Transart presents Spring Talks
Open Window Series
Zeerak Ahmed, Photo Credit: Danish Faruqi
Saturday March 26th
15:00 - 19:30 UTC
15:00 - 16:45 UTC
Body as Archive - Sound Bath with Zeerak Ahmed
If sounds of the past are akin to cultural artefacts, how must we use our sounding bodies to access them? Should we consider the body as an archive of listening and the voice as a tool to excavate? Through an experimental meditative sound bath, voice exercises and group discussions on listening vs. hearing, we will explore the possibilities of an immaterial knowledge that is nestled in the music of all the sonic experiences that are held, and all that haunts the body in its absence. An exploration of silence, environmental sounds and experimental music will be used to activate the sounding body and bring new awareness to listening and voicing.
Participants are encouraged to be in a quiet space, seated or laying in a comfortable position (with cushions, blankets, yoga mats etc).
Areas of interest: body, voice, identity, memory, meditation, archiving, noise, silence, field recordings, voidscapes, ambient music, experimental music & performance art.
17:00 - 18:00 UTC
Lecture + Q&A by Joanna Ebenstein
Death in the Age of Rationality: Playing with Death in Popular Amusements
Over the past 150 years, death, once a sacred mystery arbitrated by shamans and priests, moved from the realms of religion and mythology to those of science and medicine. At the same time, it largely disappeared from our daily life, with much higher life expectancy; people dying in hospitals instead of homes; and the dead body being outsourced to the professional, male run funeral parlors that replaced the tradition rites overseen by women centered in the home parlor. As death became more exotic and outside of our daily experience, it became more and more terrifying and, at the same time, fascinating.
Although our affluent industrialized Western culture sees it as morbid, our interest in death has not dissipated. Instead, like other unacknowledged or suppressed psychological material, it has underground, to emerge in other, less conscious, shadowy forms, expressed in the unpoliced realms of popular culture.
This talk will examine western cultural imaginings of death in a "post religious” world by tracing the history of death themed popular amusements from the phantasmagoria ghost shows of 18th century pre-revolutionary France to the present, with looks at the Diableries, The Paris Morgue, The Cabarets of Death, The Grand Guiginol, and Coney Island’s disaster spectacles.
The talk will end with a mediation on—and discussion on—how imaginings of death might have manifested differently in a non-patriarchal society, using the work of artists such as Graciela Iturbide and Frida Kahlo--along with the largely women run Positive Death Movement--as a jumping off point.
Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, photographer and graphic designer. She is the creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library and event series, and was co-founder (with Tracy Hurley Martin) and creative director of the recently shuttered Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. She is the editor of the posthumous publication of Mel Gordon’s “Cabarets of Death: Death, Dance and Dining in Early Twentieth-Century Paris”. Her other books include Anatomica: The Exquisite and Unsettling Art of Human Anatomy,Death: A Graveside Companion, The Anatomical Venus and The Morbid Anatomy Anthology (with Colin Dickey). Her work explores the intersections of art and medicine, death and culture, and the objective and subjective.
18:15 - 19:00 UTC
Artist talk + Q&A by Mia van Leeuwen
How to Raise a Ghost: Memento Mori as Contemporary Praxis
How to Raise a Ghost is a research-creation project led by Mia van Leeuwen that explores artistic perspectives on death. Inspired by the ancient principles of memento mori and other death confronting approaches, the work seeks multi-perspectivism on this vast subject by engaging in death studies research, artistic inquiry, philosophical contemplation, movement, a sense of humour, collaborative practice and interviews with artists about their relationship to death. Mia will present an artist talk outlining the How to Raise a Ghost project in preparation for engaging in a working group with Transart students.
A collection of readings and video sources will be curated by Joanna and Mia to be distributed prior to the event to contextualize/provide background information for the artist talk and lecture.
Artist talk by Mia van Leeuwen, artist & assistant professor @ University of Lethbridge, Canada