Lecture by Angel Angelov - Images of Transformation/Disapearance

7 October 2010, 20.00, Nina van Leerzaal, Oude Turfmarkt 129, Allard Pierson Museum/Special Collections

Metamorphosis is a motif that has always invited reflection upon notions of what it is to be human and its changing, metamorphic nature. This motif not only signifies the plasticity of definitions of what it is to be human, but also invites reflection upon its specific temporality. A series of performances and a video installation by Nadezhda Lyahova, in which she uses fluid or transient materials, such as soap bubbles, ice cream and sand, touches upon a distinctly baroque problematic of transience and knowledge, which opens up multiple iconographic associations (homo bulla). Hendrik Goltzius’s etchings and Marcel Duchamp’s Torture-Morte (1959) emerge as two possible interlocutors of Lyahova’s work.
 

Angel Angelov (1955) is Professor of Theory and History of Culture in the Faculty of Arts at the Neofit Rilski Southwestern University in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. He has taught in the fields of art history, aesthetics, literary theory and visual culture, and has been a visiting researcher at the University of Vienna, the Martin Luther University in Halle, the Getty Institute, the University of Konstanz and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. He has published widely in the fields of history and theory of art. He is the author of Historicity of the Visual Image (2008), Telling the Image (editor with Irina Genova, 2003), Afterhistories of Art (editor with Irina Genova, 2001), Concrete Utopias. The projects of Christo (Javachev) (1998).