Conversation between Julia Bryan-Wilson and Eva Ehninger
CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS!
21 November 19, 7 pm
Venue: KW Studio, front building, 1st floor
In English
Christina Ramberg, Willful Excess, 1977, Copyright the Estate of Christina Ramberg, Courtesy Collection of Karin Tappendorf
Christina Ramberg’s paintings of cropped torsos, sharply delineated and bound in bizarre variations, explore the body in traction with its environment, shaped as much by garments, corsets and hairstyles as by behavioral and gender conventions. The individual freedom of bodily experience and expression is radically called into question in these headless silhouettes of uncertain gender, immobilized in the upright format of the canvas. Ramberg’s practice coincides with a painterly orientation towards the figurative: exploring human form from this position, her works speak to the broader question of the body within given politics of representation in art. Julia Bryan-Wilson and Eva Ehninger will engage in a discussion delineating the conditions of the represented (female) body in visual art, and talk about Ramberg’s practice in the context of feminist and queer theories.
Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor for Modern and Contemporary Art and Director of the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center at the University of California. She is the author of Sharon Hayes (2018, with Jeannine Tang and Lanka Tattersall); Fray Art and Textile Politics (2017); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (2016, with Glenn Adamson); and Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009). Her writings have appeared in Afterall, Art Journal, Artforum, Camera Obscura, Frieze and October.
Eva Ehninger is Professor for Modern Art History at Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research focuses, among other topics, on the theory and critique of US modernism, postcolonialism and on the media history of representation. She is the editor of Bruce Nauman. A Contemporary (2018) and In Terms of Painting (2016, with Antje Krause-Wahl). She’s currently writing a monography on Face and History. Photographic Norms of Representation (forthcoming); past writings have appeared in Texte zur Kunst, kritische berichte and Photo Researcher.