POZNAN LECTURES ON CONTEMPORARY ART

In May 2010 AMU Institute of Art History and Culture Time Association (Stowarzyszenie Czas Kultury) inaugurated a series of lectures devoted to the Art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Poznan Lectures on Contepmorary Art are a serial public event for every person interested in this subject. Three times a year (in winter, spring and autumn) outstanding researchers, who have not visited Poznan before, will present their analyses of most important phenomena of contemporary visual culture.

Poznan Lectures on Contemporary Art are an opportunity to learn about inspiring theories and their applications. The areas covered are going to be  diverse, but in the limelight present key categories used during the art interpretation and, in a broader perspective, the culture. One of the aims of this series is to provide new tools for active critical recipients of newest culture and to refelect critically on those used.

Contact:  osztuce@gmail.com

May 13, 2010    Interiors & Interiorities in Contemporary Art

The inaugural lecture was given by Professor Ewa Lajer-Burcharth from Harvard University. Professor Ewa Lajer-Burcharth – art historian, graduated in Art History (Warsaw University), did her PhD at the City University of New York and has been Professor in Art History and Architecture Institute at Harvard University for many years. She takes interest in European Art of the 18th and 19th c. as well as in contemporary art. She has published much about about Polish artists like Zofia Kulik and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

This is what Professor Ewa Lajer – Burcharth writes about her lecture:

The precarious, invaded or otherwise challenged interior has emerged as a recurrent trope in contemporary art produced in a recent decade or so. Among those who had used it are artists asdiverse as Jane and Louise Wilson, Pipilotti Rist, Mary Kelly, Andrea Zittel, Janet Cardiff (working in collaboration with her partner, George Bures Miller), or the Polish artistic tandem Aneta Grzeszykowska & Jan Smaga, to name just a few. I consider these aesthetic engagements with interior space as a symptom of an ongoing radical transformation of the notion of interiority. There are, of course, differences among these European and American works which address a broad range of issues, some explicitly political, other ethical or technological, some local some global in their scope. But what they share is a persistent concern with the notion of interiority figured as a precarious, endangered, or overprotected space. What these works point to is, then, not only the far-reaching changes that have recently been occurring in social life in Western democracies and beyond. They also suggest a profound psycho-cultural transformation, a major shift in the imagination of individual as well as collective self. It is precisely with these forms of this imagination that I would like to engage.
I will focus specifically on the work of two artists: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s video installation Guests (2009), exhibited at the recent Venice Biennial, and Chantal Akerman’s film Là-bas (Down there, 2006) presented also in the form of an installation. The first uses interior space to examine the place of the stranger–the immigrant worker, the refugee-in the European collective cultural imaginary. The second is a visual investigation of the artist’s complex interiorized negotiation of her relation to Israel, and herself. Though different in means and purposes, both works share an interest in the notion of interiority non-identical to itself, the first as the basis of an non-identitarian community, the second, as a personal necessity.