The Cambridge Modern and Contemporary Art Seminar Series: Taking the Sun by the Hand: Insight and the Rhythms of Memory

Professor Jane Garnett (University of Oxford)

This talk puts in conversation the work of two Italian 20th-/21st-century artists - Maria Lai and Virgilio Sieni - who have reflected on how art can build community (indeed transform the very concept of community) through engaged gestures of connectivity. Both artists think about cultural depth - the archaeology of gesture creating spaces in past and present forms - and about how performance can simultaneously suspend and transmute the rhythms of the everyday, thereby opening up new possibilities of revitalisation and the exercise of agency.  In rethinking art they reemphasise the significance of thinking historically.