Lecture by Roger Sansi, Tuesday 24. 9., 18.00

Contemporary art practices are often described as projects or processes. But when can we say that an art project or process is finished? How is it valued? Does it become a product? In this presentation, I will discuss a particular artwork, ‘The Artist and the Stone,’ that consisted in taking an artist and a 24 tone stone from Palestine to Barcelona, Spain. Through this example, I will explore the different temporalities of process, and project, and I will reflect on how they relate to the life of the people involved in these temporalities, not only as artists but also as artworks.

Roger Sansi is associate professor at the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. He received his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago (2003). He has worked at Kings College and Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has done research on Afro-Brazilian culture and religion, the concept of the fetish, and on contemporary art in Barcelona. His publications include the books Fetishes and Monuments, (Berghahn, 2007), Sorcery in the Black Atlantic (edited with L. Nicolau, Chicago UP 2011), Economies of relation: Money And Personalism in the Lusophone World (U. of New England Press 2013), Art Anthropology and the Gift (Bloomsbury 2015), and The Anthropologist as Curator (Reutledge 2019).

Lecture will be in English.

The lecture is part of Art from (another) perspective  a series of interdisciplinary lectures co-organized by NGP and Institute of Ethnology (Czech Academy of Sciences). The talks by social scientists (anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, etc.) and other specialists, provide a unique viewpoint on critical issues in contemporary art. Approaching art through these other lenses allows for a fresh way of looking at culture and can provide new insights on major ideas facing artists today.

TUE 24. 9.

18.00

Admission: free / Duration: ca 60 minutes / English friendly / Venue: Atlas, 1st floor of the Trade Fair Palace

Pdf poster here.