Mondays at the Center – February

All lectures are brought to you in association with the Curatorial Studies Program of the Kibbutzim College of Education

On Thresholds – Julie Bacon and James Geurts

Mon 21.2 at 20:00

A presentation tracing the development of the art practices of the English artist Julie Bacon, who is based in Quebec, and the Australian artist James Geurts. Structured around images of their art works and Bacon’s curatorial projects, the talk explores the themes of their site-specific, ephemeral, performative and time-based approaches to art making. Ranging from themes of mythology, philosophy and hydrology, works covered include large-scale bridge installations, a land art project at four points on the equator and their current collaborative project exploring the poetics of water in the geography and context of Israel.

Julie Bacon is an artist, writer and curator. She has edited three anthologies

exploring social, historical and philosophical aspects of contemporary art making, the most recent of which is Arkive City (http://www.interface.ulster.ac.uk/arkivecity)

Bacon has played an active role in the development of artist-run culture through curatorial posts at art centres in England, Northern Ireland and Canada. In 2007 she completed her practice-based PhD on the politics and poetics of museum and archival spaces based at Interface Centre for Art, Technologies and Design in Belfast, where she was Research Associate in Art and its Locations from 2005-2008. She explores philosophical leitmotifs (eg. power relations, archetypes) through the space of aesthetics and the body, and is interested in the relationship between ritual, technology and consciousness. By overlapping the lenses of myth, storytelling and analysis, her performances, installations, essays and curatorial projects propose a form of critical poetics. She uses this language to explore the porosity between the dynamics of inner and outer landscapes.

James Geurts is an Australian artist who has developed an ‘expanded drawing practice’ that involves drawing with traditional materials, as well as with light, sound, photography, Land Art, kinetic sculpture and video. Working in sites ranging from a city harbor and a salt lake in the desert in Australia, to a cultural quarter in China, his events and installations amplify the relationship between form and flux in nature and the built environment, and the experience of the senses and perception in the human body. A central theme in his work is the dynamics of water, through which he explores the environment and the human as two interdependent circulatory systems. He recently completed projects with Satellietgroep in the coastal city of Hague, and at Nadine in Brussels where his work focused on an underground river in the city.

Assaf Talmudi

Mon 28.2 at 20:00

To be announced

Entrance 10 NIS

Free entrance for friends of the CCA