Juli Carson (University of California, Irvine) is an art historian, critic and curator. She is Director of the University Art Galleries at the University of California in Irvine, which host an annual rotation of professional and student shows. In her talk at the Kunsthochschule Kassel Carson will focus on her most recent exhibition project untitled "Beirut Lab: 1975(2020) or: again, rubbed smooth, a moment in time – caesura“, which has been shown at the American University in Beirut and will soon be presented at the UC Irvine’s Room Gallery in Fall 2019.
The subject of "Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020)" features contemporary film essays produced by artists living and working in Beirut, a site where time bends and curves, as in a Gödel universe. Here, as elsewhere, historical events are what semioticians call a “sliding signifier,” an image-unit that floats between the past, present and future, then back again in one’s mind. Counter-intuitively, Beirut is thus a city where particular events function as a kind of collective caesura – an historical blank space – within cultural consciousness. The most prominent of these events being the Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1991, which has (and continues) to provoke critically minded artists to engage in a type of hermeneutic aesthetics of past moments in time. For instance, artists of one generation, who were in primary school in the seventies, wrangle with screen memories of that moment, which can neither be completely remembered nor forgotten. Alternately, a younger generation of artists attempt to untangle that which they never knew themselves but which they have nevertheless inherited as a gap in Lebanon’s state sanctioned national history. But, already, this generational schema is a bit too tidy. For there are those artists in the region whose artwork critically investigate the more general question of memory, history and therefore, ultimately, temporality, precisely by subtending the perspectival positions of the aforementioned generational lines. The film essays featured in Beirut Lab: 1975(2020), showcase all three such perspectives.
Carson’s academic research focuses on the effect that legacies of 1960s Minimalism and 1970s Conceptualism has had on a branch of contemporary art informed by psychoanalysis. Her art criticism is widely published. She is editor of Exile of the Imaginary: Aesthetics / Politics / Love (Vienna: Generali Foundation and Walther König Press, 2007) and Paradox and Practice: Architecture in the Wake of Conceptualism (Irvine: UCI University Art Gallery, 2007). Her interest in the combined legacies of psychoanalysis and conceptualism informed her archival exhibition (and MIT dissertation) on Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document: Excavating Post-Partum Document: Mary Kelly’s Archive (1968-1998), Generali Foundation, Vienna (1998). In addition to her contributions to critical anthologies, Carson’s essays appear in artUS, X-TRA, Art Journal, Texte zur Kunst, Documents, and October. Her most recent book is: The Limits of Representation: Psychoanalysis and Critical Aesthetics (Buenos Aires: Letra Viva Press, 2011). Her forthcoming book is entitled: The Conceptual Unconscious: A Poetics of Critique, and will be published by PoLYpen.
Solo exhibitions Carson has curated include: Kelly Barrie, Yael Bartana, Steve Fagin, Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Roberto Jacoby, Adria Julia, Mary Kelly, Cristóbal Lehyt, Shana Lutker, Dolores Zinney/Juan Maidigan, Florian Pumhösl, Constanze Ruhm, Barbara T. Smith, Koki Tanaka, Stephanie Taylor, and Erika Vogt. The UAG’s group exhibitions have featured: Fallen Fruit, Gaylen Gerber, Silvia Kolbowski, Sowon Kwon, Dorit Margreiter, An Te Liu, Katya Sanders, and Bahc Yiso. In addition to Carson’s curatorial activities at UCI, she curates thematic exhibitions on contemporary art that travel internationally. Her exhibition, Exile of the Imaginary: Aesthetics / Politics / Love, was hosted by the Generali Foundation in Vienna.
Vortrag von Juli Carson
4. Juni 2019, 16 Uhr
Raum 0250, Klasse Thomann (KhK)
*In English language