Icons and Images: Objects of Commemoration and Presence

Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University

IRCPL at Columbia

German artist Heide Hatry, in conversation with historian Caroline Walker Bynum, will discuss her most recent work "Icons in Ash."

Deutsches Haus

In several complex and provocative bodies of work made from refuse of the meat production industry, artist Heide Hatry has staked out a unique position on materiality in art. Giving voice to the unceremoniously slaughtered in the form of their very flesh and creating thereby the space for a direct relationship of art to its subject – in her words, creating “art subjects instead of art objects” – she bypasses the problematic of representation and even interpretation while putting an even profounder onus on and offering a deeper, whole person, experience to her viewer. Like other contemporary artists of death and materiality, such as Teresa Margolles or Doris Salcedo, she has moved beyond medium to immediacy, heightening the real instead of distancing themselves from it through mere depiction, analogy, or allusion.Her most recent work, in which she has created portraits out of the cremated remains of their subjects, thematizes and transforms the notion of likeness while hearkening back to what Hans Belting contends is the aboriginal purpose of portraiture: to keep the dead among us in charged ceremonial artifacts. The experience of families of her subjects strongly suggests an uncanny and consolatory effect that is best understood in terms of a sense of the continuing presence of their dead, the demise of which experience underlies our modern “culture of mourning.” In discussion with cultural historian Caroline Walker Bynum, Hatry will address issues of presence, new (and recovered) understandings of our relationship to death and the dead, the place of art in the process of grieving and the resumption of life, image, icon, and relic.This event is organized by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life and cosponsored by the Departments of Germanic Languages, History and Art History. It is part of the <a href="https://www.ircpl.columbia.edu/death-series" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Death and After</a> series at IRCPL.__________________________________New York-based German artist Heide Hatry studied art at various German art schools and art history at the University of Heidelberg. She taught at a private art school for 15 years while simultaneously conducting an international business as an antiquarian bookseller. Since moving to New York in 2003 she has curated numerous exhibitions and has shown her own work at museums and galleries around the world. She has edited many books and art catalogues. Her book Skin was published by Kehrer, Heidelberg, in 2005; Heads and Tales and Not a Rose by Charta, Milan/New York in 2009 and 2012; and Icons in Ash by Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY in 2017.Caroline Walker Bynum is professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and University Professor emerita at Columbia University. Her most recent book is Christian Materiality: An Essay on Late Medieval Religion (2011). Articles include “Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology, Or, Why Compare?” History of Religions 53 (2014), which compares objects in Hindu and Christian devotion; and “Are Things Indifferent? How Objects Change Our Understanding of Religious History,” German History 34 (2016), which explores the implications of the recent “material turn” for understanding the transition between the Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation. Her 1995 book The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, which won prizes from the American Philosophical Society and Phi Beta Kappa, was reissued in 2018 by Columbia University Press with a new introduction.

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Icons and Images: Objects of Commemoration and Presence

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