Author: ICI

Searching for Sebald

Although many recent scholarly texts address Sebald’s complex prose, Searching for Sebald is the first to explore Sebald’s fictive world through the idiosyncratic and anti-heroic photographs that propel and interrupt his labyrinthine narratives. Theoretical essays approach Sebald through the multiple filters of art history, film and photographic studies, cultural theory, and psychoanalysis. Contemporary visual art projects offer a more anamorphic reading of this bricoleur. The book also features an English translation of an interview Sebald gave in 1997 in which he talks exclusively about his use of photographs. Searching for Sebald is the 7th in a series of publications by ICI Press that explores the methodologies of culture.

Featuring artwork by:

Shimon Attie, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Andre Breton, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Walther Brüx, Tacita Dean, Marcel Duchamp, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rodney Graham, Vic Muniz, Adam Pendleton, Gerhard Richter

Artist projects:

  • Dorothy Cross
    “Antartica“
  • Christel Dillbohner
    “Wahlverwandschaften und Korrespondenzen”
  • Anne Flannery
    “Sebald’s Invisible Cities”
  • Axel Forrester
    “Max”
  • Suvan Geer
    “Trying to Remember my Mother’s Face”
  • Skuta
    “The Colorful Auras Found in Black & White Glass Plates of One Family”
  • Pablo Helguera
    “How to Understand the Light on a Landscape”
  • Antoinette LaFarge
    “All That is Beyond Hearing”
  • Daniel Lash
    “Translation and Repetition: An Architectural Translation of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn“
  • Matthew Marco
    “The Minimalls of Downey, CA (excerpt)”
  • Jeremy Millar
    “A Firework for W.G. Sebald (2005-6)”
  • Helen Mirra
    “Rings of Saturn Index”
  • Chris Rochelle
    “Birdland”
  • Christian Scholz
    “A Sebald Portfolio”
  • Tris Vonna-Michell
    “Who is Reinhold Hahn”
  • Tim Wright
    “In Search of Oldton”
  • The Institute of Cultural Inquiry Research Team
    “A Truth That Lies Elsewhere”

Essay contributions:

  • Richard Crownshaw (Manchester Metropolitan University)
    “German Suffering or ‘Narrative Fetishism?’: W.G. Sebald’s “Air War and Literature: Zürich Lectures”
  • Adrian Daub (University of Pennsylvania)
    “Donner à voir – The Logics of the Caption in W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn and Alexander Kluge’s The Devil’s Blind Spot“
  • Lisa Diedrich (Stony Brook University)
    “Gathering Evidence of Ghosts: W.G. Sebald’s Practices of Witnessing”
  • Florence Feiereisen and Daniel Pope (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
    “True Fictions and Fictional Truths: The Enigmatic in Sebald’s Use of Images in The Emigrants“
  • Mattias Frey (Harvard)
    “Theorizing Cinema in Sebald and Sebald with Cinema”
  • Christopher C. Gregory-Guider (University of Sussex)
    “Memorial Sights/Sites: Sebald, Photography, and the Art of Autobiogeography in The Emigrants“
  • Avi Kempinski (University of Michigan)
    “Quel roman! Sebald, Barthes, and the Pursuit of the Mother-Image”
  • Christina Kraenzle (York University, Toronto)
    “Picturing Place: Travel, Photography and Imaginative Geography in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn“
  • Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (University of Ulster)
    “Post-War Germany and ‘Objective Chance’: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean”
  • Anneleen Masschelein (K.U. Leuven, Belgium)
    “Negative Indexicality in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and André Breton’s Nadja“
  • Bettina Mosbach (Bonn University)
    “Superimposition as a Narrative Strategy in Austerlitz“
  • Christian Scholz, translated by Markus Zisselsberger
    “But the written word is not a true document,” a conversation with W.G. Sebald (1997)
  • John Sears (Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire)
    “Photographs, Images and the Space of Literature in Sebald’s Prose”
  • Carsten Strathausen (University of Missouri)
    “Going Nowhere: Sebald’s Rhizomatic Travels”
  • Markus Zisselsberger (State University of NY, Binghamton)
    “Melancholy Longings: Sebald, Benjamin, and the Image of Kafka”

with an introductory essay by:

  • Lise Patt (Institute of Cultural Inquiry)
    “Searching for Sebald: What I Know for Sure”

For purchasing of Searching for Sebald or SFS special editions, please visit our giftshop.

ICI Friend in Exhibition

DESIRE,

                              JOHNNY WAS

VLADIMIR CYBIL CHARLIER

An installation in the FiveMyles Plus/Space

“Exploring the intimate scale of the Plus space, Vladimir Cybil Charlier’s site specific installation, Desire, Johnny was, engages the complex cultural dynamics linking two important geographic markers: The Caribbean and The United States. Referencing pop art, Caribbean and African American traditions, the work  seeks to draw the viewer in a play between private and public spaces.”

EXHIBITION OPENING: SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 5:30-8PM
EXHIBITION ON VIEW: APRIL 21 – MAY 13, 2018

Former VIR in New Group Exhibition

Former VIR, Maya Gurantz, is currently featured in HOMEBODIES, AWAY TEAMS, a new group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, initiated and curated by Earl Gravy.

“Homebodies, Away Teams, organized by artist duo Earl Gravy, is a two-part group exhibition featuring sculpture, video installation and performance. At the project’s core is Earl Gravy’s research into a premillennial spiritual commune established in southeast Utah in 1934.”

On display January 26 – May 12, 2018.

ICI Associate and Friends in Exhibition

Martin Gantman and Pam Posey are featured in a new exhibition opening in Santa Monica, CA on March 17th.

“Every (ongoing) Day is an exhibition about daily practices. It showcases  durational projects – those undertaken by artists on a daily basis as a ritual, to track changes, or to mark the day. The exhibition presents a fragment of these ongoing artworks as a way to glean an understanding into an artist’s process and methods of working. “

Exhibition: March 17 to April 14, 2018 at ARENA 1 Gallery
Reception: Saturday, March 17, 2018, 5:00 to 7:00pm 

Open Studio Event

Melinda Smith Altshuler, SEEING LIGHT IN DARK,
Sublimated C Print (photo) on Aluminum

 

Artist’s Reception Saturday October 21st 6-9pm 

ICI Associate, Melinda Smith Altshuler, will open up her studio to the public to showcase SEEING LIGHT, a small new series among other works, October 19-20, 2017 at Santa Monica Art Studios. 

Hours: Thursday October 19th 12-6pm; Friday October 20th 12-6pm

Santa Monica Art Studios
3o26 Airport Ave. Studio #26,
Santa Monica, CA 90405

 

PRESS RELEASE: With Everything but the Monkey Head Iteration VIII

With Everything but the Monkey Head:
Theorizing Art’s Untheorizable Practices

Iteration VIII: Amy Kaczur (June 26 – July 1)
Finissage: Saturday, July 1, 2017, 6 – 8 pm

The Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) is pleased to announce the launch of With Everything but the Monkey Head: Theorizing Art’s Untheorizable Practices, a major project centered on the burgeoning field of studio-based research in the visual arts. This project will be a long-term collaboration with a host of diverse participants including nine researchers who have participated in some sort of visual research at the ICI; a set of specially selected interlocutors whose questions will help construct and strengthen the ideas central to each researcher’s project; and the curious spectators who bring discussion and debate to public exchanges.

The eighth iteration of the project will feature Amy Kaczur, a 2015 participant in the ICI’s Visualist-in-Residence (VIR) project. Kaczur returns to the ICI for a one week mini-residency during which time she’ll share her thoughts about her own research practices while collaborating with the ICI to build a treatise on the organization’s visual research endeavors. Building off her VIR project, the artist will continue to work on Stitching Julia: installation for an imagined life and the persistence of inquiry, as she attempts to mine and imagine the life and cultural shaping of Juliska Alt Kaczur through a singular photographic portrait. Her stay will culminate in a finissage on July 1, 2017 during which time she’ll share her ideas with the public.

Each iteration of With Everything but the Monkey Head will be accompanied with a unique laboratory workbook created by the researcher over the course of their short residency. In addition, each researcher will contribute to the project’s catalog, which is being produced to emulate late 19th century ‘sample’ books used by traveling salesmen, books whose form lends itself to an idea that is still unfolding.

All parts of the project can be followed on the ICI’s website. The construction of the lab books and the catalog will be charted on ISSUU where finished publications will be offered to the public through the print on demand service of ICI Press.

A PDF version of the press release for this iteration of the projects can be downloaded here.

ICI President, Deborah Cullen, Curates New Exhibition

 

ICI President, Deborah Cullen, has curated a new exhibition entitled Uptown at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University.  The exhibition is “a new triennial surveying the work of artists who live or practice north of 99th Street.”

Uptown runs June 2 – August 20, 2017