Adrian Rifkin: in-conversation with Dominic Johnson
In-conversations is a series of talks with Adrian Rifkin and invited guest speakers.
Date and time
Location
LVMH Lecture Theatre, Central Saint Martins
1 Granary Square London N1C 4AA United KingdomAbout this event
- Event lasts 2 hours
Dominic Johnson is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Queen Mary University of London and, in 2024, he was the Fulbright Visiting Professor at Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California.
His research focuses on modern and contemporary art and performance after 1960. Through writing and curating, he primarily researches artists whose work has tended to be marginalised or stigmatised in institutional and critical histories of visual art and performance. His publications include Unlimited Action: Performance of Extremity in the 1970s (2019) and Pleading in Blood: The Art and Performance of Ron Athey (2013). Johnson recently curated exhibition, Apprehensions, which is the first retrospective of the work of the artist Hamad Butt (1962-1994).
The exhibition first opened at IMMA, Dublin (6 December 2024-5 May 2025), and is tours to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, opening on 4 June. Hamad Butt’s pioneering art practice of the late 1980s and early 1990s engaged with sculptural installation, sci-art, and intermedia art.
Adrian Rifkin is an art historian and cultural theorist. He as extensively engaged with matters of theory in a wide range of interdisciplinary contexts, ranging across aesthetics, cultural studies, music, pedagogy, performance studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis and visual culture. His publications include Street Noises: Studies in Parisian Pleasure, 1900-40 (Manchester University Press, 1993), Ingres Then, and Now (1999), Communards and Other Cultural Histories (edited by Steve Edwards, 2018).
Adrian curated two exhibitions, one (with Grant Watson) dedicated to the aesthetics and politics of the British composer and improviser Cornelius Cardew, held at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp (2008) and The Drawing Room, London (2009), and (with Lisa Le Feuvre) Robert Smithson: Mundus Subterraneus – Early Works, an exhibition of Smithson’s works on paper at Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris. His work is also the subject of the anthology Interdisciplinary Encounters - Hidden and Visible Explorations of the Work of Adrian Rifkin (edited by Dana Arnold, 2015).
Image credit: Hamad Butt, Cradle, part of his Familiars series (1992). The work’s glass baubles are filled with lethal chlorine gas. Photo: Jamal Butt.