With Alice Butler, Josh Cohen, Lucy Clout, Esther Peeren & Marianna Simnett. Moderated by Steven Bode & Remco de Blaaij.
In this one-day symposium exploring a variety of themes proposed by the exhibition ‘What Will They See of Me?’, artists Marianna Simnett and Lucy Clout were be joined by cultural theorist Dr Esther Peeren, writer and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, and writer and critic Alice Butler .
Beginning with the artists’ works themselves, the day’s discussions ranged widely over contemporary notions of identity and visibility, privacy and posterity. In a response to the suggestion that ‘nothing dies on the internet’, the speakers considered the ghostly afterlife that images can acquire in our increasingly shared and crowded (digital) world.
Read more...Biographies
Alice Butler is a writer and editor based in London. Her writing has been published in a wide range of publications including Frieze, Cabinet and E.R.O.S Journal, and she contributed the catalogue essay to the first phase of 'What Will They See of Me?'. She is Arts and Culture editor of the online magazine Review 31. In September this year she is due to start a PhD on the performance of confession in experimental women’s writing and visual art.
Josh Cohen is Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the author of numerous articles on psychoanalysis, modern literature and aesthetic theory, and four books including Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy, How to Read Freud and most recently, The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark.
Since January 2013 Esther Peeren is Associate Professor in Globalisation Studies at the Media Studies Department and Vice-Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS). As a researcher, she is also associated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA). Her research on globalisation focuses on how processes of globalisation influence the formation and representation (in literature, film, and television) of marginal subjectivities, on the under illuminated impact of globalisation on rural areas, and on the changing relationship between centres and peripheries. Other interests are popular culture, modern literary and cultural theory (in particular the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, poststructuralism, cultural analysis, and gender studies), and 20th and 21st century English and American literature.