The Elaine Terner Cooper Education Fund:
Conversations with Contemporary Artists
FREE for students
All programs begin at 6:30 pm
Peter B. Lewis Theater
1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street)
New York City
www.guggenheim.org/publicprograms
On the occasion of the exhibition Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, select artists discuss themes and processes involved in their work. By using dated, passé, or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, much contemporary art embodies a melancholic longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past. Haunted documents this obsession, examining myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice, and in the process underscores the unique power of reproductive media.Curators introduce each program. Following the program, guests are invited to enjoy a private exhibition viewing and reception in the Guggenheim Museum rotunda.
LUIS JACOB
Tuesday, April 13
Like his predecessors Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and the artists of the Pictures generation, Luis Jacob (b. 1971, Lima) appropriates the visual material that surrounds us to reflect on individual and social experience. Installations such as Album IV (2004-05) memorialize a rapidly disappearing world, in this case printed magazines, a media format struggling in the onslaught of the Internet age.
IDRIS KHAN
Wednesday, April 28
Idris Khan (b. 1978, Birmingham, England) repeatedly turns to the work of twentieth-century photographers who have explored the notion of the archive. His Homage to Bernd Becher (2007) compresses an entire group of the photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher into a single, multilayered composition, paying tribute to the sheer labor and singular vision of the original creators while offering a melancholy reminder of the passage of time.
SARAH CHARLESWORTH
Tuesday, May 4
Employing a deconstructive technique inspired by Conceptual art and post-structuralist theory, the work of Sarah Charlesworth (b. 1947, East Orange, New Jersey) poses questions about photographic representation and the way history is reconstructed through photographs. In Herald Tribune: November 1977 (1977), for instance, she manipulated prints of newspaper pages to reveal how the news media can shape particular events, which in turn affect the opinions of the viewer.
WALEAD BESHTY
Wednesday, May 26
In 2001, Walead Beshty (b. 1976, London) began a project documenting the abandoned Iraqi diplomatic mission in former East Berlin. In his own words, the site represented “a relic of two bygone regimes, unclaimable by any nation; a physical location marooned between symbolic shifts in global politics.” When exposure marks were furthermore left by airport x-ray machines on Beshty’s camera film, the artist realized the new set of ghostly traces on the images constituted the “core dialectic” of his investigation—a tension between what once was and what remains in the photographic artifact.
STAN DOUGLAS
Wednesday, June 9
Stan Douglas (b. 1960, Vancouver) utilizes forms of popular entertainment—cinema and television—to destabilize narratives that depict society as a unified, homogeneous front with one history, one set of desires, and one value system. The film installation Der Sandmann investigates the intersection of history and memory as witnessed against the backdrop of post–Cold War Germany. Shot on 16mm film and projected as two separate but intersecting videos that show a community garden in use during the 1960s and as a construction site some 20 years later, Der Sandmann contemplates temporality and the transformative effects of history.
For more information and tickets, visit or call the Box Office 212 423 3587, Mon-Fri, 1-5 pm. Students may RSVP for free tickets to boxoffice@guggenheim.org.
