Dialogues: Art, Performance, Film at Rich Mix, January 30 2014

Dialogues: Art, Performance, Film

Rich Mix, London

Thursday 30 January

10.45am – 5pm

£14.50, £9.50 concessions

A day long symposium and screening event on dialogues in art, performance and film with Gareth Evans, Mike Dibb, Deborah Levy, Hugo Glendinning, Alan Read, Irit Rogoff and Adrian Heathfield in conversation.

Conversation makes the world go around. And in recent times creative works of conversation have been a forceful part of contemporary art practices, ‘relational’ and participatory performances, and the rising genre of the essay film in experimental documentary cinema and video. Conversing has long been prescribed as the means to solve all manner of dis-eases, from Sigmund Freud’s talking cure for psychological imbalances, to physicist David Bohm’s proposition of creative dialogue as the primary tool for organizational and social change. But what do these dialogues in art, performance and film do for, or with, the spectator? What do they tell us about the stakes of being social with ideas?

As well as a screening of Transfigured Night, a conversation with Alphonso Lingis, a new, as yet untitled, dialogue film will also be premiered: Heathfield’s discussion on the value of spirit, shot in the heart of France with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler.

Alongside the screenings there will be two panel discussions with leading thinkers, visual artists, film and performance makers discussing a variety of approaches to dialogic practice, and what these explorations of the ethos of relation might tell us about the status of ‘the intellectual’ and intense ideas in the contemporary public sphere.

“Capturing thought in the moving image is notoriously difficult. To witness thinking itself is to make something very different from the standard 'in conversation', however acclaimed the speaker. Performance Dialogues face this challenge head-on. A series really without precedent, it seeks to present ideas in action, as they unfold in the key sites of their hugely influential protagonists – city apartment, house-museum, contested street. Poised between intellectual narrative and place-work, each film finds a distinctive style and a language suitable to its subject, while remaining always engaged, empathetic and concerned, finally, with the most pressing business: how to live in such times.”

Gareth Evans, Film Curator, Whitechapel Gallery, London; Producer, Patience (After Sebald)

The Crossovers DVD series is produced and published by Performance Matters, a collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Roehampton, and the Live Art Development Agency, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Crossovers is supported by Follow on Funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.