$10 general admission
$5 for students and seniors
FREE for AK Members
Auditorium

On the occasion of the special exhibition Anselm Kiefer: Beyond Landscape, Dr. Lisa Saltzman, Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, will discuss how issues of history, memory, and identity have driven Anselm Kiefer’s work since its inception. Tickets are available at the AK Admissions Desk. Please call 716.270.8292 to reserve your seat today. 

In 2010, the Gagosian Gallery in New York mounted a stunning exhibition of Kiefer’s recent work. Even as the title of the installation, Next Year in Jerusalem, proclaimed its messianic temporality, the exhibition was unabashedly retrospective, a monumental restaging of a career’s worth of philosophical and material concerns. Comprised of more than forty works, the installation took its viewers back across a mythic and historical terrain that stretched from the desiccated desert floors of the ancient Near East to the primeval snowy forests of an emergent German nation. Animated by an iconography that ranged from the Hebrew Bible and Kabbalah to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, Kiefer’s installation recapitulated his signature work and enshrined repetition in and as monumental form, forty years of painting reconceived in three-dimensional, sculptural form and encased in massive glass and steel vitrines. An anticipatory gesture of preservation in the face of works that are already figuring ruins, the installation instantiated the possibility that art might be a means of tarrying with trauma, which is to say, not “coming to terms” with it, but staying with it, preserving that ongoing gesture of belated  encounter in literally monumental (i.e. memorial) form. That Kiefer’s retrospective reimagining of his oeuvre should have coincided with the theatrical rerelease of Claude Lanzmann’s epic Holocaust documentary Shoah, only intensified the implications of that aesthetic proposition.

AK Café will be open prior to Dr. Saltzman’s talk from 5:30 to 6:45 pm. A cash bar will be available, as well as a $10 special featuring a glass of wine and cheese-and-cracker plate. For more information about this event, please call 716.270.8223.

About the Speaker

Lisa Saltzman, PhD, is Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she teaches courses in modern and contemporary art and where she served, from 2003 to 2009, as the Director of the Center for Visual Culture. Educated at Princeton and Harvard Universities, she has been awarded fellowships by the DAAD, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Clark Art Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Saltzman is the author of Anselm Kieferand Art after Auschwitz (Cambridge, 1999), Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago, 2006), and Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects (Chicago, forthcoming); she also co-edited, with Eric Rosenberg, Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (Dartmouth, 2006).