The pensive image

Symposium with Hanneke Grootenboer, James Elkins, Peter Piller, Ursula
Frohne, Rineke Dijkstra

Friday 31 March, 11:00
Auditorium Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht

"Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or
even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks."
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.

"Painting not only shows but thinks."
Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective

Images can be thought-provoking, but to what extent are they able to think?
If images are capable of thinking, about what are they philosophizing? This
symposium offers a platform for exchange and debate on the notion of the
thinking image. Related issues on the connection between vision and thought,
artistic and non-artistic imagery, painting and photography, watching images
and being watched by them will also be addressed. The speakers - James
Elkins, Peter Piller, Ursula Frohne and Rineke Dijkstra - will approach the
topic from various theoretical and practical perspectives. Jan van Eyck
researchers - Antony Hudek, Charlotte Moth and Ils Huygens - will act as
respondents.

James Elkins (US) is the E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art
History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute at
Chicago. He also teaches in the Department of Visual and Critical Studies,
and is Head of History of Art at the University College Cork, Ireland.
Elkins is known for his theory on artistic as well as non-artistic
(scientific) images, for his explorations in perspective and optics, and for
his recently coined notion of visual literacy. His numerous books include
The Object Stares Back (1997), Pictures and Tears (1991), Visual Studies: A
Sceptical Introduction (2003), and On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them
(1998), and Master Narratives and Their Discontents (2005).
www.jameselkins.com

Peter Piller (DE) is a draughtsman as well as a collector of photographs of
non-events found in newspapers or archives of (local) companies or
institutions that he exhibits by re-arranging and re-categorizing these
images. The recipient of numerous prizes, he has exhibited widely, most
recently in Rotterdam in Witte de With (Archiev Peter Piller), in the
Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden (Park; Zucht und Wildwuchs in der
Kunst), and in the Frehrking under Wisehöfer, in Köln (Von erde schöner).
His work was published in eight volumes by Revolver Books.
www.peterpiller.de

Ursula Frohne (DE) is professor of Art and Art History at the International
University Bremen as well as an Associate Professor at the Graduate Research
Fellowship on a project on 'Body-Image-Media' at the Academy of Design in
Karlsruhe. Frohne has published extensively on contemporary photography,
film, video, and electronic media. She is the co-editor of CTRL [SPACE]:
Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (2002), and Present
Continuous Past(s): Media Art, Strategies of Presentation, Mediation and
Dissemination (2005). www.iu-bremen.de/directory/02759/

Rineke Dijkstra (NL) is well-known for her large format photographs
portraying people in transitional moments that hang somewhere between the
posed and the natural, such as mothers shortly after having given birth,
young club kids just off the dance floor, preadolescent bathers on various
beaches. Her work has been exhibited widely in Europe and in the United
States. In the winter of 2005/6 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam honoured
Dijkstra with a retrospective that had been on view in Paris, Winterthur and
Barcelona prior to coming to Amsterdam. The bilingual catalogue Rineke
Dijkstra-Portretten/Rineke Dijkstra-Portraits (2005), was published in
conjunction with the exhibition.

PROGRAMME

11:00
Introduction: Hanneke Grootenboer

11:15
James Elkins

12:00
Response by Antony Hudek

12:15
Lunch

13:00
Peter Piller

13:45
Response by Charlotte Moth

14:00
Ursula Frohne

14:45
Response by Ils Huygens

15:00
Break

15:15
Rineke Dijkstra interviewed by Hanneke Grootenboer

16:00
Discussion

16:45
Drinks

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

Language:
English

Registration:
Admission free.
Registration form

Venue:
Jan van Eyck Academie
Academieplein 1
NL - Maastricht

For info please contact: Hanneke Grootenboer at A.J.S.Grootenboeruva.nl

The pensive image is made possible with support of Provincie Limburg.

http://www.janvaneyck.nl