‘ON SYMPATHY’: A ONE-OFF OCCASION HOSTED AS PART OF THE CLASSICAL NOW EXHIBITION
We are delighted that King’s College London and The Courtauld will be hosting the 2018 Association for Art History Annual Conference; as a special, one-off event, the Conference this year will also include a Friday lunchtime Festival, curated by Abigail Walker (student ambassador on ‘Modern Classicisms’).
The Festival is a way to start thinking differently. It will both celebrate and challenge the current forms of art historical research, study and engagement. Composed of various events, workshops and visits, the Festival looks to complement the Annual Conference proceedings and themes in a discursive and exploratory environment. It investigates topics such as access to art history and to knowledge of the subject; it will also explore alternative ways in which art historical work can be interpreted. It offers the opportunity to experience art, music and debate in an informal environment.
In collaboration with our major exhibition, The Classical Now, artist Isabel Lewis will be hosting an occasion in the Bush House Arcade. The event will form part of the Conference Festival, and this particular component will be free to the public. The event is called ‘On sympathy’, and has been organised together with Michael Squire and Brooke Holmes.
The organisers write: ‘We tend to think of sympathy as a relation between persons. But in the fourth century BC, Greek philosophers started to talk about sympathy as something diffused throughout the world, affecting human and non-human bodies alike. What is at stake in expanding our own concepts of sympathy today, beyond communities imagined in human terms? In doing so, what kind of relation do we open up with the past and those long dead? How do these experiments in sympathy affect, in turn, how we come to be with one another – our living in shared space? And in what ways might these questions help us, according to the rallying cry of the Association’s 2018 Annual Meeting, to “look out!”?’
Lewis’ occasions are immersive, multi-sensory, ecological experiments in the cultivation of conditions for working through, collectively, the questions of living well and living together.
The event will be open to the public as well as delegates of the Conference; participants will be free to come and go as they please. Why not combine your visit to our exhibition with this unique opportunity to experience the work of Isabel Lewis? And if you are attending the Association for Art History Conference, there is also a chance for a curator-led tour of The Classical Now during the lunch-break on Thursday 5 April.
The 2018 Annual Conference Festival will take place on Friday 6 April, 12.30-3.00. To see all events organised by the King’s Faculty of Arts & Humanities to celebrate The Classical Now, click here.
