Category: Artworks news

We invited Professor Eduardo Cadava from Princeton University to present Derrida’s work Athens, Still Remains, an extended commentary on a series of photographs of Athens made by the French photographer Jean-François Bonhomme.

First published in French and Greek in 1996, Athens, Still Remains is Derrida’s most sustained analysis of the photographic medium in relationship to the history of philosophy and his most personal reflection on that medium. The book begins with a sort of verbal snapshot or aphorism that haunts the entire book: “we owe ourselves to death.” Combining philosophical speculations on mourning and death, event and repetition, and time and difference with incisive commentary on Bonhomme’s photographs and a narrative of Derrida’s 1995 trip to Greece, Athens, Still Remains is one of Derrida’s most personal,  works. As he reminds us, the word photography—an eminently Greek word—means “the writing of light,” and it brings together today into a single frame contemporary questions about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and much older questions about the relationship between light, revelation, and truth—in other words, an entire philosophical tradition that first came to light in the shadow of the Acropolis.

Eduardo Cadava joined the English Department at Princeton University in 1989. He specializes in American literature and culture, comparative literature, media technologies, literary and political theory, and theory of translation. He has written extensively on literature, philosophy, photography, architecture, music, democracy, war, memory and forgetting, race and slavery, human rights and citizenship, and the ethics of decision. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton UP), Emerson and the Climates of History (Stanford UP), and, with Fazal Sheikh, of Fazal Sheikh: Portraits (Steidl). He has translated several works by Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Maurice Blanchot, and recently has introduced and co-translated Nadar’s memoirs, Quand j’étais photographe, which appeared with MIT Press in 2015.

Daphne Dragona -member of our selection committee for the Visual Arts- presented her work and talked about the different ways of evaluating proposals when applying for festivals, exhibitions, awards and other arts programs.

Daphne Dragona is a Berlin based theorist and curator. She is the conference curator of Transmediale festival since 2015. Articles of hers have been published in various books, journals, magazines and exhibition catalogs. She has worked with different institutions for exhibitions, conferences, workshops and other events. Among her curated or co-curated projects are: Tomorrows, Urban Fictions for Possible Futures (Onassis Cultural Center, 2017), “…” An archaeology of silence in the digital age (Aksioma, 2017), Co-Curricular Program (transmediale, 2016), Capture all (transmediale, 2015), New Babylon Revisited (Goethe Institut Athen, 2014), Home/s (Goethe Institut Athen & Benaki Museum, 2013), Afresh (ΕΜSΤ, 2013), Mapping the Commons – Athens (EMST, 2010), Homo Ludens Ludens (Laboral, 2008). She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Communication & Media Studies of the University of Athens.

Choreographer and visual artist Alexandra Bachzetsis discussed with ARTWORKS Fellows about her work and performed parts of her work Private Song (Documenta14, 2017).

Alexandra Bachzetsis is a choreographer and visual artist, based in Basel (CH) and Zurich (CH). Her practice unfolds at the intersection of dance, performance, the visual arts and theater, generating a conflation of the spaces in which the body -as an artistic and critical apparatus- can manifest.

Much of Bachzetsis’s work involves choreographies of the body and, in particular, the way that popular culture provides source material for gesture, expression, identification and fantasy, as we continually create and re-create our bodies and the way we identify. Within this, she scrutinizes the mutual influence between, on one hand, the use of gesture and movement in the ‘popular’ or ‘commercial’ genres (online media, video-clip and television as a resource) and on the other and in the ‘arts’  (ballet, modern and contemporary dance and performance).

Since Bachzetsis started working independently in 2001, she has created over 24 pieces, often working collaboratively, which have been shown in theaters, festivals and public space venues worldwide. In addition to this, her work has been exhibited in a variety of contemporary art spaces and museums, including Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, 2008), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 2013 and 2015), Tate Modern (London, 2014) and the Jumex Museum (Mexico City, 2014), as well as a number of international biennials, such as the 5th Berlin Biennial (Berlin, 2008), (d)OCUMENTA 13 (Kassel, 2012) and the Biennial of Moving Images (Geneva, 2014). Bachzetsis was nominated for the DESTE Prize (2011) and is a laureate of the Migros Kulturprozent Jubilee Award (2007), the Swiss Art Award (2011 and 2016) and Swiss Performance Prize (2012). In 2016, Brachzetsis participated in “The Parliament of Bodies” and “Continuum”, Public Programmes at documenta 14. In January 2017, she presented Massacre: Variations on a Theme at MoMA, New York City. Later that year her work was included in documenta 14 exhibitions at Athens and Kassel.

Last night, we celebrated the awards of the 60 selected artists (45 visual artists and 15 filmmakers) to participate in the SNF Artist Fellowship Program 2018. We are grateful to the artists who celebrated with us yesterday, as well as the members of the jury, the media sponsors and all our collaborators for their decisive contribution.