All seminars are aimed primarily at graduate students undertaking or considering the Critical Theory Emphasis, but all are welcome.
Winter 2025 CTE Mini Seminar, Presenting
Stefania Pandolfo
UC Berkeley, Professor and Lowie Distinguished Chair,
Department of Anthropology
Program in Critical Theory
"Art-Cure:Imagework at a Time of Catastrophe"
When: March 4th, 5th, & 6th
Time: 4-6pm
Location: March 4th & 5th in HG 1010; March 6th in HG 1002
3/4, Session One: Image-Events between the Spiritual and the Political.
3/5, Session Two: In the Garden of madness, or, the Unconscious Otherwise.
3/6, Session Three: The Hand and the Colors: Painting the Asylum.
This is an in-person event - Please RSVP Here if you intend on attending the CTE Mini-Seminar.
*Please note that UCI students attending this Mini-Seminar for credit are required to attend all three seminar sessions. Sign-ins will be required each session.
Art-Cure:Imagework at a Time of Catastrophe
Stefania Pandolfo
UC Berkeley
The seminars are scarred by this moment and its spectral inscriptions, allowing catastrophe to leave in imprint and interrupt, as at once an impossibility of thinking and a necessity to think–an exigency to see otherwise. They are based on a book in progress, which develops a framework to think the politics and ethics of art in a context of illness and collective loss, based on my own research, and on ongoing collaborations with several artists, primarily located in the Maghreb and Middle East.
Through a reflection on madness and psychic life, image-work and spiritual cures, I explore aesthetic processes as spaces of transmutation, in the confrontation with destruction, and in the experience of mental pain. In turn, I reflect on the way aesthetic forms (in the sense of Aby Warbug’s “dynamograms”) in their inception have a close relationship with the un-worlding affects of destruction itself. The book explores what I call invisible bridges (in Arabic “ta`bir, at once “expression” and “passageway”), enabling passages, transferences, and translations, between the visible and the invisible, between medical, ritual, religious and artistic practices, towards a reactivation of desire, and the possibility of dreaming.
A man paints mural frescos in his apartment during an episode of his illness of the psyche/soul. Later he reinterprets his visions in the mode of ta`bir and taswīr: an unconscious work of form born in the midst of crisis–psychical, spiritual, political. They disclose a vocabulary of agentive forms, which bear witness to the forms born of crisis in the dream of a suspended collectivity. My seminars will reflect on the conceptual configuration of ta`bir and taswīr through three moments, or scenes.
The first scene reflects on the practice of imagemaking sought by the Syrian film collective Abounaddara, which I ponder from the perspective of the liturgical-political practices discussed above, and through their new artwork The Imagemaker (2024 currently in the BAMPFA exhibition I cocurated). Best known for the videos they posted online throughout the Syrian revolution and war, their artwork attempts to capture the spiritual essence of a world through image-events, visual interventions into the texture of the real. Yet the group developed their practice from an apprenticeship at the image-work of master artisans, seeking the capacity of form to disclose other worlds, at the border of the visible and the invisible, where that which cannot be said or represented can only been "shown". The second scene is drawn from is my ethnography of psychiatric illness and liturgical healing in Morocco, and reflects on the example above. The third scene reflects on a political-aesthetic experiment in a psychiatric institution in Morocco at a time of political suppression and upheaval.
Stefania Pandolfo is a Professor and Lowie Distinguished Chair in the Department of Anthropology and member of the programs in Critical Theory and Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her work centers on subjectivity, imagination, memory, trauma, and the experience of madness, with a focus on the Maghreb and Islam and in conversation with psychoanalysis and Islamic thought. She is the author of Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (Chicago 2018); Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago 1997); and co-author with Ann Lovell, Veena Das, and Sandra Laugier of Face aux désastres: Une conversation à quatre voix sur la folie, le care, et les grandes détresses collectives (Editions d’Ithaque, Paris, 2013). She guest-curated Matrix 274, a contemporary art exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum featuring the work of Kader Attia, and is currently co-curating an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum entitled, “Abounaddara: The Ruins We Carry”.
She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled “Art-Cure: Imagework at a Time of Catastrophe.”
Please message criticaltheory@uci.edu for any questions.