TARYN SIMON

1. November 19 Uhr Aula

TARYN SIMON
A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I – XVIII
Contraband
An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar
The Innocents


Taryn Simon was born in 1975 in New York, where she lives and works. Her latest work, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, on view in 2011 at Tate Modern, London, and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, chronicles 18 bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen ‘chapters’ that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. The subjects documented by Simon include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, and the living dead in India. In 2011, Simon’s work was also included in the 54th Venice Biennale. Her previous work includes Contraband (2010), an image archive of items detained or seized from passengers and mail entering the United States from abroad; An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), which reveals objects, sites, and spaces integral to America’s foundation, mythology, or daily functioning but inaccessible or unknown to a public audience; and The Innocents (2003), which documents cases of wrongful conviction in the United States, calling into question photography’s function as a credible witness and arbiter of justice.

Jalal Toufic

Vortrag
Jalal Toufic: The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster
Dienstag, 25. Oktober 2011, 19h, Aula

With regard to the surpassing disaster, art acts like the mirror in vampire films: it reveals the withdrawal of what we think is still there. In normal times a nebulous entity despite the somewhat artificial process of canon-formation, tradition becomes delineated and specified by the surpassing disaster. Tradition is what conjointly materially survived the surpassing disaster, was immaterially withdrawn by it, and had the fortune of being subsequently resurrected by artists, writers, and thinkers.
Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. Many of his books, most of which were published by Forthcoming Books, are available for download as PDF files at his website: http://www.jalaltoufic.com. He is presently a guest for the year 2011 of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD.

This lecture is on the occasion of the publication of the German translation of Toufic’s book The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009) by August Verlag last month.

Mark von Schlegell

Lesung
Mark von Schlegell: Beyond the paperback revolution (Jack Vance)
Freitag, 14. Oktober 2011, 19h, Aula
In Kooperation mit Merve Verlag

In the forthcoming Dreaming the Mainstream: Critical Fictions of U.S. Power (Merve Verlag, Berlin) Mark von Schlegell reads Emily Dickinson, Patricia Highsmith, H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick and others as vanguard agents of the 20th Century paperback revolution. This lecture will shine light on the relatively unknown career of the contemporary U.S. science fiction "grand-master" Jack Vance to speculate on the paperback revolution's history and possible survival in the current crisis of 21st century publishing and the anarchy beyond.

Mark von Schlegell is born in 1967 in New York and lives in Cologne. He is an American science fiction writer and cultural critic. His numerous essays have appeared in magazines such as: "Parkett", "Arttext" and "Flash Art". His most recently published books are “Mercury Station” (2009, Semiotext(e)) and “New Dystopia” (2011, Sternberg Press); and – in German – the essay “Realometer” (2009, Merve) and the sci-fi novel “High Wichita” (2011, Matthes&Seitz).
Since 2011 he is Guest Professor at the Städelschule.