Museum as Hub

Thursday, December 4, 7:30 p.m.
Friday, December 5, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, December 6, 3 p.m.

Night School is an artist’s project by Anton Vidokle in the form of a temporary school. A yearlong program of monthly seminars and workshops, Night School draws upon a group of local and international artists, writers, and theorists to conceptualize and conduct the program. This month’s seminar is conceived by Walid Raad and Jalal Toufic.

Walid Raad (b. Lebanon) is an artist and an Associate Professor of Art in The Cooper Union (New York, USA). Raad’s works include The Atlas Group, a fifteen-year project between 1989 and 2004 about the contemporary history of Lebanon, and the ongoing project titled Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art. His books include The Truth Will Be Known When The Last Witness Is Dead, My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair, and Let’s Be Honest, The Weather Helped.

Raad’s works have been shown at Documenta 11 (Kassel), the Venice Biennial, The Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Homeworks (Beirut) and numerous other museums and venues in Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Raad is also the recipient of the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2007), the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2007), and the Camera Austria Award (2005).

Jalal Toufic (b. Lebanon) is a thinker, writer, and artist presently based in Istanbul. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), : An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005), and Undeserving Lebanon (2007). His videos and mixed-media works have been presented in such venues as Artists Space, New York; ICA, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; and the 16th International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) in a “Focus Jalal Toufic” program. He co-edited the special Discourse issue Gilles Deleuze: A Reason to Believe in this World, and edited the special Discourse issues Middle Eastern Films Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee and Mortals to Death as well as the Review of Photographic Memory. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley; CalArts, Valencia, CA; DasArts, Amsterdam; and the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam; and he was a guest lecturer at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, in 2007. He is currently a Professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.

*This event is free but tickets are required. Tickets can be reserved online or at the Museum prior to the seminar’s start.