Friday 30 September 2005, 14.30–18.30
Saturday 1 October 2005, 11.00–18.30

At this symposia we want to focus on both the cultural politics of Kahlo’s work and her reputation. The role of Frida Kahlo’s work and the construction of her persona within contemporary culture is in itself indicative of the complexities of the interaction of the national with the global. She is now one of the few widely recognised female artists and one whose image informs global perceptions of Mexico and what it means to be Mexican. Her work has traditionally been seen as expressive of the personal pain of a unique woman on to which collective (essentially female) audiences can project their own experiences; other aspects of her identity have been overshadowed by this emphasis. Her role as a political activist and her ability to comment upon, rather than be a vehicle for, the expression of the historical moment is frequently subsumed beneath this desire to empathise with Frida the woman.

By 2005 Kahlo’s life and work has come to represent more than her contribution to the construction of a post-revolutionary Mexican cultural identity or the aesthetic issues and debates which underpin twentieth century art. Kahlo has become a phenomenon through which to discuss far wider issues of cultural meaning and importance to twenty-first century creative practice.

This conference explores these wider meanings. It aims to look at the genealogy of the Kahlo phenomenon as we encounter it today and at its influence on different areas of late twentieth and early twenty-first century culture. We want to allow for an exploration of Kahlo’s impact across a range of disciplines and audiences including fine art, design, film, fashion and feminist and post-colonial cultural theory. Themes include: the relationship of Kahlo to the debates around surrealism and the relevance of the exotic and the popular within the construction of ideas of cultural authenticity; Kahlo as an icon of the dispossessed, as an exemplary ‘minority’ and the impact of this phenomenon on expectations of Mexican and Latino creative practice; and the meanings and appropriations of both the appearance and persona of Frida in film and fashion and the ways in which those meanings have impacted on contemporary consumerist cultures.

– Oriana Baddeley and Dominic Willsdon

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£35 (£25 concessions), booking recommended
Price includes refreshments and drinks reception

    

Programme:

Friday 30 September

14.30
Symposium begins. Starr Auditorium Level 2.
Welcome. Dominic Willsdon

14.40
Opening discussion on representations of Frida Kahlo:
Carlos Monsivais, Emma Dexter and Oriana Baddeley

15.50
Victor Zamudio-Taylor on Kahlo as a teacher, screening 20 minutes of rare filmed interviews with her students not included in The Life of Times of Frida Kahlo, the recent documentary which Zamudio-Taylor made with Amy Stechler. Ms Stechler is unable to travel due to ill health.

16.30
Tea and coffee

17.00
Whitney Chadwick and Dawn Ades
Discussion chaired by Deborah Cherry

18.30
Drinks reception. Starr Auditorium Foyer.

 

Saturday 1 October

11.00
Gannit Ankori, Luis M. Lozano and Victor Zamudio-Taylor
Discussion chaired by Dawn Ades

13.00
Lunch

14.00
Marisela Norte

14.40
Discussion: Laura Mulvey, Caroline Evans and Marina Wallace
Chaired by Oriana Baddeley

15.40
Amalia Mesa-Bains

16.20
Tea and coffee

16.50
Sylvia Ziranek

17.10
Claudia Schaeffer

17.50
Concluding discussion: Whitney Chadwick, Carlos Monsivais and Amalia Mesa-Bains
Chaired by Dominic Willsdon

18.30
Close

 

Biographies:

Dawn Ades is Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. A pioneer in the study of Latin American art in the UK, she has been responsible for some of the most important exhibitions in London and overseas over the past thirty years, including Art in Latin America (1989) and Fetishism: Visualising Power and Desire (1995).

Gannit Ankori is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard and Tufts Universities. She is the author of Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo's Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation (2002), Frida Kahlo: Diary, Art and Life (2003) and a catalogue essay for the 2005 Tate Modern Kahlo retrospective. She was guest curator of Frida Kahlo's Intimate Family Picture (2003) at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Oriana Baddeley is Professor of Art History and Director of Research at the Camberwell School of Art, and Deputy Director of the University of the Arts London. She has written extensively on contemporary Latin American art; her publications include Drawing the Line: Art & Cultural Identity in Contemporary Latin America (1989, co-authored with Valerie Fraser) and an article on contemporary responses to Frida Kahlo for the 2005 Tate Kahlo retrospective.

Whitney Chadwick is Professor of Art and Art History at San Francisco State University.  She is the author of several foundational texts of feminist art history, including Women, Art and Society (1990) and Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985). She was co-organiser of Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation (1998), which opened at the List Visual Art Center at MIT.

Deborah Cherry is Editor of Art History and Professor of the History of Art at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. Her publications include The Edwardian Era (1987), Treatise on the Sublime (1990), Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (1993), Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture (2000) and Speak English (2002).

Emma Dexter is one of Tate Modern’s principal curators. She has organised several major exhibitions, most recently Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph (2003), Luc Tuymans (2004), and now Frida Kahlo.

Caroline Evans is Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. Her recent books are Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (2003), the co-authored The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk (2004) and the co-edited Fashion & Modernity (2005).  She was a consultant to the Museum of London exhibition The London Look (2005).

Luis-Martin Lozano is an art historian from the Iberoamerican University of Mexico City. Professor Lozano is one of the most renowned scholars in the study of Mexican modern masters of the twentieth century. He has conducted research on Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in major museums and institutions throughout the United States. He was recently appointed director of the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.

Amalia Mesa-Bains, Director of the Department of Visual and Public Art at California State University, Monterey Bay, is an artist, scholar, curator and writer who has been involved in the Chicano artist movement since the 1960s. She was the curator for the traveling Ceremony of Memory exhibit and the regional committee chair (Northern California) for the exhibition Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 (CARA). Among her many awards is a 1992 Distinguished MacArthur Fellowship.

Carlos Monsiváis is one of Mexico's most popular and prolific writers. He has been compared to Spain's José Ortegan Y Gassett for the sheer volume as well as the important social and cultural commentary in his works. Monsiváis is considered Mexico's foremost cultural historian, independent scholar and intellectual. He's best known for his chronicles of life in Mexico and its immense capital, Mexico City.

Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her writings, particularly the 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, helped establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study. Between 1974 and 1982, Mulvey co-wrote and co-directed with her husband, Peter Wollen, six experimental films including Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974), Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1982).

Marisela Norte is a performance artist. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Interview, Elle, Option, Venice, the Los Angeles Weekly, Buzz, the LA Opinion, and the anthologies Microphone Fiends, Bordered Sexualities: Bodies on the Verge of a Nation (2005), The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place (1999), and The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock: Trouble Girls (1997).

Claudia Schaeffer is Professor of Spanish at the University of Rochester. She is the author of Bored to Distraction: Cinema of Excess in End-of-the-Century Mexico and Spain (2003), Danger Zones: Homosexuality, National Identity, and Mexican Culture (1996) and Texture Lives: Women, Art, and Representation in Modern Mexico (1992). She has also published on post-Franco Spain, detective fiction, popular culture, millennial debates and film.

Amy Stechler is Producer/Director/Writer of The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo (2005). She co-produced, wrote and edited the early films of Ken Burns: Brooklyn Bridge (nominated for an Academy Award), The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God and Huey Long. She also served as an editing consultant for The Civil War. Stechler is president of Daylight Films.

Victor Zamudio-Taylor is a member of the editorial board of Art Nexus and a co-editor of Origina, the Mexican arts monthly. He is the co-producer of Amy Stechler’s biopic The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo (2005). He has also curated many exhibitions including Inigo Manglano-Ovalle (2003, with Pedro Alonzo)), Ultra Baroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art (2000, with Liz Armstrong), and The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland (2001, with Virginia Fields).

Marina Wallace is Professor of Art History at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. She is also Director of Artakt @ CSM and Director of Operations for the Universal Leonardo project. She was responsible for co-curating (with Professor Martin Kemp) Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now (2000) at the Hayward Gallery, London.

Dominic Willsdon is Curator of Public Events at Tate Modern and teaches for the London Consortium the Curating Contemporary Art MA at the Royal College of Art.

Silvia Ziranek is a performance artist. A Few Big Frocks – taking her titular cue from A Few Small Cuts, Ziranek will in ten minutes, with ten outfits, offer a unique and personal appraisal of Kahlo’s own layers as artist, woman and symbol. SZ gratefully acknowledges stupendous support from Wild At Heart and Osborne + Little, and continuing coiffure care from Hype Hair.

This event is related to the Frida Kahlo exhibition