at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry
Searching for Sebald – Reader’s Edition
The Reader’s Edition includes a softcover trade edition of Searching for Sebald with a free-standing print of Christel Dillbohner’s project for Searching for Sebald. Book and poster are housed in a silver cardboard sleeve.
Purchase the Reader’s Edition of Searching for Sebald at our gift shop.
A clandestine photograph of TRANSIT co-founder Evelyn Farny as she performs the world premiere of “Panorama” by composer Angélica Negrón on Thursday, February 2, 2012 at Kent Gallery in New York City. She also performed pieces by Alexandra Gardner, Caroline Shaw, and György Ligeti.
The works by Hans Haacke and Charles Gaines on the walls behind her are part of “Mind the Gap,” a Kent Gallery exhibition inspired by the ICI’s book Searching for Sebald with works that ‘operate between and within signs in order to discover, tease out, and make manifest meaning that is neither obvious nor orthodox.’ The Gaines piece (right) draws its inspiration from Georges Bataille, the subject of the ICI’s first full-length publication. These ‘Sebaldian’ moments no longer surprise us. But we were inspired by the full-length exhibition catalog produced solely for the internet. We applaud this impulse to remove commodity from acts of thought.
The exhibition, which includes work by Joseph Beuys, Walid Raad, Mark Lombardi, Alfredo Jaar, Heide Fasnacht and others, runs until February 25, 2012
The ICI believes that thought is often jump-started by sight that is slightly distracted or disrupted. For this reason, many ICI Projects begin with an investigation in the field. The objects, images, and impressions collected through this field work or through Interpretive Field Projects (IFP) — journeys to foreign sites — form the basis for most of our ICI publications, projects, and/or displays.
IFP journeys have included: The Origins of Madness in 1992 (Vienna, Buttenhausen, Auschwitz); Cults in 1994 (Carlsbad Cavern, Graceland, Bibleland); Traüm(a) in 1999 (Berlin, Prague, Krakow, Auschwitz, Venice); Searching for Sebald in 2004 (East Anglia, London, The Hague) and An Inconvenient Camera in 2012 (Gränna, Sweden; London and Berkeley).Interpretive field work has contributed to projects such as Between Flesh and Blood: Visualizing Race in America and Forget Foucault, our latest tactical event meant to draw focus to the AIDS pandemic.
In January 2015, the ICI, in conjunction with the E of the We, will present an IFP project at Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences. In a Mere Full of Rime: a search for photography’s essence will explore the limits of photography in a month-long residency undertaken in a hand-built paper airstream.
