Artist’s Series (supported by the London Consortium)

Organised by Parveen Adams

Architectural Association: 36 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3ES

Friday 12th February              ALFREDO JAAR                  6.30-8.00

Jaar explores the public’s desensitization to images and the difficulties art has in representing genocides, epidemics, and famines. He is concerned with different strategies of communication to make images visible. For the installation of Let there be light : the Rwanda project 1994-1998 (1998) Jaar placed each photo in a black box with a description of what couldn’t be seen, “as if I were describing the piture to someone who was blind.” Jaar has shown at over half a dozen Biennales and at Documenta in 1987 and in 2002. Fundación Telefonica Chile, Santiago (2006) was his first in his native country in twenty-five years. The Politics of the Image showed at South London Gallery in 2008. He has been a Guggenhein Fellow (1985) and a MacArthur Fellow (2000) and he won Spain’s Premio Extremadura la Creación.

Friday 5th March                    EYAL SIVAN                                   6.30-8.00

In an investigation of the way in which memory is used for political purposes Sivan works with the idea of an archive common to victims and perpetrators – in this case Palestinians and Israelis.  His films include Slaves of Memory (1991); The Specialist (1999) using footage from the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem; Route 181 – fragments of a journey in Palestine-Israel (2003); Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork (2009). His powerful work has drawn accusations of all kinds and even a court hearing. “In the Israeli case…What is surprising is to notice to what extent the analogy with the Nazi genocide existed already during the 1948 event—it was only three years after the end of the Second World War. It throws a completely new light on the myth … that memory can be a vaccine against future crimes.” He is a film-maker, a writer and a Research Professor at the University of East London.

Monday 8th March                 MARCEL ODENBACH       6.00-8.00

Odenbach is one of Germany’s leading video artists. He has produced a large body of work since the seventies. He will be speaking about and showing two works in their entirety, something necessitated by the way the work is conceived and structured in time. In Still Waters Crocodiles Lurk is a work on the Rwandan genocide of 1994 completed in 2004. The second Turning Circles is a newly completed work concerned with the relation of architecture and memory. It is a study of the Majdanek Mausoleum which was built on the site of the Lublin concentration camp in 1969. Odenbach has lived and worked in New York and Ghana and is now in Cologne.

Friday 12th March                  TOM McCARTHY                            6.30-8.00

McCarthy is a writer and artist. He won the 2008 Believer Book award for his novel Remainder. He has also published Men in Space and his third novel C will appear later this year. His International Necronautical Society is an on-going art project which surfaces in a number of forms. The discussion will focus on the relation between literature and film. Remainder is being made in to a film; McCarthy has written some script for Johan Grimonperz’ Double-Take; and C contains a big film-strand. Tom McCarthy lives and works in London.