Masters’ School Seminar 08.06.2022 3 p.m.

The next Masters’ School Seminar will be held on June 08, 3 p.m.

Our guest is professor Mieke Bal.

Profesor Mieke Bal 

A co-founder of ASCA, the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, Mieke Bal
develops interdisciplinary approaches to cultural artifacts and their potential
effects. She is an internationally renowned cultural theorist, critic, video artist and
curator, and the recipient of five honorary doctorates. She focuses on gender,
migratory culture, psychoanalysis, and the critique of capitalism. Her forty-some
books include a trilogy on political art: Endless Andness (on abstraction), Thinking
in Film (on video installation), both 2013, Of What One Cannot Speak (on
sculpture, 2010). Her early work comes together in A Mieke Bal Reader (2006). In
2016 appeared In Medias Res: Inside Nalini Malani’s Shadow Plays. Emma &
Edvard Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic, accompanying the
exhibition she curated at the Munch Museum in 2017 demonstrates her
integrated approach to academic, artistic and curatorial work.
After eighteen video documentaries on migratory culture, she began making
‘theoretical fictions’. A LONG HISTORY OF MADNESS, with Michelle Williams Gamaker,
argues for a more humane treatment of psychosis, and was exhibited in a sitespecific version in the Freud Museum in London. MADAME B, also with Michelle,
was combined with paintings by Edvard Munch in the Munch Museum in Oslo
(2017).
Her later film REASONABLE DOUBT, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina, explores
the social and audio-visual aspects of the process of thinking (2016). She is
currently exhibiting a sixteen-channel video work DON QUIXOTE: TRISTES FIGURAS. Her
latest film, IT’S ABOUT TIME! REFLECTIONS ON URGENCY was produced in Poland, in
2020.
za: www.miekebal.org

Title and abstract:
“Image-Thinking: the Integration of Art-making and Academic Reflection”

In this seminar I will propose to consider, with a few examples from my recent (2019) project Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, how artmaking and academic reflection support each other. The practical and material issues that occur during making (video) art, even including coincidences, can advance the insights into intellectual issues, and bring the contemporaneity of artmaking to such issues, without having to wait for the long and distancing process of publication. The integration of approaches I have termed “cultural analysis”: the detailed analysis of cultural objects or artefacts, not in isolation but in their live, social and political context, as artistic and aesthetic, intertwined with intellectual reflection, I term “Image-Thinking”. Together, the two approaches of detailed, close analysis and framing in context are productive. I will focus also, on curating, museum display and the need to build in durational temporality. Practical, artistic and intellectual issues cannot be separated.