11 February at 2pm
free but booking essential
A series of lectures conceived by Beaconsfield in collaboration with City & Guilds of London Art School.
The 20th century concept of the artist as a politically alienated idealist has undergone significant shifts in recent years. Is there any form of moral obligation still within art’s purpose? What price integrity? Can the negotiations of compromise be catalysts for creative invention?Gallery One Lecture
Mark Sealy delivers the third lecture in the Art & Compromise series. In The Organ that Weeps, Sealy will discuss, through his work at Autograph ABP, issues relating to race, representation and human rights.
“How does one bear witness to the criminality of societal rule, which consigns the uniqueness of being to eternal forgetfulness, not through an act of dramatic transgression but through a descent into everyday life? Thus, how does one not simply articulate loss through a dramatic gesture of defiance but learn to inhabit the world, or inhabit it again, in a gesture of mourning? It is in this context that one may identify the eye not as the organ that sees but as the organ that weeps.”
Veena Das
Mark Sealy is the Director of Autograph ABP – the Association of Black Photographers. The curator of several international photography exhibitions, he has commissioned artists globally and initiated the production of over forty publications, including Different, his critically acclaimed book project with Professor Stuart Hall. Sealy has a special interest in the relationship of photography to social change and identity politics. The talk will offer a great opportunity to view material from the vast Autograph archive.
The Art & Compromise series, delivered in partnership with City & Guilds of London Art School, addresses the various forms and occasions when compromise might enter into art-practice and the criteria that might be used to condemn or commend these effects. Mark Sealy’s lecture forms part of a series including presentations by artist Gustav Metzger, Contemporary Art Society Director, Paul Hobson, and the collective of disability artists, 15mm Films.