Screening: William Kentridge’s Ursonate (2018)

Saturday February 28  |  2 - 3 PM

Koffler Arts, mezzanine

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South African creator William Kentridge’s artistic output is informed by many influences including Dada, an artistic and literary movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland in 1916 as a reaction against the nationalism and bourgeois indifference that led to World War I. Their anti-materialist approach resulted in a chaotic blend of artforms: painting, sculpture, collage, photography, performance art, and poetry. Soon after WWI ended, the movement dissipated.

One prominent Dada artist, Kurt Schwitters, wrote Ursonate (1922-1932), a sound poetry performance - itself inspired by fmsbw (1918), a poem by Raoul Hausmann, a fellow Dada artist.

This is a screening of Kentridge’s “re-performance” of Ursonate in October 2018 as part performance, part lecture, and part symphony. The artist reads Schwitters’ sound poem as his own stop-motion visual works are projected on a large screen, dancers improvise movement, and a pianist and a trombonist add high or low notes.

James Michael Levinsohn provides an introduction that contextualizes Kentridge and Ursonate.

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James Michael Levinsohn is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History, University of Toronto. His dissertation project, "Wolfgang Tillmans: Realism Beyond Redemption", argues that German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans reinvented photographic realism for the post-Cold War world of the 1990s. More broadly, Levinsohn's work concerns the persistence of figurative realism in the twentieth century, especially as reimagined under new conditions of sexuality, subjectivity, and space. In recent years, he has published and presented internationally on artists such Christian Schad, Sophie Calle, and Canadian collective Image Bank. He has held curatorial positions at the Roman Vishniac Archive of the International Center of Photography (ICP), Museum of Modern Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum and has taught a variety of undergraduate courses at Rutgers and the University of Toronto.