Seminar Topic : Gender, Sexuality and Body Politics
Contact: wulandani.dirgantoro@lasalle.edu.sg
Class hours: Thursday, 9-1pm
Location: B209, Winstedt Campus
Synopsis:
Gender as many scholars have pointed out, is not a biological construct but a social construct, but how is it constructed? This dissertation/research class will explore the construction of gender through exploring how scholars, writers, activists and artists have sought to answer the question.
Using historical and contemporary texts, films, new media, and current socio-political events, we will also look at key critical theories that informed artistic practices across the spectrum. The class will also discuss the changing perception of ‘normal’ by challenging categories such as ‘man/woman’ through how we perceive ourselves and other people around us.
Students are expected not only to actively participate in the weekly reading discussions but also to reflect critically on their own past and current projects in the individual consultation sessions that follow the reading session. The aim of the class is to build critical thinking through discussions of the reading materials as well as self-awareness of their own artistic projects.
Seminar Topic: Plumbing the Depths: Archaeology, Narratives and Archives in Art
Contact: shubigi@gmail.com
Class hours: Monday, 1-5pm
Location: B209, Winstedt Campus
Synopsis:
This course will examine 3 methodological approaches that artists use in their referencing of the past, the absent and the intangible in their contemporary practice. While not dealing with archaeology per se, the course will look at the archaeological approach employed by contemporary artists in sifting through, weighing up and ordering knowledge, information, sensations and non-quantifiable data.
Narratives become important here, and the readings will assist the student in distinguishing between and correctly identifying the differing forms of the open work, as well as the relevance of material, content and reference. To both these approaches must be added the role of artist as archivist, whether implicated in the work (as it is understood within the archival nature of exhibitions and their accompanying texts), or in the process.
Contemporary global art practices will be discussed, the critical tools employed by artists with special attention to artists who involve or reference text/s (in any form), as well as the political implications of the artist as archaeologist, narrator and archivist. Finally, how artists use the Internet as archive, as library and as landfill will be examined.
Lecturer: Dr.S.Chandrasekaran
Seminar Topic : Notion of Body – Spirituality, Sexuality, Ritual and Concept of Pain
Contact: s.chandrasekaran@lasalle.edu.sg
Class hours: Monday, 1-5pm
Location: F212, McNally Campus
Synopsis:
The lectures explore the notion of the body in relation to spirituality, sexuality, ritual, concept of pain, disabled body and presence of body of everyday reality. These issues will be critically analysis and explored through various journals, articles and works of artists
The lectures are not just based on analyzing critical aspects of the suggested readings, but also to interpret how various critical theories informs the art practice, in both aspects classic and contemporary. The class will also discuss the complexity that surrounds the aesthetic meanings and bodily presences of the body as a centrifugal force in analyzing the artistic language.
Students are expected to attend the consultation sessions regularly. During the session, students are encouraged to articulate their weekly reading discussions and then reflect critically in their writings.
Lecturer: Michael Lee
Seminar Topic: Space and Memory
Contact: michaelleehonghwee@
Class hours: Thursday, 1-5pm
Location: B207, Winstedt Campus
Synopsis:
This course will investigate the interconnections between space and memory, through the works of artists and scholars in the context of international contemporary art. By focusing on urban and architectural spaces as sites of modern living and passing, development and conservation, recollection and forgetting, hope and loss, this course will uncover the numerous situations in which the city attempts to improve on the past while being constantly haunted by it.
Both the politics and poetics of space are of relevance in this context, especially the establishment and contestation of who has the say in what gets remembered, conserved, represented, experienced and imagined. Included for discussion are the phenomena of memory loss and mnemonics (especially those employing a spatial framework), haunting and the uncanny in the context of home, memorials and memorabilia, archives and libraries. Given that the past can at best be recalled in fragments, a key point in this course is the intrinsic relationship between urban memory and fiction, as manifest in fictional cities, imaginary buildings, constructed ruins and abandoned utopias.
Investigating the contexts of memory in philosophy, visual culture and cultural politics, this course also surveys a host of conditions and implications of contemporary artists who explore sites as related to a bygone time, especially those dealing with history as embedded in a place and its material and social conditions. Particular aesthetic strategies—including re-enactment and psycho-geography, repetition and revision, miniaturisation and monumentality—and their implications will also be examined.