TALK Lecture & Visitor Series 2012

Under the title TALK Lecture & Visitor Series, Reykjavik Art Museum, Icelandic Art Center and the Icelandic Academy of the Arts are initiating a collaborative visitor program, offering a platform for continual professional-, international encounter to take place in Iceland. Comprising visits by groundbreaking figures in the visual arts, this program initiative will bring to Icelandic art community, as well as to the public at large, the burgeoning ideas and diverse practices that define the terms and shape the dialogue within the international contemporary art scene.

Each series will be prepared through a thematic focus, where speakers will offer a specific insight to the field. For spring 2012, under the title TALK Transfers, the series places its focus on topics such as work and ethics of the artist, his role and responsibility; and how he distributes it with different intentions. Participants are Eleanor Heartney, Claire Bishop, Helen Molesworth and Alanna Heiss.

Events will take place in English and are open to everyone, free of charge.
The American Embassy in Iceland is the main sponsor for TALK Lecture & Visitor Series 2012

TALK TRANSFERS

Thursday 26 January 8 p.m.
Hafnarhús – TALK
Eleanor Heartney – Art and Labour

Eleanor Heartney, is a Contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for such other publications as Artnews, Art and Auction, The New Art Examiner, the Washington Post and The New York Times. She received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism in 1992. Her books include: Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (Midmarch Arts Press, 2004); Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order (Hard Press Editions, 2006) and Art and Today (Phaidon Press Inc., 2008), a survey of contemporary art of the last 25 years from Phaidon. She is a co-author of After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art (Prestel Publishing, 2007), which won the Susan Koppelman Award. Heartney is a past President of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association. In 2008 she was honored by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Wednesday 21 March 8 p.m.
Hafnarhús – TALK
Claire Bishop – Delegated Performance

Claire Bishop is a British - New York based art historian and critic. She is a professor of History of Art Department at CUNY Graduate Center, New York and has previously taught in the Curating Contemporary Art department of the Royal College of Art, London, where she continues to be Visiting Professor, and at Warwick University(UK). Bishop is editor of the highly regarded volumes Participation (2006) and Installation Art: A Critical History (2005) and is a contributor to many art journals including Artforum, Flash Art, and October; her essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” which appeared in October in 2004, remains an influential critique of relational aesthetics. Bishop is currently working on a history and theory of socially-engaged art. In 2008 she co-curated (with Mark Sladen) the exhibition Double Agent (ICA, London; Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre; and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead).

Thursday 12 April 8 p.m.
Hafnarhús – TALK
Helen Molesworth – Work Ethics

Helen Molesworth is a chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Previously she served as head of the department of modern and contemporary art at the Harvard Art Museum and the museum’s Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art; chief curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio; curator of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art (2000 – 2002); director and curator of the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at State University of New York (SUNY), Old Westbury (1997 – 1999). Molesworth has organized a number of noteworthy exhibitions including Long Life Cool White: Photographs by Moyra Davey and ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993, Felix Gonzales-Torres: “Untitled” (Placebo – Landscape – for Roni) as well as the critically acclaimed Part Object, Part Sculpture. She also served as senior critic at the Yale School of Art and has held teaching positions at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies; SUNY, Old Westbury; and the Cooper Union School of Art. She was a co-founding editor of Documents, a magazine of contemporary visual culture, and is the author of numerous articles appearing in publications such as Art Journal, Artforum, Documents, and October.

Thursday 10 May 8 p.m.
Hafnarhús – TALK
Alanna Heiss – Alternatives

Alanna Heiss was the founder and director of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center from 1976-2008, and is the current director of Art International Radio and The Clocktower Gallery. Heiss is one of the originators of the alternative space movement, beginning with Under the Brooklyn Bridge, a 1971 outdoor show she organized with installations by pioneering American and European artists. Heiss has curated and/or organized over 700 exhibitions at P.S.1 and elsewhere, including the inaugural exhibition at P.S.1, Rooms (1976); New York, New Wave (1981); Stalin's Choice: Soviet Socialist Realism, 1932-1956 (1993); Greater New York (2000 and 2005, selecting curator), and Arctic Hysteria (2008); as well as solo shows by various international artists. In 2001, she received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute, and in 2008, she received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.