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Joan Jonas Knowledge Base Launch Event

Friday, October 15, 2021, 3–5 pm, Dia Online, Dia Chelsea

Event Details
Friday, October 15, 3–5 pm
Live on Zoom

RSVP and receive a Zoom link here


Dia Art Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base (JJKB), an event hosted in collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and in conjunction with the exhibition Joan Jonas, which opened at Dia Beacon on October 8.

This event will include an introduction to the JJKB by members of the project team Barbara Clausen, Deena Engel, Lozana Rossenova, and Glenn Wharton, followed by a screening of archival footage of Jonas’s seminal work Organic Honey (1973) and a discussion among the artist, EAI director Rebecca Cleman, and Haus der Kunst director Andrea Lissoni. During the week after the event, EAI will host a virtual video showcase, allowing viewers to explore additional videos by Jonas.

The JJKB is an open-source digital resource, presenting a collection of documentary materials, photographs, videos, interviews, and bibliographies. The site features studies on two of the artist’s seminal works and their various iterations—Organic Honey (1972; 1972/1994) and Mirage (1976; 1976/1994/2005; 1976/2001)—and three exhibition case studies that represent important moments in Jonas’s artistic development from the early 1980s to today. This academic research project is part of the Artist Archive Initiative and is dedicated to providing information to conservators, curators, and other scholars. To visit the website, click the link here.


Joan Jonas was born in New York in 1936. She received a BA from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1958, and an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University, New York, in 1965. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London (2018); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2019); Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2019); and Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (2020). Jonas represented the United States at the 2015 Venice Biennale and received the Kyoto Prize in 2018. Jonas is Professor Emerita at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

Barbara Clausen
is associate professor and the vice dean for research and creation, Faculty of the Arts, University of Quebec, Montreal. Since 2000 she has curated, lectured, and written extensively on the historiography and institutionalization of performance-based art practices and the parallel discourses surrounding the politics of the body and the archive. She is the curatorial research director of the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base and is coediting a monograph on Joan Jonas in conjunction with the exhibition at Dia Beacon. 

Rebecca Cleman is the executive director of Electronic Arts Intermix, New York. She has programmed and curated numerous exhibitions and screenings exploring media art history, including Aesthetics of Analog, Museum of Art and Design, New York (2012); Attack of the Packs! (Ghostbusters and early video collectives), Metrograph, New York (2017); and with Alex Klein, Broadcasting: EAI at ICA, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2018).

Deena Engel teaches undergraduate computer science courses on web and database technologies and undergraduate and graduate courses in the digital humanities and the arts. She also supervises undergraduate and graduate student research projects in the digital humanities and the arts. Codirector of theArtist Archives Initiative, she researches and collaborates with museums on the conservation of time-based media and software-based art while pursuing a PhD at the Bard Graduate Center, New York.

Andrea Lissoni is the artistic director of the Haus der Kunst, Munich. Previously, Lissoni was the senior curator of international art, Tate Modern, London; a curator at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; and a lecturer at the Academia di Brera and Università Bocconi, both Milan.

Lozana Rossenova is a research associate in the Open Science Lab at the German National Library of Science and Technology in Hannover, where she is working on the NFDI4Culture project for a national research infrastructure of cultural data. She completed her PhD at London South Bank University in partnership with Rhizome, New York. Her research focuses on data presentation and performativity in the online archive of born-digital art. In 2020–21, Rossenova served as assistant director for linked data research at the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base.

Glenn Wharton is a professor of art history, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and chair of the UCLA/Getty Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage. Previously on faculty in the museum studies program at New York University, from 2007 to 2013, he served as media conservator, Museum of Modern Art, New York. In addition to codirecting the Artist Archives Initiative, in 2006 he founded Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA), a nonprofit focusing on the production, presentation, and preservation of contemporary art.

 

 

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