As there are quite a few interesting events organized by or with collaboration of our Art & Culture staff and alumni coming up, here is a brief overview of some of them:

Tuesday, September 13th, 7 pm: Launch of the new Kunstlicht issue on ‘Cultural Policies. Agendas of Impact’ (edited in collaboration with Lara Garcia Diaz and Cristina Marques, both CAMS alumni) at Framer Framed (Tolhuistuin), with a lecture performance by Angela Bartholomew and a panel discussion with Bram Ieven (lecturer on Dutch Literature and Culture at the University of Leiden) and Ruben Pater (graphic designer and lecturer at various design academies in the Netherlands), moderated by Sven Lütticken. More Information

Wednesday, September 14th, 8 pm (LIMA, Arie Biemondstraat 111): Second public evening in the context of L-I-M-A’s UNFOLD project on the reinterpretation of media art, entitled UNFOLD #2 “Reinterpretation as Creative Act”, with lectures by researcher Annet Dekker, curator Sarah Cook and artist Manuel Pelmus, moderated by Katja Kwastek. More Information here

Friday, September 16th, 3:30 pm: In the context of the Van Gogh Museum’s symposium “On the verge of insanity. Van Gogh and his illness”, Jos ten Berge will give a lecture on the role of Van Gogh in Outsider Art. More Information here

In the following week, on Thursday, September 22nd, at 2:30 pm, the Koos Bosma Lecture & Spatial Heritage colloquium will take place at the VU, in memory of our sorely missed colleague Koos Bosma, who passed away a year ago. In the spirit of Koos, the afternoon will be devoted to ‘big works’ and will also be future oriented, inaugurating a new series of Spatial Heritage colloquia organised by our architectural history staff together with colleagues from Leiden, Delft, and Rotterdam, under the title ‘Re-scape’. The keynote on September 22nd will be given by Prof. Hartmut Frank on ‘Architectural History as Planning History. Koos Bosma’s attempts to overcome traditional perspectives’

Starting October 1st, the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden will present the exhibition “Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity” (Dutch title: Alma-Tadema: klassieke verleiding), co-curated by Ivo Blom. Through his great knowledge of archaeology and classical antiquity, Alma-Tadema managed to bring the days of ancient Rome to life in paintings. Still today, our image of classical antiquity is heavily influenced by those painting, which also became the basis for seminal films about this era, from Ben-Hur to Gladiator.

Ivo is not only responsible for the film part in the exhibition, he also curated the accompanying film programme and wrote an article on Tadema and film in the accompanying book, edited by Prestel. On November 26th, Ivo will also give a lecture in Leeuwarden (13:30), on Alma-Tadema and Hollywood (in Dutch).

In November, we will start our yearly lecture series, this year organized by Ginette Verstraete, and devoted to Cultural Approaches in the Digital Humanities. The first evening, co-organised with the Institute of Sound and Image Hilversum, will take place on November 1st at the Balie. The speaker will be Victoria Szabo, Associate Research Professor of Visual and Media Studies at Duke University. She will be followed by Christian Nold, designer and lecturer at Bartlett, University College Londen, on November 22nd, and José van Dijck, president of KNAW and professor of Comparative Media Studies at the UvA, on December 7th.  Those latter two lectures will take place at the VU.

On November 29th, Nathalie Zonnenberg will defend her PhD thesis with the title “Between Dematerialization and Documentation: Conceptual Art in a Curatorial Perspective” (13:45, VU, Aula).

Last but not least two ‘save the dates’ for the coming year:

On February 2nd, at the VU, we will host a young researchers’ colloquium entitled ‘Artistic Subversions. Setting the Conditions of Display’ in conjunction with the Stedelijk Museum ‘Lose Yourself! – A Symposium on Labyrinthine Exhibitions as Curatorial Model’, which will take place over the two days to follow, on Feb. 3rd and 4th As the response to our call for papers was great and we received excellent proposals from a wide range of international applicants, we look forward to a discussion that will comprise the forces and circumstances that shape exhibitions across different time periods and countries.

This event will be followed by a further, big international congress which we organize together with our VU colleagues from philosophy and literature studies, on April 5th to 7th. It will be devoted to “Critical Theory in the Humanities. Resonances of the work of Judith Butler”. Judith Butler herself will give a keynote, as well as Jean-Luc Nancy, Achille Mbembe, Amelia Jones, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Charlotte Witt, and Luciana Cavarero. The related call for papers is still open and the deadline is October 1st. More Information here.