Announcement: Free Panel Discussion: 'Loss & Melancholic Possibilities: Challenging the Interdiction of Mourning through Art'

Please join us at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery for a free panel
discussion on Friday, November 13, 6pm.

"Loss & Melancholic Possibilities: Challenging the Interdiction of
Mourning through Art"

If melancholia names an active and ongoing relationship to illimitable
loss-rather than a compulsive, polemical repetition of the familiar-then
how might that relationship prompt us today to unprecedented encounters?
If catastrophe estranges us from what we thought we knew of ourselves,
then how might self-estrangement become an occasion to face-rather than
to repress, suppress, assimilate, or annihilate-the other? If the past is
in ruins, how might those ruins occasion a transformation of terrain
rather than a tragic reparation or a romantic restoration? If the
interdiction of mourning persists, what kind of loss is at risk? If shame
and guilt have no pause, how can art intervene? If visibility breaks
silence, what affect might invisibility promise?

This inaugural panel is part of a series of public discussions that are
integral to the making of the Blind Dates exhibition that opens at Pratt
Manhattan Gallery in November 2010.

Panel Date:
Friday, November 13, 2009
6:30 - 8:30 PM

Pratt Manhattan Gallery
144 West 14th St,
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10011
(212) 647 7778
pratt.edu/exhibitions
Free and open to the public

Participants:
Aysel Gul Altinay: Anthropologist, Sabanci University, Istanbul
Linda Ganjian with Elif Uras: Visual Artists, New York and Istanbul
Ahmet Ogut with Nina Katchadourian: Conceptual Artists, Amsterdam and
New York
David Kazanjian: Graduate Chair, English Dept University of Pennsylvania
Aleksandra Wagner: Psychoanalyst and Professor of Sociology, The New
School, New York

The panel is organized by Neery Melkonian with Defne Ayas, co-curators
of Blind Dates, an exhibition to take place at Pratt Manhattan Gallery,
fall 2010.

As an interdisciplinary and cross cultural curatorial undertaking, Blind
Dates has been working with artists, intellectuals and cultural
producers interested in deconstructing master narratives to give agency a
chance, or to extend new 'ways of seeing' contentious historical
accounts/events and their lingering effects on life today. By pairing
artists and non artists for a series of private/informal discussions
project co-curators have been 'matchmaking' to mediate encounters between
distanced neighbors and their estranged cultures.

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