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ARTIST TALK
The Intermedial Moment
Andi & Lance Olsen
in conversation with
Cécile Guédon
Sunday 28 May @ 3 – 4pm
At Momentum, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
Part of the Exhibition
There’s No Place Like Time – A Novel You Walk Through
By Andi & Lance Olsen
There’s No Place Like Time is a novel you walk through. It takes the form of a real retrospective of videos dedicated to the career of Alana Olsen, one of America’s most overlooked experimental video artists who never existed. An interplay of videos, texts, objects, and interventions, There’s No Place Like Time forms a multimodal installation that translates Alana’s life (which began as a fictional character in Lance’s novel, Theories of Forgetting [2014], based on Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty) into a three-dimensional reality. Andi and Lance Olsen’s collaboration explores the relationship between the visual and the verbal as it redefines the page, novel and gallery space. As well, There’s No Place Like Time thematically investigates the problematics of identity construction and historical knowledge.
CLICK HERE FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXHIBITION >>
Andi Olsen is an assemblage, computer-generated collage, and experimental video artist. Her videos have been exhibited in such venues as the American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore) & Greenhouse Berlin (Germany), & have screened at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, Mütter Museum (Philadelphia), Revolving Museum (Lowell), & at literary and artistic events in Banff, Cologne, Munich, Paris, Rouen, Szeged, Warsaw, & across the United States. Her art has been exhibited & published around the country & abroad. Her ongoing solo project, Hideous Beauty, is a Cabinet of Wonders composed of short videos, assemblages, & collage texts exploring the idea of monstrosity & the generative possibilities inherent in the processes of decay.
Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative writing. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies. He is known for his experimental, lyrical, fragmentary, cross-genre narratives that question the limits of historical knowledge. In 2015-2016 he was a guest of the D.A.A.D. Berlin Artists Program. In 2013 he served as the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize in Fiction Fellow at the American Academy also in Berlin. A Guggenheim and N.E.A. fellowship recipient, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence from 1996-1998, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he is professor of innovative narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.
Cécile Guédon is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, Department of Comparative Literature (July 2015-June 2018).
She was previously a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Romance Languages and Literatures /Visual and Environmental Studies Departments at Harvard University (August 2014-June 2015) and a Research Fellow and Associate Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Intermediality at the University of Groningen (Sept. 2012-July 2014). She was awarded her PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies in July 2014 (London Consortium, Birkbeck College, under the supervision of Daniel Albright, Harvard University and Steven Connor, Cambridge University). Prior to this, she has completed an M.A. ès Lettres Modernes (Nanterre-Paris X, 2004, Very High Hons) followed by a DEA in Comparative Literature (La Sorbonne-Paris-IV, 2005, Very High Hons) and an M.A. in European Culture on a Marie Curie Fellowship awarded by the European Commission (UCL, London, 2007, Distinction).
CÉCILE GUÉDON
Her doctoral dissertation is mainly concerned with modernist aesthetics, the notion of gesture and the phenomenon of abstraction across the arts. She has published papers for journals such as the ‘International Journal for the Humanities’ (2007), ‘Quaderni di Synapsis’ (2008), ‘Static’ (2009), and a number of entries in the ‘Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism’ (2013). Various chapters in edited volumes are forthcoming in 2016 (Routledge, Oxford University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, de Gruyter). Her monograph ‘Abstraction in Motion: A Choreographic Approach to Modernism’ is currently under review (2015).
During the academic year 2009-2010, she has held a Visiting Scholar position at the CRAL (EHESS, Paris) under Georges Didi-Huberman’s supervision; she has then collaborated in 2010-2011 with the International Research Training Group Interart at the Institut für Theater- und Tanzwissenschaft (FU, Berlin) under the supervision of Gabriele Brandstetter–on a DAAD Research Scholarship.
Between 2007 and 2015, she has presented papers at some 35 conferences in the UK, USA, Canada, and Europe; among other prizes she has received three awards for the best paper delivered by a post-graduate student (Harvard, ACLA, 2009; Stanford, SDHS, 2009; Berlin Academy for the Arts and Sciences, 2010).
She is member of the editorial board for the peer-reviewed journal Evental Aesthetics (UCLA/University of Southern California).