Ikon Contra Modernity: Genealogies of the Moving Image in Tarkovsky and Malevich Seminar

Joshua David Gonsalves, Assistant Professor in the English Department at AUB, is holding a ten-session seminar every Thursday at the Beirut Art Center.

This seminar questions how the theologies, theories and embodied practices (kissing, kneeling, weaponization) articulated in and around the icon continue to resonate today. Participants will investigate the socio-historical, libidinal and philosophical problematics that the icon brings to light when resituated in terms of the cultural productions of pre-and-Soviet-era Russia that it influenced from the ground up. This updating of the icon will trace the diverse shapes that ‘iconic desire’ assumes in Abstract and Non-Abstract Modern Art as well as in the Art Cinema: repression and expressivity, irony and reflexivity. The seminar will, in sum, provide a fluid framework for rethinking the image vis-a-vis the history of the art-system and present-day political conflicts in the region.

Seminar language: English

Over the course of ten sessions, participants will discuss readings by Žižek, Malevich, Badiou, Tarkovsky, Laruelle, Groys, and others that will enable us to work through film and videoworks by Godard, Tarkovsky, and Laibach.

Registration Fee: 75,000 LL