Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

ICA Miami welcomes professor of Anthropology at UC-Berkeley Stefania Pandolfo to the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center for a public talk 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.