Lecture

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic, and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for arts production in contemporary life.

Nina Katchadourian’s work has often looked at the relationship between the human and natural worlds, questioning our assumptions about those two terms and where we draw the line between them. Older works (such as Mended Spiderwebs, Natural Car Alarms, and Animal Crossdressing) will be discussed by way of providing background to the artist’s most recent animal-oriented piece, a complex multi-channel video and sound environment entitled Zoo. Shot in zoos all around the world between 2001 and 2008 (and ongoing), Zoo tries to ask what it is that we desire from and what we project onto the animal-human relationship. Both questions come under a particular kind of compression in the zoo environment.

Nina Katchadourian’s lecture follows a talk by anthropologist Laurel Braitman on September 14, also focusing on human-animal relationships.

Born in Stanford, California, Nina Katchadourian grew up spending every summer on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year. Her work exists in a wide variety of media including photography, sculpture, video, and sound. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at places such as PS1/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, the ICA Philadelphia and the Palais de Tokyo. In 2006, the Turku Art Museum in Turku, Finland, featured a solo show of works made in Finland and the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York, exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published an accompanying monograph entitled All Forms of Attraction. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a solo show of recent video installation works in 2008. Katchadourian received her BFA from Brown University in Visual Art and Literature and Society, holds an MFA from UC San Diego, and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program.