"History/ Memory / Identity............Telling Stories"

[Belarie Zatzman]

PRESS RELEASE PRESS RELEASE PRESS RELEASE PRESS RELEASE


 The Department of Fine Arts at Atkinson College, York University is
pleased to announce our 2000 FINE ARTS FESTIVAL PANEL EVENT:

TITLE:  "History/ Memory / Identity............Telling Stories"

PANEL PARTICIPANTS :  Ruediger Bender, Philosopher, Germany;
                                                       Rebecca Comay,
Philosopher, University of Toronto; and
                                                       Loren Lerner, Art
History, Concordia University, Montreal.

DATE:  Monday, March 20, 2000
TIME:  6:30 - 8:30  P.M.
PLACE:  York University, Atkinson College,
                     Harry Leith, Room 004, Lower Level
4700 Keele Street, Main Campus
FOR MORE INFO:  Francesca L'Orfano  (416 531-0420 or artista at cyberus.ca)


Post-Memory
   "In the passing of survivors and direct witnesses, the inevitable
dilemma arises not only about the appropriate form that representation
should take but also about who can legitimately voice and recount the
events.  The very issue of legitimacy, the use of photography as historical
proof, and the translation of traumatic memory into postmemories are some
of the most perplexing issues that confront the representation of history.
The indirect chronicling of history always crosses inevitable distance."
Andrea Liss, 1998


Our guest panel will include:

RUEDIGER BENDER, distinguished German philosopher and cultural theorist
from the Universitat Erfurt.  His research interests and areas of
publication include "Personal Multiplexity and the Search for Coherence:  A
Study in Self-Deception and the Narrative Construction of Moral Identity";
"Collective Memory and Collective Amnesia:   Pathologies of the Present
German Discourse on Remembrance" and "The Aura and Topography in
Contemporary German Art".

REBECCA COMAY, brilliant Canadian professor of philosophy and literary
studies at the University of Toronto.  She has published extensively on
continental philosophy (e.g. Benjamin, Hegel, Adorno, Levinas), literature
(Proust, Kafka), art (Christian Boltanski, Rachel Whiteread) and
architecture (Mies).  Her book on Benjamin and psychoanalysis "Benjamin's
Wake: Between Melancholia and Fetishism" is nearing completion.  She is
presently also working on two other books. One on Proust and trauma
"Proustian Impressions" and the other on the Irish artist James Coleman.
She is the editor of "Alphabet City", specifically a past issue "Fascism
and its Ghosts" as well as the forthcoming issue "Lost in the Archive".

LOREN LERNER, renowned professor of Art History at Concordia
University in Montreal.  She is the curator of a new Canadian exhibition on
art and the Holocaust, as well as an accompanying three-day symposium
entitled "Evocations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Arts and Creative
Literature", opening in May 2000.  The exhibition and symposium will take
place at the new Montreal Holocaust Centre and will run until June 2000.
Professor Lerner has also compiled a website bibliography of Canadian women
artists of Eastern European origin.

****Please join us for a lively evening of debate about issues of Memory /
Identity / and History.


Belarie Hyman Zatzman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Theatre
Co-Chair, Department of Fine Arts
Atkinson College, 6th floor
York University
Toronto, Canada