AICA-USA Lecture

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev presents the 2014 AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School. This is the eighth annual AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

“Cum-mittere—to put with, to put together: holding environments and knots in art work and work with art.”

What are the transformative ecological and social forces that are involved in curating “committed” exhibitions? Working with artists and people active in other fields of knowledge in locations such as Sydney, Turin, Kassel, Kabul, New York, and now Istanbul, exhibitions and artworks hold together chains of relations that can be read through various lenses. In this lecture, we might think about the question through the lens of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s late fascination with topology, or the ways in which chains of relations or knots are created.

Christov-Bakargiev is an internationally esteemed curator, author and researcher into the histories of art. She is curator of the 14th Istanbul Biennale, to be held September 5-November 1, 2015. In 2012, Art Review named her the most powerful person in the art world. As artistic director of the influential and much-lauded documenta 13 in 2012, she presented objects produced by artists together with those conceived for other purposes, without privileging either. In preparation and during the event, she organized talks and exhibitions in Alexandria, Egypt; Kabul, Afghanistan; and Banff, Canada. She has written that she is intent on probing how exhibitions, art writing, and art history “could be re-imagined for the purposes of a more worldly ecology, co-evolution and flourishing of all forms of life on the planet.”

Born in Ridgewood, New Jersey in 1957, she was chief curator of the Museo di Arte Contemporanea at Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy (2002-2008; interim director in 2009), Artistic Director of the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008), and Senior Curator at P.S.1 in New York (1991-2001). Her books include William Kentridge (1998), Arte Povera (1999), and publications for documenta 13. She is currently the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University and Leverhulme professor at Leeds University, as well as Guest Scholar at The Getty Research Institute for 2015.

The previous AICA-USA Distinguished Critic lecturers are Michael Brenson, Linda Nochlin, Roberta Smith, Holland Cotter, Peter Schjeldahl, Michelle Kuo, and Lucy Lippard.

AICA was founded in the wake of World War II to protect the openness of global discourse in the arts. There are now chapters in 64 countries currently promoting art criticism and its insights into contemporary culture. AICA-USA, with a nationwide membership, contributes significantly to the current dialogue.

This is the eighth AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, an annual event addressing current issues in the world of art criticism. It is presented by the United States Chapter of International Association of Art Critics (AICA: Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art) in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.