Skip to content

Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

Calendar

Stefania Pandolfo Talk: “Things we call Visions”

Type
Art + Research
Education
Date
Wed, Aug 3, 2022
7pm
Location
RSVP

ICA Miami welcomes professor of Anthropology at UC-Berkeley Stefania Pandolfo to the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center for a public talk. This lecture is free and open to the public with advance RSVP and is presented in conjunction with the ICA Miami’s Summer Intensive 2022 semester.


What is vision? In what sense can the dream awaken, and aesthetic experience be “one of the names we give to our need for breakthrough” (Etel Adnan) in the midst of a history of destruction, intimate, political, and cosmic? Through a discussion of the artwork of Lebanese painter and poet Etel Adnan, at once meditative and engaged with the devastation of war, marked by an exile from language and home, and yet steeped in the Islamic mystical tradition, and in conversation with cases from my own ethnography of mediumship, artistic expression, and traumatic experience in contemporary Morocco, this talk presents an approach to imagination and vision where the figure, the dream, the painting, and the poem, are autonomous manifestations and agentive expressions– “passageways” that may carry us beyond the boundaries of the visible and the invisible, the living and the dead, granting an access to an otherwise.


About Stefania Pandolfo

Stefania Pandolfo is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Impasse of the Angels (1997); with Anne M. Lovell, Veena Das, and Sandra Laugier, Face aux désastres (2013); and Knot of the Soul (2018). Her current book project is tentatively titled “Art/Cure”.

RSVP