomenon (ventriloquism) that arguably underwrites, in admittedly more conceptual ways, their work as a whole.
Image: Detail of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Marionette Maker (2014)
February 1, 2023 – Director’s Welcome
Lecturer in The Department of History of Art
Director of the Center for Visual Culture
Bryn Mawr College
If unable to join us in person, please register here.