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Lecture / Inge Morath, the Other(s) and Historical Difference 
UGM, Strossmayerjeva 6
Thursday, 11 October 2018, 18:00
lecture by: Laura Hengehold, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, USA
special guest: Eva D. Bahovec, philosopher and ambassador of Wom@rts project


In the year when UGM I Maribor Art Gallery celebrates the diversity of female artists with several exhibitions and events, we have also started a line of activities in the European project Wom@rts, pursuing women’s equal share presence in the Arts in terms of visibility, promotion and access to the market. Also, next year is the 70th anniversary of Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex's first publication, a book which plays a pivotal role in the Wom@rts project. The UGM have asked philosopher Eva D. Bahovec to help us promote the project by becoming it's ambassador, as well as to speak about the role that Simone de Beauvoir's work has today. This encounter in turn led us to invite philosopher Laura Hengehold to talk about self as an object in time, hovering on the borders of photography, fiction and autobiography.

Laura Hengehold on her lecture:
»A life is such a strange object,« Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her third volume of memoirs, La Force des Choses, »an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken.«  At the same time, even more than literature and philosophy, photography seems to efface the self while disclosing a world into which others can imaginatively enter. This presentation explores ways in which the photo-stories of Inge Morath play on resemblances between the human and the sculptural, and thereby open an uncanny relation with historical time through style, which escapes objectification. This path also leads us to consider the ways in which the acts of travel and translation (particularly to the United States and China) are themselves spatial metaphors for the invisible passage of time and its felt intensity.  Finally, the presentation asks what light Morath's art and her encounters as a photographer and translator might shed on the myths of Woman denounced by Beauvoir.
The lecture will be held in English.

Laura Hengehold is a Professor of Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, USA. She is the author of The Body Problematic: Foucault and Kant on Political Imagination (2007) and Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Individuation (2017), and translator/editor of Jean-Godefroy Bidima’s Law and the African Public Sphere.  She teaches and has published numerous articles on political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of sexuality using perspectives from Continental European and African thinkers. 

Wom@rts is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme, supported by the European Union.

KINDLY INVITED!