Professor Eduardo Cadava teaches English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, and he has been a visiting professor in art colleges, including the San Francisco Art Institute. Cadava is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton UP,1997), a reading of Walter Benjamin’s concept of history and its relation to photography. This has been the most influential book on the philosophy of photography since Susan Sontag’s book on photography. Cadava has also published Emerson and the Climates of History (Stanford UP,1997), a study of the politics of Emerson’s meteorological reflections. He co-edited Who Comes After the Subject? (Routledge, 1991), and is the translator of many essays by contemporary French philosophers, including the work of Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Blanchot. He is currently writing Music on Bones, a book length meditation on the relation between music and techniques of reproduction, memorization, and writing. In addition, he is current working on a book in progress entitled Mourning America, on the relationship between mourning and nationalism.

Eduardo Cadava Graduate Seminars <>

Seminar 1 – Monday, March 10, 2008 5-7 pm
Location: JT Reid Room (Elizabeth Murdoch Building, 234 St Kilda Rd)
Nadar
Readings
Nadar, “Nadar: My Life as a Photographer,” trans. Thomas Repensek, October 5 (summer 1978): 6-28.
Rosalind Krauss, “Tracing Nadar,” October 5 (summer 1978): 29-47.

Seminar 2 – Tuesday, March 11, 2008 5-7 pm
Location: CFI Seminar Room (Arts Hub, Level 2, 234 St Kilda Rd)
The Poetry of Photography
Readings
Baudelaire, “Correspondences,” “Blind Men,” “A une passante,” “A Strange Man’s Dream” (translations provided)
Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Critical Inquiry 19 (spring 1993): 421-436.

Seminar 3 – Friday, March 14 2008, 5-7 pm
Location: T Reid Room (Elizabeth Murdoch Building, 234 St Kilda Rd)
Photography and Reproduction: Walter Benjamin
Readings
Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” trans. E. Jephcott and K. Shorter, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol.2, 1927-1934 (Cambridge, MA.: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999): 507-530.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” trans. H. Zohn and E. Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA.: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2003): 251-283.

Everyone is welcome to attend the seminars.
Readings are available as PDF files - CLICK HERE

Thursday, March 13, 2008 5-7 pm
Location: Federation Hall, Victorian College of the Arts
PALM READING:
FAZAL SHEIKH’S HANDBOOK OF DEATH

The talk focuses on a series of photographs by the New York born, Pakistani photographer, Fazal Sheikh. Fazal spent the winter of 1997 along the Afghanistan/ Pakistan border photographing Afghan refugees, in secret, in the middle of the night, and under the light of a small lamp. He recorded innumerable images of the refugees, of the devastated landscapes, the wounded bodies, and so on. In particular, though, I’ve been interested in a series of images of hands, just hands, holding small photographs of dead sons, brothers, and fathers. I wish to read these images in terms of what they can tell us about the relation between life and death, movement and stasis, the erasure and preservation of human traces, and memory and forgetting – all of which belong to the motifs and issues we most generally associate with the photograph in general. In other words, I wish to read these images in order to think about what it means to read a photograph, and this because these are, among other things, photographs of photographs. You can see this project on Sheikh’s website at: www.fazalsheikh.org.

The public lecture is co-sponsored by the School of English, Communication and Performance Studies, Monash University

Jalal Toufic is a thinker, writer, and artist. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005), and Undeserving Lebanon (2007). His videos and mixed-media works have been presented in such venues as Artists Space, New York; ICA, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; and the 16th International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) in a “Focus Jalal Toufic” program. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, USC, and the Rijksakademie, and he is currently a Professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. www.jalaltoufic.com.

Seminar 1
Thursday 6 March, 2008 5.00-7.00 pm
Location: Postgraduate Lounge (Arts Hub, Ground Level, St Kilda Rd 234)
Title: “Two or Three Things I'm Dying to Tell You about The Thousand and One Nights”

Abstract: “Morning overtook Shahrazâd, and she lapsed into silence… The king thought to himself, ‘I will spare her until I hear the rest of the story; then I will have her put to death the next day.’” Borges errs when he writes: “Why were there first a thousand [the apparently Persian version: Hazar Afsana, the thousand tales] and later a thousand and one?” It is confounding that despite all his flair Borges should miss the displacement from tale in the Persian version to night in the Arabic one: I consider that the first title refers to the stories Shahrazâd tells, while the second refers to the nights, the one thousand nights of the one thousand unjustly murdered previous one-night wives of King Shahrayâr plus his night with Shahrazâd, a night that is itself like a thousand nights.

Seminar 2
Friday 7 March, 2.30 – 4.30 pm
Location: Cinema 2 (Film and TV School, St Kilda Rd 234)
Title: “Arriving Too Late for Resurrection”

Abstract: “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. Yet when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days” (John 11: 5-6). The narrator of Blanchot’s Death Sentence writes: “I think in saying that, she was announcing that she was going to die. This time I decided to return to Paris. But I gave myself two more days.” By the time both arrive, the moribund is already dead. Similarly, following his disappearance, the Johannes of Dreyer’s Ordet shows up only after Inger dies.… Johannes and Death Sentence’s narrator must have intuited that they can do nothing to save the dying person, and that they may not recover from their complete helplessness to prevent her death. Johannes and Death Sentence’s narrator arrive only once the doctor, who, at least until now, functions in the timely, and who has center stage as long as the patient is still struggling to maintain her life, now that she was dead, has withdrawn. Jesus Christ, Johannes and Death Sentence’s narrator arrive just in time for the resurrection.

Everyone is welcome to attend the seminars.

Wednesday 12 March 5 -7 pm
Location: Federation Hall, Victorian College of the Arts, 234 St Kilda Rd

Screening of the following Videos:

-- Saving Face, video, 8 minutes, 2003
-- Mother and Son; or, That Obscure Object of Desire (Scenes from an Anamorphic Double Feature), video, 41 minutes, 2006
-- The Sleep of Reason: This Blood Spilled in My Veins, video, 32 minutes, 2002

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Jalal Toufic

The Centre for Ideas honoury Research Fellow Dr. Albrecht Dümling has been awarded the prestigious Prize for European Culture KAIROS. The prize was for work on rediscovering persecuted musicians.
More information (in German): www.toepfer-fvs.de/magazintexte.html

Dr. Albrecht Dümling was awarded a PhD in 1978, from the Technical University, Berlin. He is a musicologist whose research focuses the music banned by the Nazis and labelled 'degenerate music'. He created the exhibition 'Entartete Musik' which has toured Europe, the UK and the US. In 2003 he was an honorary research associate at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. He is currently a researcher with the Centre for Studies in Anti-Semitism at the Technical University, Berlin.

He is President of "musica reanimata", the society for the re-discovery of Nazi-persecuted musicians and their music.

Dr. Dümling will return to the Centre for Ideas in 2008 to write his forthcoming book on refugee musicians in Australia.

http://www.duemling.de/biografie.htm (German language biography)

Since the establishment of the CFI in 2001 a wide range of prominent international and local artists, performers, writers, and thinkers have contributed to the program including:

Louise Wilson is the recipient of the 3rd Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford/Centre for Ideas Fellowship. Louise will be in residence at the Centre for Ideas from 3 July - 2 October.

Biography
Louise K Wilson is a visual artist who makes installations, sound works and single channel videos. Born in 1965, she studied Fine Art at the University of Northumbria (1987) and Studio Arts at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada ( MFA, March 1996).
She has exhibited widely in North America and Europe, most recently in A Record of Fear (National Trust Orford Ness, 2005); Artists Airshow, RAE Farnborough (Arts Catalyst, 2004); Arena, Baltic (2003); Runway/ Spadeadam, Gallery TPW, Toronto (2003); Spectacular Bodies, Hayward Gallery, London (2000) Space Camp, Dunlop Art Gallery, Canada, (2000) and Dreams in the Void, Temple Gallery, Philadelphia, (2000). Her curatorial project Flock opened in Britain in 2003. Her published writing includes an interview with Paul Virilio (CTHEORY, 1994), a commissioned essay for Private Views: Artists Working Today (Serpents Tail, 2004) and artist pages for Zero Gravity - A Cultural Users Guide (Arts Catalyst, Cornerhouse books 2005).

Statement
My work explores perceptual and cultural aspects of science and technology. Processes of research are central to this practice and I frequently involve the participation of individuals from industry, museums, medicine and scientific research in the making of work. Previous associations have included the Montreal Neurological Institute, the Science Museum in London, the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training facility in Moscow and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

My practice typically involves an immersive process, some video and broadcast audio pieces for example have sprung from a curiosity about how the technology of flight affects our physiological states and psychological selves. To this end I have participated in a movement experiment in zero gravity (Arts Catalyst 2001-5), co-opted a team of air traffic controllers in formation cycling on an airport runway (for the Arena project, 2003) and been a passenger in an aerobatics plane repeatedly looping the loop in Northumbria airspace (for Artists' Airshow, 2004).

One aspect of my practice that I am seeking to develop through a range of different strategies and dialogues is an examination of certain spaces through the recording of sound. Essentially I am using sound as a means to explore Cold War sites. As such I want to touch upon the idea of recording corporeal memory and sensory accounts to respond to a historical era within living memory that continues to touch lives in complex ways.

Wendy Woodson (Professor of Theatre and Dance, Amherst College) is a Fulbright Fellow and Visiting Artist at the Centre for Ideas, Semester 1 2007.

Wendy, artistic director and founder of Present Company Inc., has created over 80 movement, theater,and video works that have been presented throughout the U.S. and in Europe. She has received numerous awards and grants for her performance and video work including Choreography, Theater and Interdisciplinary Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Boston Film and Video Foundation. Her full-length movement theater pieces and videos have been shown extensively in the U.S. at such venues as the Washington Project for the Arts, P.S. 122, Jacob's Pillow, Emerson Majestic Theater, the John F. Kennedy Center, Wolf Trap, New Playwrights Theater, the DeCordova Museum, at numerous colleges, universities, and national and international video/film festivals. Most recently she was the recipient of a playwrights/new theater fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

In addition to her credits as a writer, director, choreographer and video artist, Ms. Woodson is also a dedicated arts educator. She worked as an artist-in-the-schools with the National Endowment for the Arts (Delaware, North and South Carolina and District of Columbia Arts Commissions) and has been guest and resident artist with numerous universities and colleges since 1980 (including the George Washington University, Middlebury College, Mt. Vernon College, Catholic University, University of Maryland, University of Wisconsin,
Williams College, Trinity College etc.). She is a Professor of Theater and Dance Department at Amherst College and the Five College Dance Department where she has taught since 1987. She holds a Master of Arts in Dance from the George Washington University and studied and/or performed with Meredith Monk, Maida Withers, Martha Graham, Attic Theater, Erick Hawkins, Mirjam Berns, Ping Chong, Free Association Dance Theater, Twyla Tharp, Kei Takei, and Dan Wagoner. In addition, she was a Gulbenkian scholar in Lisbon, Portugal and lived and danced in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.