[-empyre-] Week 1. Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival

Tue Nov 6 06:27:32 AEDT 2018

Welcome to the end of fall, everyone.  The last of the leaves are falling in Upstate New York and we are on the edges of our seats awaiting the US election results tomorrow night after an election cycle of harrowing, racist attacks on the world's most disenfranchised.  The results of last week's election results in Brazil make us all the more nervous.  Bizarrely, I too await my own election results as I am on tomorrow's ballot (unopposed, so no mystery) for election to my town council (I've always wanted to have a say in how to preserve snow plows and which potholes should be filled!).

But on a more serious note, I've chosen to moderate this month as a follow-up to the deeply thoughtful conversations that have been catalyzed by artworks and performances mounted over the past three months for the Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial, which I have curated under the same theme as we'll have for this month's discussion: Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival.  I'll say more about that as the week and month progresses, but for now just want to say that many of the participating artists have agreed to join us after this week.

For this week, I am joined by three international curators and theoreticians whose work probes the extent of duration across the arts and philosophy.  Their experiences and projects across the globe -- New Zealand, Singapore, Canada -- should provide our discussion with some exciting framing about how duration has been throught within the arts and digital culture.  So welcome to our discussion, featured guests, Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers (New Zealand), Justine Kohleal (Canada), Elizabeth Wijaya (US/Singapore).

Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers (New Zealand)
Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers is a contemporary art historian, public engagement specialist and arts writer based in Auckland, New Zealand. In 2017, she was awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis at the University of Auckland. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art published by Intellect and distributed through Chicago University Press. She has lectured at the University of Auckland and AUT University, worked as a curator at Artspace, NZ and currently manages a public engagement team at Auckland Transport.    Her book, Time,
 Duration and Change in Contemporary Art,  presents a major study of time as  a key aesthetic dimension of recent art practices. This book explores different aspects of time across a broad range of artistic media and draws on recent movements in philosophy, science, and technology to show how artists generate temporal experiences that resist the standardized time of modernity: Olafur Eliasson’s melting icebergs produce fragile temporal ecologies; Marina Abramović’s performances test the durations of the human body; Christian Marclay’s The Clock  conflates past and present chronologies. This book examines alternative frameworks of time, duration, and change in prominent philosophical, scientific, and technological traditions, including physics, psychology, phenomenology, neuroscience, media theory, and selected environmental sciences. It suggests that art makes a crucial contribution to these discourses not by “visualizing” time, but by entangling viewers in different sensory, material, and imaginary temporalities.

Justine Kohleal (Canada).
Justine Kohleal is a Toronto-based curator and art critic. Prior to her appointment as RBC Curatorial Fellow at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Kohleal worked as an independent curator and arts writer in Edmonton, Alberta. Select past curatorial projects include [INTERFACE] (Fringe Gallery, Edmonton); No Job More Dangerous and Intellectual Play (dc3 Art Projects, Edmonton); Sounding the Alarm: The Poetics of Connection (Art Gallery of Ontario); and Beth Stuart: Length, Breadth, Thickness and—Duration (The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery). She acted as a curatorial assistant to Gerald McMaster and Denise Birkhofer at Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto for The Faraway Nearby: Photographs of Canada from The New York Times Photo Archive and to writer and curator Kari Cwynar for Duane Linklater’s installation Monsters for Beauty, Permanence and Individuality (Evergreen Brickworks, Toronto). She has interned with The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Centre for American Art and with the Art Gallery of Ontario. Kohleal holds a curatorial M.F.A from OCAD University and a B.A. from the University of Alberta with a focus in Art, Design, and Visual Culture. Currently, her research focuses on the intersection of space, the body/senses and boredom within performance-based art and curatorial practice.

Elizabeth Wijaya (US/Singapore)
Elzabeth Wijaya is a President's Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Asian Languages and Literature of the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University in August 2018. Her research interests are in film-philosophy, ecocinema, and cinematic time. She is working on her book manuscript "Luminous Flesh, Haunted Futures: The Visible and Invisible Worlds of Chinese Cinema." She co-edited a Special issue of Parallax "Survival of the Death Sentence" in which she contributed an article "To See Die Again: The Act of Filming and The Act of Killing." She has also published in Derrida Today. She is a co-founder of E&W Films, a Singapore-based film development and production company: ewfilms.com.sg. Her co-directed feature-length film, I Have Loved, competed at international film festivals including the Shanghai International Film Festival.

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English

B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853

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