Underskog

Open Forum and Open Seminar with Jalal Toufic 

Open Forum January 10th. 2012 / 19:00  
Jalal Toufic:
Which Is the More Difficult in the Christian Era: to Resurrect or to Bury?
What would be an apt sound track during the vampire’s deadly sucking of someone’s blood? How in the Christian era to resurrect the nameless beloved? Alternatively, how to bury him or her? Can a single scene confirm my answers or provide answers to the aforementioned three questions? Yes: a scene from Resnais/Duras’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959).
Kunstakademiet auditorium

Open Seminar January 11-12-13th. 10:00-16:00 (All days=3 cred)
Jalal Toufic: The (Un)dead
Drawing on various altered states of consciousness I underwent, films and novels on the undead, psychiatric case studies and mystical reports, the seminar deals with many of the certainly dubious but also dubiously certain characteristics of the undeath state, for example: over-turns that undo the dead’s turn to answer an interpellation; doubles; frequent unworldly freezings still, ones that reveal the occasional worldly immobilization of the living as merely motion-less-ness, i.e., a variety of movement; the implicit indefinite fall of/in the cadaver; the turning of the metaphorical into the literal; and an unreality that sometimes behaves in a filmic manner (e.g., the lapses in hypnosis, schizophrenia, and undeath permit editing in reality), inducing the undead to wonder: “Am I in a film?”
Kunstakademiet auditorium. Open to public!

Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996; 2nd ed., 2009), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005), Undeserving Lebanon (2007), The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (2009), Graziella: The Corrected Edition (2009), What Is the Sum of Recurrently? (2010), The Portrait of the Pubescent Girl: A Rite of Non-Passage (2011), and What Were You Thinking? (2011). Many of his books, most of which were published by Forthcoming Books, are available for download as PDF files at his website: http://www.jalaltoufic.com.

Open Forum is a series of lectures, presentations, performances and conversations with artists, curators, theorists, authors, musicians etc. initiated and arranged by the Art Academy in Oslo. Open Forum usually take place in the Academy’s auditorium at Seilduken, Fossveien 24. The lectures are mainly executed in English and is ordinarily rounded up with questions and answers. The event is open for general public. Welcome!