Tuesday, April 23, 7:00 p.m.
Debates Room at Hart House, University of Toronto
7 Hart House Circle, Toronto
Free admission
The Justina M. Barnicke Gallery presents:
NOT IN THE AGE OF THE PHARAOHS
A Lecture by Bruce W. Ferguson
The lecture takes as its starting point the assumption that works of art can be symptomatic of larger cultural and political issues without necessarily using these as their content. Bruce W. Ferguson will discuss in detail the present day situation in Egypt through an investigation of works by four artists produced in the two years prior to the now-famous 18 days of Revolution begun in January of 2011. He shows how these artists—Lara Baladi, Ahmed Basiouny, Bahia Shebib, and Amal Kenaway—were already a compact measure of the upcoming discontents and how these art works engaged with values that coincided with those of an earlier Modernist literature in Egypt, as well as those of years of protests that preceded the Revolution. Ferguson does not overvalue the works of art as predictive or as the cause of the uprisings but seeks to show how works of art can seen to be investigative and analytical in advance, like a symbolic social diagnosis of a political disease. The lecture explores works produced both before and after the revolution, seeing how they act as a hinge to the more recent works now produced in the streets of Egyptian towns and cities in the form of graffiti.
Bruce W. Ferguson, Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the American University in Cairo, is a proven arts and academic leader with extensive experience in entrepreneurial leadership and institutional development, with a demonstrated passion for facilitating artists and intellectuals and their work and research. He has specialized in discovering and nurturing artistic talent internationally. He has also envisioned, advocated and created arts organizations from the ground up, including Site Santa Fe, an international art biennial in a regional setting, which now has a successful 15-year history. Equally importantly, he has become known for his ability of remaking and rebranding disorganized or static academic organizations through infrastructural means and strategic planning, including the Future Arts Research at Arizona State University, the New York Academy of Art, Columbia University School of the Arts , and the Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University of Cairo where he was appointed Dean as of 2010. Most recently, in 2012, Bruce Ferguson was Distinguished Professor at the Institute of Arts and Humanities at Penn State in Pennsylvania, a consultant to the Bergen Triennial in Norway, a consultant to a new curriculum at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts (ALBA) in Beirut, Lebanon and has written a catalogue text for the inaugural Kiev Biennale in Ukraine as well as being an invited lecturer on the subject of pre-revolutionary art in Egypt to the University of London, School of Oriental and Asian Studies.