ACW & IMMA Research Residency & Public Lectures
MA Art in the Contemporary World (NCAD, Dublin) in collaboration with Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) is delighted to welcome Nuit Banai as their inaugural Visiting Research Resident.
Following an open, competitive, call Nuit was invited to develop and present her research on the theme: “The Crisis of the Object Of Criticism.” This will involve graduate seminars, studio visits and two public lectures.
Declan Long and Francis Halsall, programme directors, MA ACW said: “We are delighted to welcome Nuit to Ireland and host her in collaboration with the residency program at IMMA. Her expertise as a researcher and critic working on modern and contemporary art will find a receptive, engaged and enthusiastic audience here at NCAD. The seminars she will lead on contemporary art and criticism will provide the opportunity for the research community of Art in the Contemporary World to engage with an exciting international critical voice. We all look forward to a rich exchange of ideas. We are also very pleased that we can open these discussions up to a larger audience with the public lectures.”
The lectures will be on Wed. 21st and 28th May at 6pm, NCAD (details below).
Nuit Banai: is an art historian and critic who received her PhD in Art History from Columbia University before joining the Department of Visual and Critical Studies at Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2007. Her research interests focus on the the post-war and contemporary constructions of new publics through the visual arts, especially in Europe and the Middle East. She has published widely, including commissioned essays for the Schirn Kunshalle in Frankfurt, Centre Georges Pompidou and Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris, Barbican Art Gallery in London, Artists Space, Bronx Museum for the Arts, the American Society in New York City and Documenta in Kassel. She served as Assistant Editor of the journal RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics (2002-2005), is a regular contributor to Artforum International and a Contributing Editor to Art Papers. Her book on Yves Klein is forthcoming in the Critical Lives series published by Reaktion Books and she is currently developing a book project titled Imagining Europe: From Nation State to Border State.
Public Lectures
Lecture 1: "Border Identity: The Manifesta Paradigm for Europe"
Wednesday May 21, 6pm, Harry Clarke Lecture Theatre, NCAD, Thomas Street, Dublin 8
In this lecture, Nuit will argue that one of the primary challenges of artistic practitioners and cultural institutions is imagining a uniquely European sphere that is still in the making, and envisioning new forms of sovereignty, publics, and models of citizenship within it. Using "Manifesta: The European Biennial of Contemporary Art" as a case study, she will suggest that transforming the modernist rubric of the nation state into a post-national project makes visible a proposition for a 'border identity' that may be both radical and reactionary.
Lecture 2: "Here and Elsewhere: Toward a Modernism of Exile"
Wednesday May 28, 6pm, Harry Clarke Lecture Theatre, NCAD, Thomas Street, Dublin 8
In the years surrounding the outbreak of World War II, the experience of exile was paramount as artists were dislocated from their site of life and work and transplanted into new cultural contexts. As a result, countless practices framed by this historical rupture have either been absorbed into national narratives or rendered invisible. In the contemporary period, meanwhile, the celebration of post-nationalism asserts the predominance of a global lingua franca and relegates those who embrace national idioms to particularistic concerns or outright obscurity. The case of Gertrude Goldschmidt, aka "Gego," might help us develop a ‘modernism of exile’ that complicate these two prevailing historical models, which link modernism and modernization with stylistic ruptures within the parameter of the nation state and are organized within geopolitical power dynamics of ‘center’ and ‘periphery.’
