Speakers

Daniel Adler

York University, Toronto (Visual Arts)

Dan Adler is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at York University. A specialist in the history of art writing and the aesthetics of contemporary art, he has published in the London-based journal Art History and regularly contributes reviews to Artforum and Canadian Art. He is the author of Hanne Darboven: Cultural History, 1880-1983 (MIT Press, 2009).

AA Bronson

www.aabronson.com
AA Bronson lived and worked as part of the artists’ group General Idea from 1969 until the death of his two partners, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, in 1994. He now works as a solo artist. Recent exhibitions include Invocation of the Queer Spirits (with Peter Hobbs, at Plug In ICA and Creative Time, 2008-2009) and AA Bronson’s School for Young Shamans (at John Connelly Presents, 2008). He has published numerous articles and essays and received many awards, including a Governor General’s Visual Art and Media Award (2002) and the Order of Canada (2008). He is the president of Printed Matter, Inc., and the artistic director of the Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary (http://artreligionandsocialjustice.org).

Chanda L. Carey

University of California, San Diego (Visual Arts)

Chanda L. Carey is a PhD student in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. Her primary research interests are aesthetic transculturation and exchange in modern and contemporary art. She is writing a dissertation on these issues in the work of Marina Abramovic, with an emphasis on post-secular art practices in a global context. She is also a researcher with the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

Natalie Carnes

Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Natalie Carnes, a PhD candidate in Theology and Ethics at Duke University, is currently writing her dissertation on the training required to perceive and respond to the beautiful. Prior to Duke, she studied at Harvard University (Comparative Religious Studies) and the University of Chicago (Religion), where she also worked in art education at the Smart Museum.

Katrie Chagnon

Université de Montréal (PhD)

Katrie Chagnon is a PhD candidate in Art History at Université de Montréal and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research looks at the intersections between the discourses of art history, aesthetics and philosophy. Her dissertation will examine the relationship between minimalist art and phenomenology. She has published articles in Parachute, Esse and Espace and has collaborated with Art Mûr and Simon Blais galleries.

Chris Cuthill

Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

Chris Cuthill teaches Art Theory, Aesthetics and Art History at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario, where he has served as Art Chair since 2002. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. His research focuses on the way symbols form, reinforce and challenge the identity of religious communities.

Iftikhar Dadi

Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (History of Art and Visual Studies)

Iftikhar Dadi’s research examines modern art as a global and networked practice informed by postcolonial theory and theorizations of modernity, modernism and contemporaneity. His curatorial projects and work as a practising artist have further served to enrich his academic scholarship. He recently published Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010). His new book project is entitled “Art, Publics and Urban Popular Culture in Contemporary South Asia.”

Walid El Khachab

York University, Toronto (Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, Arabic Studies)

Walid El Khachab founded the Arabic Studies Department at Concordia University, Montreal. He now teaches in the Languages, Literatures and Linguistics Department at York University. He is the author of a comparative literature dissertation on melodrama in Egypt. During the past two years, he has published extensively and worked on the aesthetics of the veil in modern culture (literature, fine arts and cinema). His current research project is entitled “Celluloid Veil and Camera Revelation.”

Robert Enright

University of Guelph (School of Fine Arts and Music, Art Criticism)

Robert Enright has worked as a cultural journalist and art critic for the CBC and a wide range of magazines. He founded Border Crossings, of which he is currently senior contributing editor and film critic. He has written introductions, essays and interviews to some forty books and catalogues and is the author of Peregrinations: Conversations with Contemporary Artists (1997). He is also co-author of a monograph on Eric Fischl (with Arthur C. Danto and Steve Martin, 2008). In 2005, he was named to the Order of Canada.

Alain Fleischer

Le Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains

Alain Fleischer is a filmmaker, writer, visual artist and photographer. He currently directs the Le Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains. Among his latest books are Le carnet d’adresses (Seuil, novel, 2008), Prolongations (Gallimard, novel, 2008), Descentes dans les villes (Fata Morgana, short stories, 2009), Moi, Sàndor F. (Fayard, novel, 2009), Courts-circuits (Le Cherche Midi, novel, 2009), Les laboratoires du temps. Écrits sur le cinéma et la photographie 1 (Galaade, essays, 2008), Caméras (Actes Sud/Cinémathèque française, essays, 2009) and L’empreinte et le tremblement. Écrits sur le cinéma et la photographie 2 (Galaade, essays, 2009).

Boris Groys

New York University (Russian and Slavic Studies)

Senior Research Fellow at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, Boris Groys is a philosopher and a theoretician of art and media. He is the author of The Total Art of Stalin (1992), has edited collections of articles in Russian and German, and has written more than a hundred articles himself. Recent publications include Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (2006) and Art Power (2008). Among the many international art conferences and exhibitions he has curated and organized since 1994 is Medium Religion (with Peter Weibel, at ZKM Karlsruhe, 2008-2009).

Kajri Jain

University of Toronto (Centre for Visual and Media Culture)

Kajri Jain teaches in the Centre for Visual and Media Culture and the Graduate Department of Art at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Duke University Press, 2007) and contributed to the catalogue for the exhibition Medium Religion (Weibel and Groys, eds., ZKM, 2009). Jain has a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Sydney. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute and the Australian Research Council.

Celina Jeffery

University of Ottawa (Visual Arts)

Celina Jeffery is an art historian with a broad interest in cross-cultural interactions, new media, spirituality and curatorial practice, and has a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex. She co-edited Global and Local Art Histories (with Gregory Minissale, 2007) and is co-founder and editor of Drain Magazine, A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture (www.drainmag.com).

Louis Kaplan

University of Toronto (Centre for Visual and Media Culture)

Louis Kaplan is the author of numerous books, including The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer (2008) and American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century (2005). He curated the exhibition Command J: Jewish Laws, Digital Arts as part of the ReJewvenation Festival in the fall of 2005. Most recently, he co-edited “Regarding Jean-Luc Nancy,” a special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture. He is currently working on Wallace Berman’s artistic practice and its relationship to Jewish mysticism.

Esther Kim

Columbia University, New York (History of Art)

Esther Kim is a third-year PhD candidate in the History of Art Department of Columbia University, specializing in theory of media and publicity and its relationship to the rise of performance-as-art in the 1960s and 1970s. Formerly the owner of a contemporary art gallery in Manhattan, an independent art dealer and a corporate collection consultant, Kim is currently a curatorial fellow and program consultant for Performa, New York’s performance art biennial founded by art historian Roselee Goldberg.

Jeffrey Kosky

Washington and Lee University (Religion)

Currently Associate Professor of Religion at Washington and Lee University, Jeffrey Kosky is the author of books and articles about religion and postmodern philosophy, including Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion (2001), and the translator of books by the theologian and philosopher Jean-Luc Marion. He is currently completing a manuscript on modern disenchantment that approaches the questions and issues of re-enchantment through an exploration of site-specific artworks.

Adi Louria-Hayon

University of Toronto (PhD)

Adi Louria-Hayon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto. Her contributions to Afterimage have focused on contemporary photography and the sublime, and Palestinian and Israeli art. She is the author of “Translocation: The Move from External Unity to the Multiple Self” (Afterimage, July/August 2009). Louria-Hayon’s current research centres on the work of Bruce Nauman.

Steven Matijcio

Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Steven Matijcio is the curator of contemporary art at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA). He holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, where his thesis investigated the social impact of interactive technology. Matijcio served as a Professor in Contemporary Practice, Theory and Criticism at the University of Manitoba and remains active as a writer, researcher and speaker.

Marie José Mondzain

Philosopher Marie José Mondzain is research director emeritus of the CNRS and a member of the Conseil scientifique du Collège international de philosophie. She has written numerous articles, exhibition catalogues and monographs, including Image, icône, économie (Seuil, 2003), Le commerce des regards (Seuil, 2003) and Homo Spectator (Bayard, 2008). She currently pursues her research activities with a seminar entitled Observatoire des images contemporaines at the Ateliers Varan du Centre de formation à la réalisation documentaire, Paris.

Natalie E. Phillips

Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana (Art History)

Natalie E. Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Ball State University. She received her PhD in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine. In 2007, she published “The Radiant (Christ) Child: Keith Haring and the Jesus Movement” in American Art. Her current work focuses on the continued relevance of religion in contemporary art, particularly in the work of Kenny Scharf and other artists active in New York throughout the 1980s.

Catherine Pickstock

Cambridge University, England (Divinity)

Catherine Pickstock’s research interests include the application of linguistics to theories of religious language, analogy and liturgy, with a consideration of the implications of this interaction for linguistics itself and a critical consideration of postmodern philosophy in relation to the reinterpretation of premodern theology. She has written, co-written and co-edited several books, and published many articles in the area of philosophical theology. Her current book project is entitled “Theory, Religion and Idiom in Platonic Philosophy.”

Todd Porterfield

Université de Montréal (Art History and Cinema Studies)

Todd Porterfield has been working on León Ferrari since 2004 and interviewed him in 2008. Ferrari’s work resonates with Porterfield’s previous investigations of the modernist traditions that crystallized about 1800 and are essential components of modern culture, namely: the culture of imperialism; the establishment of national, religious, racial and sexual identities; and authoritarian regimes’ trafficking of the feminine, consumer culture and art history (e.g. Staging Empire: Napoleon, Ingres and David, with Susan Siegfried, 2007).

Cyril Reade

Rochester Institute of Technology (Art History)

Cyril Reade, an Associate Professor of Art History at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is the author of Mendelssohn to Mendelsohn: Visual Case Studies of Jewish Life in Berlin (2007). He is currently working on “The Mendelssohns in Berlin: Portrait of a Family.” Reade has also written numerous catalogue essays, articles and reviews on contemporary artists.

Bernard Sichère

Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot (Philosophy)

Philosopher and novelist Bernard Sichère teaches at the Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot. He has contributed to the magazines Tel Quel, L’Infini, Les Temps modernes, La Règle du jeu, Esprit and Pylône. In recent years, he has produced a meditation on the thought of Being after Heidegger and Christian revelation: Le Dieu des écrivains (Gallimard, 1999), Penser est une fête (Léo Scheer, 2002) and Seul un Dieu peut encore nous sauver (Desclée de Brouwer, 2002). His latest book is L’Être et le divin (Gallimard, 2008).

Ricky Varghese

University of Toronto (Sociology and Equity Studies)

Ricky Varghese is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. He is currently working on a dissertation entitled “Being, A Wound: Memory, Melancholia, Messianism,” in which he is attempting to stage a dialogue between Freud’s conceptualization of melancholia and the work of Walter Benjamin—especially his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”—as a way to better understand teleology and eschatology within the tradition of Jewish historiography.