PARASOPHIA 京都国際現代芸術祭2015

Since June 2013, Parasophia has invited artists and academics of international importance to deliver lectures and other events for the Open Research Program as part of the curatorial team’s research. For the next event in this program, Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015’s participating artist Ann Lislegaard will be invited to deliver a lecture in Tokyo.
Ann Lislegaard is known for 3D film animations and sound-light installations often departing from ideas found in science fiction novels such as Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. She finds in science fiction an alternative approach to language, narration, gender roles, sexuality, and concepts of the future.
Her Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard) (2006) is set in a hotel that is slowly crystallizing. As the animation moves through the architecture, one encounters furniture by the female architect Lina Bo Bardi, Robert Smithson’s sculpture The Dead Tree, and Eva Hesse’s Untitled (Rope Piece). These “virtual replicants” are re-activated in the animation as provisional characters in a setting where time itself is ruined.
In Oracles, Owls… Some Animals Never Sleep (2012–14), which draws on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a computer-animated owl delivers a monologue of aphorisms and latent fragments that consist of prophecies from I Ching and a feminist speaking in tongues. The monologues are interrupted by squeaks of compressed noise, dramatized and distorted samples from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Although it is at times menacing, it is also humorous, a doubled and redoubled self, with its unsynchronized dancing and trance-like movements.
Lislegaard will speak about her work and creative process for Parasophia’s first Open Research Program in Tokyo.

About the Open Research Program
The Artistic Director and his curatorial team will conduct part of their research for Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015 publicly, in the form of lectures and other events in this program.

Ann Lislegaard
b. 1962 in Tønsberg, Norway; based in Copenhagen and New York. Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015 participating artist. Read more: Ann Lislegaard