Yvonne Rainer | Where’s the Passion? Where’s the Politics?
April 7
Elvan Zabunyan
Art critic, historian, and Associate Professor, University of Rennes (France)
The starting point of Elvan Zabunyan’s talk is the work of Korean-born American artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. In 1980, having left her native Korea seventeen years earlier, Cha returned to work on a film project she described as “memory [that] materializes directly on the screen.” Cha was fluent in English, French, and Korean and worked with words as images and with images as words, using the structure of language and translation to create a multiplicity of narratives in time, space, and memory.
Elvan Zabunyan is a contemporary art historian and art critic based in Paris. Her research focuses on the redefinition of contemporary art history through postcolonial and feminist art and theory in the context of the genealogy of cultural displacement. She is the author of Black Is A Color: A History of Contemporary African-American Art (2005) and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Berkeley, 1968 (2013). Her essays on contemporary visual arts have appeared in books, exhibition catalogues, and journals. She is an Associate Professor at the Rennes University (Brittany, France) and Director of the Curatorial Program in the Art History Department. Learn more about Dr. Zabunyan.
