a series of lectures curated by Hilde de Bruijn,
hosted by TENT. and Witte de With
February-April 2006

Ritual can be observed in a broad range of socio-cultural areas such as politics, sport, music, the medical and academic realm and is considered to play a wide variety of roles. The Ritualizing series looked at ritual as a cultural and historical construction in which the aspect of doing is key. Ritualizing is an activity, that can function as a creative and dynamic tool for shaping the world around us. How do we use ritualizations to place ourselves in the larger order of things or in what way do ritualizations shape and perform the relationship of the individual to the outside world, and of different groups to each other? How is this expressed in the semi-public and public realm of mass media and exhibitions?

PROGRAMME

Thursday February 9, 2006
The Gift of Terror: Suicide-Bombing as Potlatch
Lecture by Ross Birrell

Recording of the final testimony of Jamal Satti on Lebanese National Television, 1985

Framed by a reading of gift-exchange in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather II, Ross Birell analysed the political economy of suicide-bombing in relation to recent anthropological studies of prestation rituals and the writings of Mauss, Bataille, Baudrillard and Derrida. Focusing on the final video testimony of Lebanese suicide-bomber, Jamal Satti, Birell discussed suicide-bombing as a form of ritual obligation.

Ross Birrell (UK) is an artist and writer and teaches at the Glasgow School of Art. He has published essays on Marcel Duchamp and Antonin Artaud, and Santiago Sierra and is co-editor of Justified Sinners: An Archaeology of Scottish Counterculture, 1960-2000 (2002).

Thursday February 16, 2006
Media Rituals: Searching for Form in a Media-Saturated World
Lecture by Nick Couldry

Media rituals are a new form of ritual that legitimates media authority (as opposed to religious or political authority). Nick Couldry discussed examples of media rituals from Big Brother to talk shows and media-based tourism, and explored the link between media rituals and a wider process of ‘ritualization’ (involved for example in the rise of celebrity culture) which prepares us to interpret, and act in, media rituals. Deconstructing media rituals, Couldry argued, is a way of gaining distance from the assumptions of media culture; something particularly important in an age when politicians have increasingly sought (and inevitably through media) to legitimate major actions that lack democratic support.

Nick Couldry (UK) is a media and social theorist, and Reader at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His publications include The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (2000), Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (2003), and Listening Beyond the Echoes: Media, Ethics and Agency in an Uncertain World (forthcoming).

Thursday February 23, 2006
Can Cinema Slow the Flow of Blood?
Lecture by Laura U. Marks

Jalal Toufic, Ashura: This Blood Spilled in My Veins, video still, 2005

Ritual implicates the body in both remembrance and forgetting, contemplation and catharsis. Laura Marks examined how two experimental documentaries from Lebanon extend and deflect these purposes in Ashura, the Shi’ite Muslim commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. With excerpts from the films Ashura: This Blood Spilled in My Veins by Jalal Toufic (2002) and Noble Sacrifice by Vatche Boulghorjian (2002).

Laura U. Marks (USA) is a theorist and curator of independent media, and author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000) and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002).

Thursday March 2, 2006
Having to Become Something Else
Performance by Lindsay Seers

Lindsay Seers’ (UK) work has evolved as an autobiographical narrative that charts her desire to become a camera, her flight into ventriloquism and her most recent attempts to become a projector. Seers has performed and made hundreds of images by using her own body as a camera, locating the photographic process inside her body to become an image receptor – her mouth cavity is the camera body and her lips the shutter and aperture. The body of work interweaves elements of photographic theory, philosophy and recent scientific research and maps them onto actions and processes that define her life story. (text from http://www.gasworks.org.uk)

Lindsay Seers (UK) is an artist based in London. Her recent exhibitions include: Haunted Media, Site Gallery, Sheffield (2004); Eyes of Others, Gallery of Photography, Dublin (2005 ); ADAM, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam (2005); I Saw the Light, Gasworks, London (2005).

Thursday March 16, 2006
Interaction Rituals, Civility and Conflict in Everyday Life
Lecture by Randall Collins

Ritual theory originated in the study of religion as performed in social gatherings that create and sustain beliefs about symbolic sacred objects. Social theorists and researchers from Durkheim to Goffman, Douglas and others have found rituals to be central in the modern secular world as well, both in the massive public rituals of politics, social movements, and entertainment, and in the momentary encounters of ‘ordinary life.’ Collins’ theory of “Interaction Ritual Chains” spells out the ingredients that make rituals succeed or fail, and how they shape group membership, morality, and emotions; the chains of rituals from one everyday encounter to the next shape the ongoing construction of individual self and inner thought.

Randall Collins (USA) is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), and Interaction Ritual Chains (2004).

Thursday March 23, 2006
The Museum Ritual: Dynamics and Dilemmas
Lecture by Sharon Macdonald

Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg turned into a documentation and exhibition centre

Museums can be seen as ritual sites which act to set their contents apart from ordinary, profane life and material culture. They serve to sacralize the objects that are presented, to legitimate art as ‘Art’, and to define what is worthy of contemplation and preservation within public culture. At the same time, however, the contents of museums and their styles of presentation are produced through processes that inevitably bear the imprint of wider social and political concerns, as well as aspects of ritual processes that are too often forgotten. This lecture looked at the ritual processes of the museum, focusing specifically on museums that seek to deal with ‘difficult’ subjects, including the Holocaust and Nazi terror. How do museums dealing with difficult subjects cope with their potentially ‘sacralizing’ or ‘enchanting’ effects?

Sharon Macdonald (UK) is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Sheffield. Recent books include The Politics of Display (ed. 1998), Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum (2002), A Companion to Museum Studies (ed. 2006) and Exhibition Experiments (ed. with P.Basu, forthcoming).

Thursday March 30, 2006
1,2,3,4
Performance by Jeremiah Day

Artist Jeremiah Day presented his performance 1,2,3,4, evolving around the National Memorials in Washington DC. The performance depicts the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial under reconstruction in the summer of 2004. The election of 2004, it should be said, was largely influenced by a public debate on both the facts and meaning of the Vietnam War and both Senator John Kerry and George Bush’s roles in the political crisis the war caused “back home”. Through slides showing the memorial and text addressing the context of the reconstruction, Day established a tentative counter-narrative to the ‘media’ that is grounded in mourning rather than public relations.

Jeremiah Day (USA) is an artist based in Amsterdam. His recent exhibitions include: Radiodays, De Appel, Amsterdam (2005); For Us The Living/Period of Reflection, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam (2006)

Thursday April 6, 2006
The Rhythms of Content
Screening programme curated by Lisl Ponger

This screening included work by Mara Mattuschka, Sabine Maier, Vladimir Nicolić, Jean Rouch, Elimir Ilnik, Kanak-TV, Songül Boyraz, and David Blandy. The programme was a journey through various film and video genres ranging from documentary (Jean Rouch), video installation (Vladimir Nicolic), structuralist avant-garde film (Mara Mattuschka) ¬– a tradition that deals with film material in a ritualistic way -– to an activist piece (Kanak TV) which gives a particular perspective on a political ritual.

Lisl Ponger (Austria) is an artist based in Vienna. Her work deals with issues related to ethnography, migration and identity. Her recent exhibitions include: Projekt Migration, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2005); Colonialism without Colonies?, Shedhalle, Zürich (2005); Schweizer Kranheit + die Sehnsucht nach der Ferne, Kunsthaus Dresden (2006).

Thursday April 13, 2006
Repetition as an Act of Resistance
Lecture and screening by Mirjam Westen

Lida Abdul, White House, video still, 2005

Repetitive movements can be an important visual aspect of rituals. Many video/performance artists use repetitive activity in their work to emphasize, to commemorate, or to criticize a certain (traumatic) event or development. “Repetitive activity is an act of resistance and endurance as well,” says performance- and videoartist Lida Abdul. Westen presented work by Lida Abdul as well as performance videos by Cheryl Donegan, Regina José Galindo, Mathilde ter Heijne and Yerbossyn Meldibekov.

Mirjam Westen (the Netherlands) is an art historian and a curator at the Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem. She made exhibitions with artists such as Andrea Fisher, Emily Jacir, Tania Mouraud, Art in Ruins, Lily van der Stokker and Lida Abdul, as well as the thematic exhibitions Selfdetermination (1995), Intimacy (1996), and Secrets of the 90s (2004).

Thursday April 20, 2006
Shooting Embalms
Lecture by Ronald Grimes and Eric Venbrux

Jan van Neck, Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Frederick Ruysch, 1683

Using every available visual medium, cultures the world over have put death and the dead on display. When the dead weren’t being buried, they were being embalmed, dried, or mummified, rendering them “objects of visual contemplation”. Currently, one way of enabling the dead to persist, if not live, is to enshrine them in photographs, films, and videos. The tight knot binding photography to death has been repeatedly noticed, so it should come as no surprise to learn that death and the dead have been shot to death. But how should we view this complex relationship between dying and the visual documentation of dying? This lecture considered various answers to this question. The proposed answer, in its simplest form, is this: shooting embalms.

Ronald L. Grimes (Canada) is Professor of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. He is founding editor of the Journal of Ritual Studies, and his recent books include Deeply into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage (2000), and Rite Out of Place: Ritual, Media, and the Arts (forthcoming).
Eric Venbrux (the Netherlands) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He is co-editor of special issues on World Art of the journals International Journal of Anthropology (2003) and Visual Anthropology (2004), and author of Exploring World Art (2006).

The organisor of the Ritualizing programme, Hilde de Bruijn, (the Netherlands) is an independent curator based in Nijmegen. She was a participant at the Curatorial Training Programme of De Appel from 2000-2001 and assistant-curator at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht, from 2001-2004. Her research into ritualizing also resulted in the exhibition Hidden Rythms, Museum Het Valkhof and Paraplufabriek, Nijmegen (2005-06).