Archive Fever: Okwui Enwezor, Christian Boltanski, Luc Sante, Lorna Simpson, George Lewis & Paul Holdengräber

April 14, 2008

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One of the most compelling issues explored by artists in recent years centers on the nature and meaning of the archive, that is, how we create, store, and circulate pictures and information.

Against the standard view of the archive which evokes a dim, musty place full of drawers and filing cabinets with historical artifacts or the dusty shelves of the library, an active archival impulse has emerged which engages the attention of contemporary artists and thinkers as a way of shaping and constructing the meaning of images.

Okwui Enwezor, curator of the exhibition Archive Fever Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art at the International Center of Photography, will sit down with Paul Holdengräber to talk about the archival impulse at work in museums, libraries, and in various artistic practices. This inquiry will be followed by two conversations between first Christian Boltanski and Luc Sante, and then Lorna Simpson and George Lewis.

7:00 - 7:20 pm

Okwui Enwezor & Paul Holdengräber

 

7:20 - 8:00 pm

Christian Boltanski & Luc Sante

8:00 - 8:40 pm

Lorna Simpson & George Lewis

 

8:40 pm Q&A

 

This event is co-sponsored by the International Center of Photography.

 

 

 

About Okwui Enwezor

Okwui Enwezor is adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography and is curator of the current show at ICP, Archive Fever. Enwezor is Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute, and has been Visiting Professor in Art History at the University of Pittsburgh. He has held teaching positions at Columbia University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Umea, Sweden. Enwezor was Artistic Director of Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (1998-2002) and the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1996-1997). He is a recipient of the College Art Association?s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Criticism and the Peter Norton Curatorial Award.

 

About Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski is one of France's best-known artists of the postwar generation. Boltanski has developed a highly personal and often disconcerting oeuvre that challenges basic assumptions of what constitutes an artwork. Using media as diverse as newspaper clippings, used clothes, amateur snapshots, and flickering shadows, Boltanski forges an original universe in which he is frequently the central protagonist. Internationally exhibited, Boltanski has been the recipient of the Laureate of the Praemium Imperiale, 2006, for sculpture; the Kaiser ring, Monchhausmuseum Goslar, 2001; and the Kunstpreis, 2001, given by Nord/LB, Braunschweig, Germany.

 

About George Lewis

George Lewis serves as the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, and as the Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award in the Arts in 1999, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. Lewis's work as composer, improviser, performer and interpreter explores electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated and improvised forms, and is documented on more than 120 recordings. He is author of Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.

About Luc Sante

Luc Sante is a writer and critic. His books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Walker Evans, and Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005. He co-edited, with his wife, the writer Melissa Holbrook Pierson, O. K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors, and translated and edited Felix Feneon's Novels in Three Lines. Luc Sante is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Sante received a Whiting Writer's Award in 1989, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992-93, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997, and a Grammy, for album notes for the Anthology of American Folk Music, in 1998. He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.

About Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson is a photo-based artist and filmmaker. Emerging in the 1980s, Simpson juxtaposes photographic images of black women, seldom seen in full view, with fragmented texts. While commenting on the ways in which black women are seen, and they ways in which they see themselves, Simpson raises philosophical questions about the relationship between image and text, and about the construction of self. Widely exhibited, a touring retrospective of Simpson's work, organized by the American Federation of Arts, was seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art ? Los Angeles, the Miami Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of Art in 2006-2007. Simpson's work has also been seen at the Studio Museum of Harlem and in Documenta XI.
 

About Paul Holdengraber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.