“Fundamentalism is a decision taken in favour of sameness over difference” – Boris Gorys
Today’s Irish Times carries an in depth interview with Medium Religion co-curator Boris Gorys wrtitten by Belinda McKeon who interviewed him in New York in advance of his trip to Sligo. An excerpt is below or you can click here to read the full article which appears on pag 18 of the print edition of today’s paper entitle “Eternal Life in a Digital World”.
Boris is currently in Sligo to open the exhibition on Saturday night and to give a talk on the occasion of the opening. The talk takes place from 5pm at the Canis Major in the Clarion Hotel (map here) and will be chaired by Dr. Tony Partridge. The talk is free but advance booking is advisable and can be done by calling The Model on 071-9141405 or emailing tickets@modelart.ie
Ritual, immortality, repetition — where can they all now be found? The answer, according to Boris Groys, is in digital media, the catalyst, he argues, for the global comeback of religion. He talks to BELINDA MCKEON .
BORIS GROYS, the Berlin-born philosopher of art, religion and the media, knows that it’s not easy to listen to his lectures. He doesn’t mind. In fact, he welcomes that difficulty into the lecture hall. Which is not to say that Groys, who currently holds professorships at both New York University (NYU) and at Karlsruhe, Germany, is unsympathetic to the trials of his audience or that he casts a cold eye on their fractured attention spans and drowsing heads. For Groys, who has always been interested in the ways the artistic and the aesthetic manifest themselves beyond the confines of the traditional art world, the slumber realm of the lecture hall offers a perfect opportunity to create something that is, in itself, a work of art.
Enter Groys’s propensity for the video lecture, in which he combines his own discourse with a collage of selected historical and film extracts circling and hovering around his chosen theme.
“It’s like lecture-dreaming,” Groys says, sitting in a cafe close to his office at NYU. “If people are listening to a lecture, they are always half-asleep. And there is a kind of flow of images that streams through their imagination as they listen. So what I show in my video is what I would like them to see if they would be half-asleep. I want to design the dreams when they sleep during my lectures.”
But at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo tomorrow, Groys can be assured of a wakeful audience when he gives a public talk to open the exhibition, Medium Religion , which will include two of his own most recent video-lecture projects, Religion as Medium(2006) and The Immortal Bodies (2007), and will also include work by more than 30 other contemporary artists from around the world, including Paul Chan, Barbad Golshiri and Christoph Bchel. What is likely to keep the west awake is the provocative clout of Groys’s statements about religosity in the age of digital media, and about the relationship of religious extremism to contemporary art practice.
read the full article on the Irish Times site here>