OCR in collaboration with the International Association for Visual Culture, Arts Administration @ Boston University and the Museum of Contemporary Cuts is proud to announce that Professor Mieke Bal will be delivering a keynote for THE SOCIAL – the forthcoming biennial conference of Visual Culture at Boston University. Prof. Mieke Bal has had an illustrious career both as an academic and as an artist, focusing on issues that relate to the social divisions, boundaries and conflicts of contemporary society.

The call for papers for THE SOCIAL is available here. The call for the Graduate Forum of THE SOCIAL can be found at this link. The application for the Clark Institute Travel Fellowships for IAVC2016@Boston can be found at this link. Here you can find the Facebook event page and the Newsletter to stay in touch.

Mieke Bal is an internationally known cultural theorist, critic, and video artist. Her interests range from classical and biblical antiquity, 17th century to contemporary art and modern literature, feminism, migratory culture, mental illness, the critique of capitalism, and the world’s need, against all odds, of rationality. Her many books include a trilogy on political art: Endless Andness (on abstraction) and Thinking in Film (on video installation), both 2013, Of What One Cannot Speak (2010, on sculpture) and A Mieke Bal Reader (2006). She is presently publishing a book on the political force of the shadow plays of Nalini Malani.

Her experimental video documentaries on issues of migration and identity have been internationally exhibited. Her video project, Madame B, with Michelle Williams Gamaker, which offers an artistic critique of capitalism and what is now ravaging the world as neo-liberalism, is widely shown. A five-screen spin-off called Precarity focuses more on the precarious economic situation than on the life of the character Emma. In April 2016 the première of a 5-channel installation and a feature film on the mis-encounter between René Descartes and Queen Kristina of Sweden, leading to the philosopher-of-rationalism’s death, and the two lives preceding that moment, will take place in Kraków, Poland.

The video excerpt is from Reasonable Doubt, 2015, a theoretical fiction/docudrama by Mieke Bal.