Theatrical Fields Symposium – Screening Theatrical Phantasms: Toward an Uncertain Futurity, Keynote by Timothy Murray, Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Cornell University

Theatrical Fields Symposium – Screening Theatrical Phantasms: Toward an Uncertain Futurity, Keynote by Timothy Murray, Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Cornell University

23 Aug 2014, Sat 1:00 - 2:00pm
72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road, Singapore 239007

This talk will reflect on the fascination of artworks in Theatrical Fields with the phantasmatic past. In providing a brief theoretical overview of "the politics of theatricality," Murray will reflect on the exhibition's screenic re-possesion of cinematic characters, buried stories, and influential texts in a way that challenges the historical groundings of theatricality in the ethnocentric certainty of culture and law. "What happens to the relation of mnemonic past and theatrical present when the screen functions as the field of phantasms that are liberated by artistic intervention from the certainties of their mythological, historical, and cinematic pasts?" This emphasis on artistic retellings in the present of weighty phantasms from the historical past will then lead to further reflection on their bearing on the future. "What might it mean that prior utopian aspirations might now be recast as the unsettlings of uncertain futurity? Might the contemporary re-theatricalization of the screen provide a historically distinct approach to futurity? Or might futurity already be in our grasp either through digital orientations of 'future cinemas' or through the sudden arrival of futurity via the vexing uncertainties of the anthroprocene and global collapse?"

A public programme of Theatical Fields: Critical strategies in performance, film and video.

2014-08-23

This talk will reflect on the fascination of artworks in Theatrical Fields with the phantasmatic past. In providing a brief theoretical overview of "the politics of theatricality," Murray will reflect on the exhibition's screenic re-possesion of cinematic characters, buried stories, and influential texts in a way that challenges the historical groundings of theatricality in the ethnocentric certainty of culture and law.

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