The Poetry of Image — The Parody of Language
Artists mediate the world around us through image and language. But what happens when the images and languages in circulation become so obvious that the artist must subvert them in order to maintain contact with the real conflicts of the contemporary world? The purpose of this conference is to study the ways of such subversion: poetry as a technique of combination and mélange, of recreating relations and commenting on them through a different image; parody as the act of discarding irony and pathos — of being more serious than the subject matter at hand.
Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué has been invited to present his performance lecture Pixelated Revolution, in response to the parodical tendencies in contemporary artistic practice and its so-called orphic turn. Parody works with an element of unpredictability in common knowledge, destabilising the audience in a dynamic way — the message cannot be decoded immediately, as its categories and rhythm diverge too sharply from conventional ones. The performance lecture is a form of artistic expression capable of transforming the most serious subject matters into something even more serious.
To understand the artist as activist and citizen today, it is crucial to include perspectives on art interventions in Cairo and the wider region. Egyptian curator Aida Eltorie has been invited to introduce the poetry and parody of visual art in Egypt, nearly two years after the beginning of the Arab Spring.
Seamus Kealy, museum director at The Model in Ireland, will share his reflections on war and artistic mediation, including an introduction to Signals in the Dark — Art in the Shadow of War, an international exhibition project examining war and its representations in contemporary art.
Through these presentations, the seminar seeks to develop a more global and cosmopolitan perspective, and to explore how the poetry of image and the parody of language can function as tools to loosen the hold of the religious and the mythical in mass communication.
Programme — Friday, December 14, 2012
Hirschsprung — The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Peder Skramsgade 2, Door A, 3rd floor.
10:00 — Arrival and welcoming words by Carsten Juhl and 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, performance lecture by Rabih Mroué
14:00 — Discussion
During the seminar, Motto Charlottenborg will present a selection of relevant publications, including Rabih Mroué: A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice and Revolution: A Reader (Paraguay Press).
About the Series
This is the third and final part of the Arab Spring art seminar series at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, organised as part of the Academic Research Programme and supported by the Danish Arts Council. The first seminar, held in October 2011, was titled The Arab Spring: A New Reality for Art and Culture in the World. The second, held a year later, was titled Media Revolt and Critique — Encounters of the 3rd Degree between Art and Media, focusing on the overlap between art and media as communication methods.
For more information, please contact Tijana Mišković, Academic Research Project Coordinator: tijana.miskovic@kunstakademiet.dk
