Gertrude Contemporary - Discpline Lecture #5

We are pleased to announce that the fifth lecture of the Gertrude Contemporary - Discipline: Contemporary Art Lecture Series will be given by Irish critic and curator Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, followed by a conversation with Rebecca Coates.

Mac Giolla Léith will draw on his research in the fields of Irish-language linguistics and literary criticism to address artworks including Franz Ackermann’s Mental Maps (1991-), Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead. Real Time (2003) and Ceal Floyer’sThings (2009). He will contextualise these works within wider debates surrounding the relationship between words and things and between naming and mapping. The lecture will also consider various questions raised by the resurgence in recent years of a variety of ahumanist forms of thought.

The Gertrude Contemporary - Discipline: Contemporary Art Lecture Series is a collaboration between Melbourne-based contemporary art journal Discipline and Gertrude Contemporary. The series presents lectures on key concerns, artists and theories of contemporary art.  Throughout 2013 lecturers will speak from the perspective of a variety of different disciplines — including philosophy, cultural studies, art history and literary studies — as well as from academic and non-academic backgrounds.

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith is visiting Australia as part of the Gertrude Contemporary Visiting Curators Program which is funded by Arts Victoria.

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith is a critic and occasional curator who teaches in the School of Irish, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore and Linguistics at University College Dublin.  In addition to his writings on literature in the Irish language he has published widely on contemporary art. Among his most recent publications are monographic essays on the work of Douglas Gordon, Annette Kelm, Elad Lassry, Anj Smith, John Stezaker and James Welling.  He is a contributor to Afterall, Artforum, Frieze, Parkett and Tate Etc.  He has curated exhibitions in Dublin, London, Amsterdam and New York and was a juror for the 2005 Turner Prize.

Rebecca Coates is an independent curator and writer, Associate Curator, ACCA, and lecturer in Art History and Art Curatorship, School of Culture and Communications, University of Melbourne.  In 2013 she completed a PhD in the field of exhibition histories.  She has worked extensively as a curator in Australia and overseas, including ACCA, the NGV, and MOMA Oxford, where she curated and developed an extensive program of touring exhibitions and collaborative projects with art spaces and museums in the UK and Europe.  She writes regularly for Australian and international art journals and publications.