lots more to come--check in again in a day or two!

STILL/MOVING is a panel discussion featuring esteemed guest Kaja Silverman, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, in conversation with two Pratt Institute Faculty: Photography Department Visiting Associate Professor Carrie Schneider and Social Science and Cultural Studies Adjunct Professor Kathleen Kelley, also a Philosophy PhD candidate at The New School for Social Research.

The conversation will draw from Schneider’s recent lens-based work as well as Silverman and Kelley's recent scholarship, investigating the psychological and media-specific qualities inherent to still and moving image media, and the implications of shooting a body of work in both.

Reception and book signing for Carrie Schneider: Nine Trips Around the Sun to follow at 8 PM.

This special session will honor Kaja Silverman, Katherine Stein Sachs CW' 69 and Keith L. Sachs W'67 Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. 

A lecture by Kaja Silverman on material related to her current book-length project, The Three Personed Picture: Or The History of Photography, Part 2. 

Renowned American photographer James Welling will discuss his work with Kaja Silverman, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and Alex Klein, Dorothy and Stephen Weber Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

This seminar will focus on Burgin's experience of working in computational image space.

 Physical Lab, Morgan Building (map)

This seminar will address a broad range of Burgin's work, both as an artist and writer. 

Introduced by Dr. Homay King, History of Art Professor, Bryn Mawr College, who will be joined for a post-screening discussion by Iggy Cortez, PhD Candidate in the Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania.

Restaurant (aka L’Avventura)

dir. Andy Warhol, US, 1965, 16mm, 34 min. b/w

The film begins with a close-up of a table in a restaurant covered with a checkered cloth, in a composition that strongly suggests a still life. It lingers there for a long time before beginning a slow outward zoom. All the while we overhear poorly recorded snippets of conversation. We see hands move in and out of the frame, lifting glasses and tapping cigarettes. We recognize Edie Sedgwick by her signature dancer's tights and jewelry. The group discuss a recent trip to Tangier; the conversation returns frequently to past and upcoming travel. At one point, a whole, uncut pineapple is delivered to their table, despite the fact that they are in an Italian restaurant: it is not meant to be eaten, but to evoke the possibility of adventure in exotic, semi-imaginary lands.

followed by:

The Life of Juanita Castro

dir. Andy Warhol, US, 1965, 16mm, 34 min. b/w

This film, loosely inspired by Fidel Castro's sister who defected from Cuba to the United States, features a script by Ronald Tavel, a frequent collaborator of Warhol's at this time. It is essentially a work of filmed theater. The actors are arranged in a tableau resembling a family portrait, at an oblique angle to the camera, and they deliver their lines in monotone. Often, their lines have to be fed to them: the poor acting style creates a Brechtian distancing effect, and becomes part of Warhol's project to include everything in his film works, even the bits that would normally be cast off.

This program is supported by Kaja Silverman and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award, the Katherine Stein Sachs and Keith L. Sachs Program in Contemporary Art in the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Alice Paul Center for the Study of Gender, Sexuality, and Women at the University of Pennsylvania

See here for tickets and more information

Kaja Silverman’s recent publication The Miracle of Analogy is the first of a two-volume rethinking of photography. Silverman writes that photography is the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us, and that the photographic image is an analogy rather than a copy, as commonly understood. Join Silverman as she introduces her poetic and influential ideas on image making. Artist Geoffrey Farmer, whose exhibition at the ICA presents new ways of thinking of photographic prints, will then join the author along with Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, for a conversation on the power of images. 

Copies of The Miracle of Analogy will be available for purchase at the ICA Store.

Walid Raad is a Lebanese artist who makes videos, installations, photographs and sculptures, and whose work frequently has a performance component. From 1989-2004, Raad produced fictionalized photographs, videotapes, notebooks, and lectures that related to real events and involved authentic research in audio, film, and photographic archives in Lebanon, under the rubric of The Atlas Group, an imaginary collective.  Raad’s recent work has expanded to address the Middle East region at large. His current ongoing project, Scratching on things I could disavow, examines the recent emergence in the Arab world of a new infrastructure for the visual arts—art fairs, biennials, museums, and galleries—alongside the geopolitical, economic, and military conflicts that have consumed the region. He is also part of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, an international group working to ensure that migrant worker rights are protected during the construction of museums on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi.

Kaja Silverman is the Sachs Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of many books, including—most recently—The Miracle of Analogy, or: The History of Photography, Part I. 

This talk will consider Joan Mitchell’s paintings from the late 1950s as part of a larger project on the global persistence of abstract approaches to artistic form circa 1960. In light of the pop, minimal, and other literal art that would soon displace abstract painting in American and European galleries, Mitchell’s work can seem narrow—nostalgically bound to an alignment of feeling with material, coherent central structures, and distanced pictorial space. But how might we understand her to be building upon an unfinished conversation, historically dominated by me, talled n "all-overness," about what was necessary for transformative sociality to go forward within the still relatively new structures of modern life?  

Elise Archias is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois, Chicago and currently a fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her book The Concrete Body—Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci will be released by Yale University Press in Fall 2016.

Event sponsored by Professor Kaja Silverman’s Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award and the Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania. Free and open to the public.

Armand De Potter was a self-made man: an immigrant who became a lecturer, tour operator, and antiquities dealer. But some regarded him as a charlatan, and many of the objects he exhibited at the Penn Museum (1898-1908) turned out to be forgeries. When he disappeared off the coast of Greece in 1905, his family was left with a trunkful of trinkets, a mountain of debts, and an unsolved mystery. In her most recent book, acclaimed novelist Joanna Scott attempts to reconstruct the final days of her great-grandfather, the notorious Armand De Potter.

Join Joanna Scott, who will read from her book and discuss the life of De Potter, the Penn Museum, and the early days of collecting with Penn professors Kaja Silverman and Robert Ousterhout. 

This seminar concentrates on the works of Kaja Silverman, and more particularly her recent book The Miracle of Analogy or The History of Photography, Part 1.  The seminar will be structured as a conversation between Walid Raad and Kaja Silverman.  Raad and Silverman will ask and hopefully answer each others’ questions about photography, psychoanalysis, ideology, writing, and other creative acts.

                   Princeton University, School of Architecture, Room N107 at 5PM. 

The Miracle of Analogy is the first of a two-volume reconceptualization of photography. It argues that photography originates in what is seen, rather than in the human eye or the camera lens, and that it is the world's primary way of revealing itself to us. Neither an index, representation, nor copy, as conventional studies would have it, the photographic image is an analogy. This principle obtains at every level of its being: a photograph analogizes its referent, the negative from which it is generated, every other print that is struck from that negative, and all of its digital "offspring." The present volume focuses on the nineteenth century and some of its contemporary progeny. It begins with the camera obscura, which morphed into chemical photography and lives on in digital form, and ends with Walter Benjamin. Key figures discussed along the way include Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, William Fox-Talbot, Jeff Wall, Joan Fontcuberta, Abelardo Morell and John Dugdale.

Kaja Silverman is the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Professor of Contemporary Art, and the author of nine books: The Miracle of Analogy (2014); Flesh of My Flesh (2009); James Coleman (2002); World Spectators (2000); Speaking About Godard (with Harun Farocki, 1998); The Threshold of the Visible World (1996); Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992); The Acoustic Mirror; The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1988); and The Subject of Semiotics (1983).

Eduardo Cadava is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History; Emerson and the Climates of History; and, with Fazal Sheikh, of Fazal Sheikh: Portraits. He also is co-editor of Who Comes After the Subject?; Cities Without Citizens; and And Justice for All?: The Claims of Human Rights; and The Itinerant Languages of Photography. His book La imagen en ruinas will appear this spring in Chile and his translation of Nadar’s memoirs will appear this fall with MIT Press. His collection of essays, Paper Graveyards: Essays on Art and Photography, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

*This is event is by invitation only. Please tune in to MoMA's livestream to watch the event from home. http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/events/23372

Conceived as an experimental platform for free-form critical discussions, the Forums on Contemporary Photography are designed to engage in debates about the perspectives and scope of contemporary photography with leading artists, curators, and theorists in the field.

For this forum, Kaja Silverman, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania will lead a discussion about her new book The Miracle of Analogy, the first of a two-volume reconceptualization of photography, published by Stanford University Press. Lead speakers Andre Dombrowski, Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania; Eve Meltzer, Associate Professor of Visual Studies and Visual Culture in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University; and Howard Singerman, the Phyllis and Josef Caroff Professor of Fine Arts, Department Chair, Hunter College, City University of New York, will discuss with Ms. Silverman her present volume, which focuses on the nineteenth century and some of its contemporary progeny. It begins with the camera obscura, which morphed into chemical photography and lives on in digital form, and ends with Walter Benjamin. Key figures discussed along the way include Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, William Fox-Talbot, Jeff Wall, Joan Fontcuberta, Abelardo Morell and John Dugdale .

@ Slought 4017 Walnut St Philadelphia, PA 19104 

Slought and the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce "The Miracle of Analogy," an event featuring Kaja Silverman in conversation with Homay King and Alex Klein, on Friday, February 27, 2015 from 5-6:30pm. Visit slought.org for details.

The event will mark the release of Silverman's new book, The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part 1 (Stanford University Press, 2015).

Kaja Silverman is Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of eight books, including Flesh of My Flesh(2009); James Coleman (2002);The Threshold of the Visible World(1996); and Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992). Silverman wroteSpeaking About Godard—a book about couples--with Harun Farocki, her life partner from 1992-1999.

Homay King is Associate Professor of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author ofLost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier, and the forthcomingVirtual Memory: Time-based Art and the Dream of Digitality. She is a contributor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art catalog for "China: Through the Looking-glass," which accompanies an exhibition opening at the museum in May 2015.

Alex Klein is the Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber (CHE'60) Program Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, and curator of the current exhibition at ICA, "Barbara Kasten: Stages," which is the first major survey of the artist's work. She is currently an "Agent" in the Carnegie Museum of Art's Hillman Photography Initiative as well as the editor of the critical volume on photography, Words Without Pictures (LACMA / Aperture, 2010).

@ 3405 Woodland Walk Jaffe History of Art Building Howard and Sharon Rich Seminar Room (Jaffe 113)

Please join Kaja Silverman in conversation with Keith and Katherine Sachs on Friday, September 26, 2014 at 3:30 PM. Titled "On Collecting," the conversation will be centered around collecting works of art as an intellectual activity. This conversation is a part of the University of Pennsylvania's History of Art Department 2104-2015 Colloquium Series and in anticipation of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's forthcoming (2016) exhibition of the Sachs Contemporary Art Collection.