John Smith,
Fall 2014
Known for their formal ingenuity, anarchic wit and oblique storytelling, John Smith's films have been widely shown internationally for over 30 years. For this screening he will present a diverse program of his older films, made between 1975 and 2001. The works in the selection explore the ambiguities of language and the world around us, playfully demonstrating how meaning is shaped by filmic construction.
Since 1972 John Smith has made over fifty film, video and installation works that have been shown in independent cinemas, art galleries and on television around the world and awarded major prizes at many international film festivals. In 2011 he received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists and in 2013 he was the winner of Film London's Jarman Award. His work is held in numerous collections including Arts Council England, Tate Gallery, London, Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, Miami and Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, Germany.
Smith's recent solo exhibitions include La Galerie, Noisy-le-Sec, Paris, France (2014), Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin (2013), Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2012), Turner Contemporary, Margate (2012), Weserburg Museum for Modern Art, Bremen (2012), Uppsala Art Museum, Sweden (2011), PEER Gallery, London (2011) and Royal College of Art Galleries, London, 2010. Recent group shows include 'Invocable Reality', Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2014), 'Constellations', Tate Liverpool (2013-14), 'Image Counter Image', Haus der Kunst, Munich (2012), 'Descriptive Acts', San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2012), 'Has The Film Already Started?', Tate Britain (2011-12), Berlin Biennial (2010), 'The Talent Show', Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and MaMA PS1, New York (2010).
http://johnsmithfilms.com/,
Claire Gilman,
Spring 2015
Claire Gilman (Ph. D. Columbia University) is Senior Curator at The Drawing Center in New York where she has organized several exhibitions, including: Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm (April 10 – June 28, 2015), Tomi Ungerer: All in One (January 15 – March 22, 2015), and Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy: Drawing Lessons (2014). Gilman has taught art history and critical theory at Columbia University, The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, The Corcoran College for Art and Design, the Museum of Modern Art and the School of Visual Arts (SVA). She has written for Art Journal, CAA Reviews, Documents, Frieze and October and has authored numerous essays for art books and museum exhibitions. She was recently voted one of the top 100 most powerful women in art by Artnet news.
Chris Sullivan,
Spring 2015
Chris Sullivan is a Chicago-based animator, performance artist, and experimental filmmaker. His film, Consuming Spirits, is a hand-made independent feature animation shot frame-by-frame on 16mm using paper cut outs, models, and tracing paper cell animation. It chronicles the lives of three characters who live in a rust belt town called Magguson, and work at its local newspaper The Daily Suggester. As the film unfolds, we find they have a long diabolical history, revolving around social service intervention, foster care, romance and hatred. Each character has family secrets to hide, and family secrets to discover. An auto accident one dark and inebriated night causes a crack in the memory vault of these intimate strangers. By film’s end all parties walk from the woods, both healed and wounded.
https://vimeo.com/sullivananimation,
Adam Szymczyk,
Fall 2014
Adam Szymczyk is Artistic Director of documenta 14 and was the Director at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland.
Szymczyk was a co-founder of the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, at which he worked as Curator from 1997 till 2003, when he assumed his new post in Basel. At Kunsthalle Basel, he organized exhibitions including Piotr Uklanski: Earth, Wind and Fire (2004); Tomma Abts (2005); Gustav Metzger: In Memoriam and Lee Lozano: Win First Don't Last Win Last Don't Care (both 2006); Micol Assaël: Chizhevsky Lessons (2007); Danh Vo: Where the Lions Are (2009); Moyra Davey: Speaker Receiver (2010); Sung Hwan Kim: Line Wall (2011); Paul Sietsema and Adriana Lara: S.S.O.R. (both 2012), as well as group shows including Strange Comfort (Afforded by the Profession) (with Salvatore Lacagnina, 2010), How to Work/How to Work (More for) Less (both in 2011).
In 2008, Szymczyk co-curated with Elena Filipovic the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art under the title When Things Cast No Shadow and in 2012, he curated Olinka, or Where Movement Is Created at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. He is a Member of the Board of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In 2011, he was recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement at the Menil Foundation in Houston.
documenta 14,
Marina Kassianidou,
Spring 2016
Marina Kassianidou is a visual artist whose work focuses on relationships between mark and surface. Her current practice combines painting, drawing, collage, installation, site-specific art, and found objects. Her theoretical interests include poststructuralist philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, and art history. She has recently completed a PhD in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, UK.
http://www.marinakassianidou.com/,
Joan Jonas,
Fall 2015
Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video and performance art, and an acclaimed multimedia artist whose work typically encompasses video, performance, installation, sound, text, and drawing. Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s, and her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theater. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures.
Joan Jonas is a New York native and she continues to live and work in New York City. She received a B.A. in Art History from Mount Holyoke College in 1958, studied sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and received an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Columbia University in 1965. Jonas has taught at MIT since 1998, and is currently Professor Emerita in the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology within the School of Architecture and Planning.
Jonas’s most recent solo exhibitions include those at Centre for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu Project Gallery, Japan (2014); Kulturhuset Stadsteatern Stockholm (2013); Proyecto Paralelo, Mexico (2013); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2013); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2011); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010). She has been represented in dOCUMENTA in Kassel, Germany, six times since 1972, and has had major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, Germany; and the Queens Museum of Art, New York.
Jessica Vaughn,
Spring 2016
“My task as an artist is to make sense of the networks of consumed resources, desirable space, labor, and class rooted in the displacement of black people in urban locations. My practice is the terrain where city segregation, affect, care, material traces and residue left from everyday objects meets contemporary thinking. I begin a piece where there is a testimony of lived experience and material objects that have traces of everyday life. Guided by thinkers and authors who study urban planning, social and cultural studies my intuition directs my material choices.”
jessvaughn.com,
Darby English,
Winter 2016
Darby English teaches modern and contemporary art and cultural studies at The University of Chicago, with a focus on American and European art produced since the Second World War. He is the author of How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, published in 2007 by the MIT Press, and 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, in 2016 by the University of Chicago Press. He is co-editor of Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress, published in 2002 by the MIT Press, and Art History and Emergency, forthcoming from Yale University Press. English’s short-form writing has appeared in Art Bulletin, Artforum, caareviews, The Guardian, The International Review of African-American Art and other venues.
Candice Hopkins,
Sounding the Margins
Candice Hopkins is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has held curatorial positions at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, National Gallery of Canada, the Western Front and the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre. Her writings on history, art, and vernacular architecture have been published by MIT Press, BlackDog Publishing, Revolver Press, New York University, the Fillip Review and the National Museum of the American Indian, among others. Hopkins has lectured widely including at the Witte de With, Tate Modern, Dakar Biennale, Tate Britain and the University of British Columbia. Hopkins was co-curator of the 2014 SITE Santa Fe biennial exhibition, "Unsettled Landscapes." In 2014 she received the Joan Lowndes award from the Canada Council for the Arts for excellence in critical and curatorial writing. She currently is a curatorial advisor for Documenta 14, opening in 2017.
Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University is pleased to present this talk in partnership with the The Graham Foundation.
Benjamin Tiven,
Spring 2016
Benjamin Tiven lives and works in New York. He completed the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program in 2012. His art and films are shown wordwide in museums, such as the Bronx Museum of Art, New York and at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival.
benjamintiven.com,
