Professor Ades talks about how contemporary practices engage with the History of Art.
Exhibitions usually dedicated to contemporary art, such as Manifesta and the Venice Biennale, have recently included swathes of historical material. The Deep of the Modern (Manifesta 9 in Genk, Belgium in 2012), and the Encyclopedic Palace (Venice Biennale, 2013) in different ways made the complexity of the workings of art and culture in history central to the displays. Surrealism in particular, which always had a different attitude to its precursors and to producers outside the mainstream of modernism, has been widely revisited by artists and by curators. In this talk I will reflect on my own experience as an art historian and occasional curator and defend exhibitions as potential forces within the modern world.
Professor Dawn Ades is a renowned art historian who has curated some of the most important international exhibitions on Dada and Surrealism and on Art in Latin America. She was Associate Curator of Manifesta 9 and is working on an exhibition on Hannah Hoch. Dawn Ades's Collected Writings will be published shortly by Ridinghouse, London.