Lili Dujourie, artist, in conversation with Gertrud Sandqvist, curator

November 20, 2013, 7 p.m. (English)

In her early video pieces from the 1970s and 1980s, the Belgian artist Lili Dujourie radically and rigorously explored the still-young medium. Video technology not only enabled her to document her actions in real time, it also allowed her to stage intimacy. Hommage à … I–V, a series of five videos, revolves around a dual regime of the gaze between theatrical pose and voyeuristic control. The artist presents her own body in a play between exposure, concealment, and the camera as a proxy for the viewer, an embodiment of the “pure” gaze. She showcases the entire register of female exhibitionism and reenacts the poses of art history’s nudes. Yet Dujourie is not a passive exponent of a desiring gaze but a self-determined agent creating an alternative narrative of the female body. The subject-object dichotomy gives way to a subject-subject relationship.

Held as part of Vienna Art Week.

Mary Kelly, artist, in conversation with Gertrud Sandqvist, curator

November 19, 2013, 7 p.m. (English)

If there is a work of art that has comprehensively grasped, visualized, and contextualized the complexities of sensory and bodily experience in relation to a system, or more precisely, a structuralist matrix, it is Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1974–79). In this pioneering work, the artist addressed a topic that had been taboo—the subjective and physical experience of birth and motherhood—and lent it form by translating it into the systematic structure of a decidedly conceptualist aesthetic. Post-Partum Document was unsparingly analytical and revealed the conventions and stereotypes at work in feminism as well as Conceptual art. Kelly transcended the artistic and conceptual agenda of by resorting to methods from both psychoanalysis (Lacan) and the sciences. With its critical and yet affirmative stance toward Conceptual art, Post-Partum Document I. Prototype manifests the same “cracks,” contradictions, and paradoxes within Conceptual art that Gertrud Sandqvist traces in the exhibition Against Method.

Held as part of Vienna Art Week