COLLOCATED EVENTS: "JOSHUA TREE / THE DIALECTICS OF PRESENCE"

 

The exhibition is the result of reflection on the concepts of visuality and presence. The dialectics of presence concern here the spatial extension, shaping the play of form, figure, and emptiness, or even more primal space, conceived of as openness, a trace in memory, Heidegger's spatialization, as opposed to the space of incarnation.

The exhibition presents the juxtaposition of mental space to physical space and landscape in the context of the picturesque and metaphorical scenery of the Joshua Tree desert in California.
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The dialectics of presence and the thinking subject should be also considered in relation to the concepts of metamorphosis, transformation, presentation, difference, the dialectic of "becoming different" in Heidegger's reading of Hegel, the Aristotelian concept of revealing metabolē, or even thinking about being as such.
 
Ewa Bobrowska – visual artist, aesthetician, philosopher. She holds two PhD degrees: in Fine Arts from the University of Arts in Poznań and in Philosophy from the Department of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine. Her interests focus on artistic creation and the analysis of contemporary philosophical reflection. Currently, she works as Assistant Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where she collaborates with Professor Krzysztof Wodiczko in the Public Domain Art Studio, and conducts theoretical seminars. Her artistic works have been exhibited, among others, at Zachęta, Trafo in Szczecin, CSW, Salon Academii, Mazovian Museum, Fordham University in New York, University of California in Irvine and the Museum Art in Castello. Her latest book in English: UCI Critical Theory and Contemporary Art Practice: Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Bruce Nauman, and Others, with a Prologue by Georges Van Den Abbeele, was published in 2020 in Berlin by Swiss publisher Peter Lang (https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/68589). She is author of the monograph Parateoria. California School of Irvine (2013) and editor-in-chief of the anthology Lyotard, Derrida, Hillis Miller and others. California Critical Theory (2019). She is a member of the Polish Philosophical Society, the Polish Society of Aesthetics, and the Athens Institute for Education & Research.

 

Ewa Bobrowska, Pustynia I (Desert I), photo installation, 2023