Lecture by Clare Davies

“The connoisseurs of fine living often look back fondly on old downtown Cairo in the 1920s. Everything about life was so French. The pace, the architecture, the settings. Life was unhurried, untouched by pollution and congestion and marked by quaint buildings, café boulevards and premium arcades."

So begins an advertisement for the Rivoli compound at Centre Ville, New Cairo, a real estate project of development giant, DAMAC, designed to capitalise on nostalgia for the old city's downtown, an area which now represents to many some of the prime reasons for urban flight: pollution, high population density, and dilapidation. While areas of medieval Cairo are being restored or reconstructed to recapture something of their supposed original appearance, new versions of the city's early "modern" quarters are being rebuilt at its outskirts. As the expansion of the Greater Cairo Region continues apace, the old city offers parallel models for imagining a future Cairo.

Too Early/Too Late shows certain aspects of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s work at their most radical. But what does the film show precisely? What exactly do we see, when watching those “panoramas” of the French and Egyptian cities and countryside around 1980? What we hear may give us clues: something about history is at stake here. So the question could be: when we are looking at a landscape, what do we see of its history?

Other artists have worked on this matter. Some of them have also shared with the Straubs other problems and principles: the “Objectivist” poets, a group formed in the USA around 1930, featuring Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and William Carlos Williams. They wanted a highly innovative poetry that could also be politically radical, a poetry that would engage at the same time vision (they were influenced by Ezra Pound’s Imagism), and history.

New York, September 26th 2009, 16:00

Technology in the service of virtue has given rise to a global form of virtual violence, virtuous war. In virtuous war, made-for-TV wars and Hollywood war movies blur, military war games and computer video games blend, mock disasters and real accidents collide, producing on screen a new configuration of virtual power, the military-industrial-media-entertainment network.

New York, September 26th 2009, 15:30

New York, September 26th 2009, 13:30

Fear is seen to be one of the defining political emotions of late modernity. Filmmakers, sociologists, artists, philosophers and pundits see fear everywhere. If fear has become a way of life, the contemporary city is seen by many to be one of its most prominent and productive social laboratories. But while fear is seen to be so politically significant, the way it is studied often both naturalizes and exteriorizes fear from politics. As a result, fear's more complex and antagonistic status as both a social relation and an arena of political action is submerged.

New York, September 26th 2009, 18:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 17:30

New York, September 26th 2009, 17:00

In EXPOLSION IMPOSION: War in Our Time, I show four series of paintings and works on paper that are concerned with war and/ or terrorism and torture. I talk about its affect on society the society. The four series are, FIRES OF WAR, 9-1, ABU GHRAIB: Abuse of Power and IN OUR NAME: Black Sites and Guantanamo. These works explore the sensory and experiential nature of violence, war and torture as distinct from their conceptual and historical dimensions.

New York, September 26th 2009, 16.30

When Schiller penned his Aesthetic Letters shortly following the French Revolution, he saw the "play drive" as a virtuous alternative to the violence that had engulfed the world of politics, a force capable of reconciling the conflict between human beings' material, sensuous nature and their capacity for reason. Much of the subsequent history of aesthetic theory hinges on this vision of creativity as a redemptive alternative to the fallen world of modernity. But gaming is serious business.

New York, September 26th 2009, 16:00

Technology in the service of virtue has given rise to a global form of virtual violence, virtuous war. In virtuous war, made-for-TV wars and Hollywood war movies blur, military war games and computer video games blend, mock disasters and real accidents collide, producing on screen a new configuration of virtual power, the military-industrial-media-entertainment network.