Land without Soil
Art without Artwork
PANEL DISCUSSION & SCREENING
SATURDAY JUNE 21/2003, 5:30-7:00 PM INNIS TOWN HALL


We live in partitioned times. The rendering asunder of common territories and histories in the name of imaginary ethnic imperatives is, politically speaking, precisely what Inadvertent Monuments [see WILL] seeks to critique. Yet art itself is not exempt from this logic of partitioning, often merely transforming politics into an image, an artwork, thereby defusing its real and potential force. Is it possible to address the perceptual geopolitics of partition using art-related habitus and skills while avoiding the pitfalls of "picture politics?" The screening of Ilana Salama Ortar's short documentary film, Adamut/Lands [Israel 2003, 12 min, DV], and the ensuing presentation will be the occasion to examine the veritable use-value of art in a political framework. The film deals with the situation of land stripped of its soil. Is it possible to envisage art without artwork, refusing to remain partitioned within the territory of its discipline? Can the inadvertent, symbolic configuration of the real be the object of the sort of sustained scrutiny usually reserved for the category of objects known as artworks? Ilana Salama Ortar and Stephen Wright, Guest Artists
• ILANA SALAMA ORTAR AND STEPHEN WRIGHT • FACILITATOR: SARA MATTHEWS •

Stephen Wright is a Paris-based theorist of art-related practice. Ilana Salama Ortar is a Haifa-based artist, working on the development of "civic art," investigating the visible and invisible traces of the erasure of individual and collective memory in the urban fabric.


INNIS TOWN HALL: 2 Sussex Ave.
subway stop St. George, south of Bloor

TICKET PRICE: $5 or pwyc


HOME

update: 29.05.2003