‘Conversations in Time’ is a series of new conversations inspired by Suzi Gablik's important book, Conversations Before the End of Time, first published in 1995.
Artists, writers and cultural thinkers have been recorded today, broadly inspired by the question posed in Gablik’s book:
What is the purpose or role of art in an age of accelerating social change and environmental uncertainty?
These conversations and the audiobook of Gablik’s book are distributed within the Public Programme ‘Conversations in Time’, part of the European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017.
*** New conversations will be added through the Aarhus year ***
You can listen below. (If you are using a smart phone, press ‘listen in browser’ to stay on the page, or you can listen via the Soundcloud app, once downloaded – it’s free.)
Siobhan Davies is a dancer and choreographer. Guy Claxton is a cognitive scientist.
Liliane Lijn is an American-born artist living in London. Alistair Hudson is currently director of MIMA and will take up his new post as Director of the Whitworth Art Gallery at Manchester University in February 2018.
AL Kennedy is a Scottish writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is known for her characteristically dark tone, a blending of realism and fantasy and for her serious approach to her work. She contributes columns and reviews to European newspapers.
After many years screenwriting, Italian writer Francesca Melandri's literary debut was in 2010 with Eva Sleeps, a critically acclaimed bestseller translated in most European languages and now published in English by Europa Editions. Her second novel Higher Than The Sea (2012) confirmed her standing among readers and literary critics. She continues in documentary filmmaker and has two children.
Francesca Melandri photo © Carlo Traina
Annie Freud is a poet, artist and teacher. Her first full poetry collection (Picador 2007), The Best Man That Ever Was received the Dimplex Award for New Writing (Poetry). The Mirabelles, her second collection (Picador 2011) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Her most recent collection The Remains includes her own illustrations.
Elaine Beckett's poetry pamphlet 'Faber New Poets 13' was published in 2016 by Faber&Faber. She originally studied music composition, and later trained at the National Film and TV school as a film music composer. She has a degree in architecture from University College London and lives in London and Dorset.
Adam Phillips is a writer and psychoanalyst. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, Raritan, and The Threepenny Review and is the author of numerous books, including On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (1993), Promises, Promises: Essays On Psychoanalysis And Literature (2000), and Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (2014) and Unforbidden Pleasures (2015). He lives in London.
Cornelia Grassi is director of greengrassi art gallery in London. An American Italian, she sees her mission as introducing art that wouldn't normally be seen in Britain and enabling her artists "to make the work that they want to make". She doesn't impose commercial boundaries, nor tie her artists to a contract: "If they feel it is beneficial to them and they want to work with me, that's fine. I don't want them to be restricted."
Haroon Mirza is an artist based in London. His work combines light, sound and video to produce kinetic sculptures, performances and immersive installations. Collaboration is at the very core of Mirza’s approach, questioning the conditions under which art is produced, with his exhibitions deconstructing ideas of singular authorship.
Jussi Parikka is a Finnish media theorist and writer. He is the author of various books on media archaeology, digital culture and technical media, including Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010) and What is Media Archaeology? (2011). He lives in Southampton.
Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism and history, based in London. She has written a number of books that explore mythology and fairy tales, including Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights (2012) and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (2014).
Jimmie Durham is a sculptor, essayist and poet. Through objects, images, and words, he hopes to reveal the prejudices and assumptions of a “Western absorbed” view of the world and seeks to give voice to alternative, non-Western modes of thought. He lives in Berlin.
Adrian Searle has been an art critic for The Guardian newspaper since 1996. He trained as a painter and soon began writing and broadcasting alongside his artistic practice. He has curated several exhibitions in the UK, Europe and the USA and continues to teach at art colleges in Britain and Europe. He lives in London.
Lara Pawson writes commentary, essays and reviews for publication including ArtReview, Verso, Frieze, the Times Literary Supplement, The Financial Times, and The Guardian. She is the author of This is the Place to Be (2016) and In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre (2016). She lives in London.
Janneke van Leeuwen is an artist and neuropsychologist based in London. She is currently the artist in residence within the Created Out of Mind consortium and is founder of The Thinking Eye. Her medium is largely photographic – she pictures the human mind by creating photographic scale models of psychological states.
Andreas Roepstorff is Professor in Anthropology and Integrative Neuroscience at Aarhus University. He is also Director of the Interacting Minds Centre which provides a transdisciplinary platform to study human interaction. He lives in Aarhus.
Cecil Balmond is a designer, engineer and artist who has created high-profile public art pieces individually and collaboratively with artists such as Anish Kapoor. He works in the crossover between art and science and is the author of a number of books on science and structure including Informal (2002) and Element (2005). He lives between London and his native Sri Lanka.
Tom Nielsen is an architect and professor at the Aarhus School of Architecture where he teaches Urban Design, Landscape and Urban Planning. His research is in public space and contemporary urban developments. Apart from academic work he has been practicing as an Urban Design consultant with Gehl Architects among others.
Irish artist Dorothy Cross uses a wide range of materials in her work, including found objects which have been in her family's possession for many years, constructed objects, photographs and animal skins. She has recently made works using sharks skins. Central to her work as a whole are themes of sexual and cultural identity, personal history and memory. She lives in Connemara.
Xavier Bray is a curator and director of the Wallace Collection in London. He has worked as a curator for Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, London’s National Gallery and was Chief Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 2016. He has organised a number of exhibitions including The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600–1700 (2009) and Goya: The Portraits (2015). He lives in London.
Mette Sandbye is Professor of Photography Studies and Head of the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She is art critic at the weekly newspaper Weekendavisen and has published several books, most recently - Digital Snaps: The New Face of Photography (2014), edited with Jonas Larsen.
Kirsten Justesen is a visual artist based in Copenhagen. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1975, with a degree in classical sculpture yet always pushed beyond the conventional idea of sculpture as a static and permanent form. She is known for her feminist performances and sculptures that center on her nude body and address issues of gender, politics, physics, and time.
Conversations Before the End of Time by Suzi Gablik was first published by Thames and Hudson in 1995. Copyright © 1995 Suzi Gablik.
Reproduced by permission of Thames & Hudson Inc. All rights reserved.