Tuesday 2 May 2006, 18.30–20.00

Distinguished anthropologist Michael Taussig’s work has investigated the history of African slavery, commodity fetishism, the impact of colonialism on shamanism and folk healing, and the relevance of Modernism and postmodernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual. Currently a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, his writing pays attention to textual construction as a form of analysis in itself, involving a mixture of ethnography, storytelling, meta-ethnography and theory.

Taussig’s talk addresses issues raised in the work of Malaysian-born artist Simryn Gill. Gill’s exhibition in the Level 2 Gallery comments on language, its fluidity and assimilation, playfully describing the impossibility of order in the systems we create to ‘know’ the world.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£7 (£5 concessions), booking recommended

    

This event is related to the Level 2 Gallery: Simryn Gill exhibition