An artist talk by the British painter Dexter Dalwood, presented by Plattform in cooperation with Faculty of art, music and design of University of Bergen.

Please join us for a talk by the British artist Dexter Dalwood, at Landmark on 14 March.

Dexter Dalwood is a rare instance of an artist equipped to examine how history is constructed and interpreted through the making of paintings, which are both intellectually challenging and visually seductive. The artist’s juxtaposition of quotations and references from a broad and eclectic range of subjects is reflected in his transposition of the cut-and-paste of the collage technique to canvas. Not only does Dexter Dalwood possess a profound cultural and historical knowledge, he also perceives the connections between art history, politics, music, literature and personal experience, which he intimates with a remarkable lightness of touch. His paintings reward close observation, for the event or situation depicted is always reflected in the styles of painting that were developed during the periods referred to in the work.

In Dexter Dalwood’s practice the medium of painting is not only examined and celebrated in terms of its history and legacy; Dalwood also demonstrates the enduring contemporary relevance of painting as a way of communicating how we experience the world in which we live. On the flat, painted surface Dalwood creates a breathtaking pluralism that refracts and collides the memory of the past with future recollections of the present. It is no coincidence that the subjects of his paintings are always physically absent, portrayed through depictions of the environments that they might have occupied. Their invisibility heightens the mystery and artifice of the scene but also removes the most recognisable aspect of figuration from works that ultimately communicate something that goes beyond depiction or language. Much more than the sum of their very disparate parts, Dexter Dalwood’s paintings make an uncompromising claim for the continuing tradition of the medium.
(Text from simonleegallery.com/)

Dexter Dalwood (b. 1960) currently lives and works in London, England. The artist was shortlisted as one of the four nominees for the Turner Prize 2010.

The talk is presented by Plattform in cooperation with Faculty of art, music and design of University of Bergen.

Plattform is Bergen Kunsthall’s series of presentations, lectures and debates involving leading artists, curators and theoreticians on the contemporary art scene.

In Texte zur Kunst’s recent themed issue “Poetry”, Karolin Meunier contributes with the essay “Hearing Voices - On the Reading and Performance of Poetry”. Reading in relation to writing, and the state of “being read” is a perspective that highlights the significance that various modes of sharing might have on the act of authorship itself. In her analysis of this phenomenon, Karolin Meunier takes Berlin-based writer Haytham El-Wardany’s book “How to Disappear” as a key example. In its consideration of reading silently versus reading aloud, she argues, it destabilizes both the boundaries of the self and the idea of possession itself – including, not least, the subject’s possession of his or her own voice.

Karolin Meunier is an artist and writer based in Berlin. She teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

As well as the productive aspects of reading in itself, reading is a way of passing time, forgetting time; something done while waiting, a precursor to doing. Hannah Gregory will consider Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘impasse’ – “a state of animated suspension”, “a poetic of immanent [and imminent] world making”, in relation to reading, and to Moyra Davey’s work. Taking texts as “temporary shelters”, she will think about how reading as a fortifying mode of thought occupies the time before both creative work and real-world actions.

Hannah Gregory is a writer and editor living in Berlin. Her writing on contemporary culture has appeared in Art Monthly, The New Inquiry, frieze and The Wire, among other publications. She is a co-editor of the art writing journal Aorist and keeps a TinyLetter Thresholds.

In addition to his work as a novelist, art critic and poet, Travis Jeppesen has developed what he terms “object-oriented writing”—writing that seeks to use language as a site for a subjective, embodied encounter with and response to art objects. Jeppesen’s writing treats objects themselves as inhabitable, in an attempt to write from within the object; this approach intends to counter distanced forms of critical analysis to which art is usually subjected. As he has written: “Objects have no feelings… but could they?”

In his installation 16 Sculptures, visitors—sitting while blindfolded—listen to recordings of Jeppesen reading his object-oriented re-creations of sculptures. Depriving us of our usual faculties for experiencing works of art—sight and visual-spatial reasoning—Jeppesen’s texts instead stage an encounter with objects through language that nonetheless retains the texture of embodied, physical experience, an imaginative realm in which he attempts to summon the autonomous essences and interior lives of objects themselves.

For the event in Bergen, Jeppesen will introduce and present excerpts from 16 Sculptures as a reading/performance.

Aveek Sen and Moyra Davey will engage in a conversation about Reading, which will take place via Skype. Davey will be speaking from her apartment in New York with Sen at his home in Calcutta. When working on his essay for the forthcoming publication on Moyra Davey’s exhibition at the Kunsthall, Sen and Davey had several such skype conversations across the continents. For this conversation we are able to ‘wire-tap’ into their correspondence from Bergen, and listen in on their exchanges.

In his essay “Low-hanging Fruit” Sen reflects both on Moyra Davey’s act of reading within her films, as well as his own attempt of ‘reading’ Davey’s work through his own writing: “What if, caught within my repeated viewing of the films, I end up rehearsing their words and action, copying into my notes what the film-maker reads out incessantly? She reads, she makes notes, she writes, she films what she reads and writes, makes films in which she reads out what she writes; I write in my notes what she reads out about what she has read, I read up what she has read. What if I am trapped in this cycle, this infinite regress, of reading, writing, filming and making notes?”

A writer on art, literature, music and society, Aveek Sen is also an Associate Editor, The Telegraph, Kolkata. Sen’s practice as writer has a focus on the intersections between art, literature, cinema, music and everyday life. He has lectured in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and is the recipient of a number of awards including the Infinity Award for Writing on Photography (2009); The Reuters Fellowship, Green College, Oxford (2005); and the Rhodes Scholarship, Oxford.