Photo by Ernesto Donegana
The poetry of image – The parody of language
Artists are mediating the world around us through image and language. But what happens when current images and languages in the world become so obvious, that the artist has to subvert them just to maintain a contact to the real conflicts of the contemporary world. The purpose of this conference is study the ways of such subversion: Poetry is a technique of combination and mélange, of recreating relations and commenting them in another image than the previous one. Parody is essentially to get rid of irony and pathos, i.e. to be more serious than the subject-matter actually treated.
We have invited the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué to do his performance lecture “Pixelated Revolution” because we are interested in some of the parodical tendencies in contemporary artistic praxis, i.e. in the “orphic turn” of this praxis. Parody is dealing with an element of unpredictability in common knowledge and it destabilizes the audience in a dynamic way. So the audience is not immediately able to decode the message and it’s never possible to do so in an easy way, as their categories and rhythm are too different from conventional ones. A performance-lecture is in fact a new form of artistic expression, which is able to transform the most serious subject-matters into something even more serious.
To try to understand the artist as an activist and citizen today, we find it crucial to include important pieces of information about art interventions in Cairo and its region. This is why we have invited Egyptian curator, Aida Eltorie to introduce us to the poetry and parody of visual art in the Egypt of today, nearly two years after the beginning of the Arab Spring. The urgency of this subject-matter is revealed by the title of the paper Aida Eltorie is going to deliver on Friday.
Seamus Kealy is a museum director at The Model in Ireland and he will share with us some of his reflections on war and artistic mediation. This talk includes an introduction to “Signals in the Dark – Art in the Shadow of War”, which is an international exhibition project examining war and its representations in contemporary art. This project is questioning the language behind the images of war and our consumption of these images.
With these presentations, we try to create a more global or cosmopolitan point of view, and we hope to get closer to an understanding of how the poetry of image and the parody of language can be tools to loosen the impact of the religious and the mythical in mass communication.
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Program for The poetry of image – The parody of language
Friday, December 14th 2012
At Hirschsprung – The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts – Peder Skramsgade 2, Door A, 3rd floor
10.00 Arrival and welcoming words by Carsten Juhl /Tijana Tijana Mišković
10.15 “Annexation: An ongoing attempt enforced into the realities of the occupied” by Aida Eltorie
11.00 Questions
11.15 “On war and art- war and its imaging and imagining” by Seamus Kealy
12.00 Questions
12.15-13.00 Lunch
13.00 “Pixelated Revolution” a performance lecture by Rabih Mroué
14.00 Discussion
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During the seminar, Motto Charlottenborg will have a small table presenting some of the relevant publications from their store like “Rabih Mroué: A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice” and “Revolution: A Reader. Paraguay Press”
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This is the third and last part of Arab Spring art seminars at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts organized as part of Academic Research Program at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine arts and supported by Danish Arts Council. The first seminar was held in October 2011 and had the title THE ARAB SPRING: A NEW REALITY FOR ART AND CULTURE IN THE WORLD – It had the rather explicit subtitle: Cities in the Middle East have been on the move for many months now. Not only politics and economy are at stake, but also cultural activities and artistic practice.
The second seminar was held a year later and titled Media Revolt and Critic – Encounters of 3rd degree between art and media: It was focusing on the tendencies of overlap between two communication methods, art and media.
The seminar is supported by Danish Arts Council.
For more information please contact Tijana Mišković, Academic Research Project Coordinator tijana.miskovic@kunstakademiet.dk
