Brown Bag Series: Devora Neumark, Dialogic Live Art Performance and the Exploration of Third Realm Beauty, September 19

Wednesday, September 19, 2012
12:00 – 1:00 pm
EV 11.705, Hexagram Resource Centre

Devora Neumark: Dialogic Live Art Performance and the Exploration of Third Realm Beauty

“In the third realm, beauty is always political because it addresses, in some manner, how to live.”   (Kingwell, M. (2004) “The $195-million Scribble”, Toronto Life, 38: 6, pp. 70-75.)

As with other forms of community-engaged art, dialogic performance is process-oriented, capable of provoking social change, and nurturing the emergence of new ways of knowing. Within such projects, especially those that are deliberately focused on an interrogation of power dynamics and motivated by the desire to address social injustice, collaboration is often embraced as a locus of and agent for an encounter with the aesthetic, ethical and political forces that shape personal and public life. Over the past several years I have convened a series of such events as a way to invite embodied experience and critical reflection about the role that material culture plays in the resettlement process for individuals who have experienced forced displacement. Borrowing Arthur Danto’s conceptual framework of “Third Realm beauty” – which implicates deliberative attention to, appreciation of, and manipulation involving material effects – my aim has been to create the conditions in which to explore how house-beautification is at once indicative and expressive of the readiness to be(come) at home (again) following forced dislocation, as much as it is performative in its practice.

Devora Neumark is an interdisciplinary artist a faculty member in the MFA-Interdisciplinary Arts program at Goddard College (Vermont) and an artist-in-residence at matralab completing her PhD in the Humanities program at Concordia’s Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture.

For more information on the series, contact David Szanto () or Florencia Marchetti ().

The full schedule of presentations for the Fall 2012 Brown Bag Series is available here.