Performance Matters Presents:

Dialogues: Art, Performance, Film

Rich Mix Cinema, 10.45am-5pm, Thursday 30^th January 2014

Book tickets: here

Conversation makes the world go around. And in recent times creative works of conversation have been a forceful part of contemporary art practices, ‘relational’ and participatory performances, and the rising genre of the essay film in experimental documentary cinema and video.

Conversing has long been prescribed as the means to solve all manner of dis-eases, from Sigmund Freud’s talking cure for psychological imbalances, to physicist David Bohm’s proposition of creative dialogue as the primary tool for organizational and social change. But what do these dialogues in art, performance and film do for, or with, the spectator? What do they tell us about the stakes of being social with ideas?

This day-long symposium and screening event sees the showing of two films from art writer Adrian Heathfield and photographer Hugo Glendinning’s Performance Dialogues series. Transfigured Night: a conversation with Alphonso Lingis assembles a rich patchwork of fragments taken from a two-day visit to the philosopher’s house near Baltimore. The discussion moves from questions of the face and gaze of others, the sensual experiences of weight and being touched, to meditations on mortality and suffering. A new, as yet untitled, dialogue film will also be premiered: Heathfield’s discussion on the value of spirit, shot in the heart of France, with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler. Beside these screenings, two panel discussions with leading thinkers, visual artists, film and performance makers will unearth a variety of approaches to dialogic practice, and examine what these explorations of the ethos of relation might tell us about the status of ‘the intellectual’ and intense ideas in the contemporary public sphere.

Curated by Performance Matters

Watch a trailer of Transfigured Night: a conversation with Alphonso Lingis here