New Perspectives on the Panorama
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT
Friday, March 30 and Saturday, March 31, 2007

Drawing on provocative new work on panoramas, this conference will rethink
the orthodoxies that currently characterize approaches to traditional
360-degree panorama paintings and broader notions of the panoramic through
an interdisciplinary conversation between scholars and artists working in
a wide range of fields, including cultural geography, art history,
literary studies, architecture, theater studies, film, photography, and
the fine arts. Papers will explore the aesthetics of 360-degree painting
from its inception in the eighteenth century to its resurgence in
contemporary practice, its relationship to architecture and film, and its
social and political contexts.

The program includes discussion sessions with curators and artists that
draw upon the rich holdings of panorama-related material at the Yale
Center for British Art and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
at Yale University.

The keynote lecture on Friday at 5:30 will be given by renowned British
filmmaker Patrick Keiller. Hailed as one of the most distinctive voices
to emerge in British cinema, Keiller blends wit and intellect in his
investigation of politics, landscape, and spectacle in films such as
London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997). His most recent work Londres,
Bombay is a moving-image reconstruction of Mumbai\'s Chhatrapati Shivaji
Terminus, formerly Victoria Terminus, as 30 high definition video
projections of up to 20 minutes duration. As part of conference-related
programming, we will screen London at 2pm on Saturday, January 27 in the
Center’s Lecture Hall. Robinson in Space will be screened in 35mm at the
Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street, on Friday, March 30 at 2pm.

Speakers will include Denise Blake Oleksijczuk (Simon Fraser University,
British Columbia), Gretchen Holtzapple Bender (University of Pittsburgh),
Andreas Luescher (Bowling Green State University), Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
(University of California-Berkeley), and Tom Gunning (University of
Chicago). The program concludes Saturday at 5:30 with a conversation with
London-based painter Timothy Hyman on “A Space for the Self,” led by
Richard Maxwell (Yale University).

The symposium is free and open to the public; advance registration is
required. For more information or to register, please email
ycba.researchyale.edu or call 203-432-7192.