Liz Johnson Artur: This Synthetic Moment

This series is organized by David Hartt, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, Maya Alam, architect and Visiting Professor, Sophie Hochhäusl, Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory.

Supported by the Provost Office at the University of Pennsylvania and the Dean’s Office at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design

The Fall 2019 Provost and Dean’s Lecture Series at the University of Pennsylvania held at the Weitzman School of Design will start with a lecture on Friday, October 18, by London-based artist and photographer Liz Johnson Artur. On November 4, poet Solmaz Sharif and architectural historian Charles Davis II will present their work followed by a public conversation.

Of this series, artist and Assistant Professor of Fine Arts David Hartt writes:

A crisis of borders, a fold in time, a rupture in space. An assertion of gradience. I was having a hard time describing how I was feeling and then Thomas said ‘synthetic’ and it stuck in my mind. I wanted something porous, a polymeric structure where the voice, agency, geography and temporality of others collude to produce a more compelling version of the world.  Brixton, Los Angles, Accra, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, etc…, spinning a new distributed off-axis center. 

I was having a hard time describing what I was seeing. So I’ll show you instead.  Visions of power and pride and grief and desire and confusion and community and celebration and abandonment and of a wandering itinerant solitude. I want to hold all of these things together in this synthetic moment.

This Synthetic Moment began as a series of exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. It now takes form as a series of talks and discussions that will explore intersectional and porous concepts of identity as expressed in art, architecture and language. A compound description of the world as vast and contingent.

Liz Johnson Artur (b. 1964, Bulgaria) is a Russian-Ghanaian artist based in London. For over three decades, her work has documented the lives of black people from across the African Diaspora. She has exhibited internationally, including group exhibitions at Serpentine Galleries, London, UK; David Nolan Gallery, New York, USA; The Photographers’ Gallery, London, UK; Kunstverein Leipzig, Germany; the 10th Berlin Biennale, Germany; and a solo exhibition at Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA. Her monograph with Bierke Verlag was listed by The New York Times in ‘Best Photo Books 2016’. In 2017 she was nominated for the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize.