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Recorded: Thursday, January 26, 7 pm in Jackman Hall
Duration: 01:34:40

Yael Bartana is an Israeli-born artist and filmmaker now based in Amsterdam, Berlin and Tel Aviv. Her film trilogy “And Europe will be Stunned” made between 2007 and 2011, was shown at the Polish Pavilion of the Venice Biennial in 2011. The films revolve around the activities of a Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland invented by Bartana. As the artists says “This is a very universal story; as in previous works, I have treated Israel as a sort of a social laboratory, always looking at it from the outside”. In 2010 she won the Artes Mundi prize for work that stimulates thinking about the human condition.

Join Yael Bartana and Sławomir Sierakowski, the protagonist of “And Europe will be Stunned”  for a conversation about Bartana’s work moderated by Chen Tamir, an independent curator and arts writer based in New York, Toronto, and Tel-Aviv. She is also the Program & Operations Manager at Artis.

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Recorded: Wednesday, November 30, 7 pm in Jackman Hall
Duration: 01:32:26

Yale University’s Professor Benjamin Harshav is the preeminent Jewish culture critic today. As a respected scholar on Chagall, his recent publications include Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World: The Nature of Chagall’s Art and Iconography (Rizzoli, 2006); Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative (Stanford University Press, 2004).

Presented in collaboration with the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto

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Recorded: Wednesday, November 16, 7 pm in Jackman Hall
Duration: 01:34:11

In connection with the exhibition Haute Culture: General Idea – A Retrospective, 1969-1994, join artist Luis Jacob, artist and writer Sholem Krishtalka and art historian Virginia Solomon for a stimulating discussion about this foundational Canadian artist group’s diverse and increasingly influential production.

Luis Jacob graduated from the University of Toronto with degrees in Philosophy and Semiotics in 1996, and has been actively participating in artist-initiated exhibitions and projects for two decades. Working as artist, curator, and writer, Luis Jacob’s diverse practice has addressed issues of social interaction and the subjectivity of aesthetic experience. Highlights of his recent work include solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2011); Art in General, New York City (2010); Fonderie Darling, Montréal (2010); the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2009); and Hamburger Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany (2008).  He participated in the exhibition “House Guests: Contemporary Art at the Grange”, Art Gallery of Ontario (2002); and during the reopening of the AGO, Luis Jacob’s work was displayed as part of the permanent collection in the Lind galleries in 2008.

Sholem Krishtalka is an artist and writer.  He holds a BFA from Concordia University, and an MFA from York University.  His writing has been featured in Canadian Art, C Magazine, CBC Arts Online, Bookforum, among others.  His artwork has been featured in Carte Blanche 2: Painting, a survey of contemporary Canadian painting. He launched a specially-commissioned folio of prints with ArtInvestor, a Munich-based multiples store and magazine; and his paintings are featured in the premiere issue of Headmaster magazine, a queer arts and culture magazine out of Providence, RI. He had a solo show in Brooklyn, New York, at Jack the Pelican Presents; most recently, he has had solo shows at the Art Gallery of Peterborough and the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives.

Virginia Solomon is an art historian, curator, and critic whose work investigates the intersections among art, social life, and politics.She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California, working on a dissertation titled ‘Queer Outsider Methods: General Idea’s Art and Politics, 1969-1994.’ She places General Idea’s practice in the context of an expanded and evolving conversation concerning the relationship between art and politics, and argues that its incorporation of sexuality enabled it to reconfigure what constituted both political and artistic activity.

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Recorded: Thursday, November 10, 7 in Jackman Hall
Duration: 01:33:56

The digital revolution, for it truly to be revolutionary, involves more than increasing efficiencies of production and distribution. It involves profoundly different ways of understanding the world and ourselves. We create our media, and our media then re-create us. Where are our media leading us—politically, spiritually, psychologically? Do we want to go there? How can we influence our own futures via the kinds of media that we create and use?

Fred Ritchin is professor of Photography & Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is the author of After Photography (W. W. Norton, 2009) and In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (Aperture, 1990), the first book on the digital revolution and photography. He began writing on digital imaging in 1984 for The New York Times Magazine, and his articles, essays and books have been translated into many languages. Ritchin is co-founder of PixelPress, an organization dedicated to creating new forms of media and advancing human rights, former picture editor of The New York Times Magazine, former executive editor of Camera Arts magazine, and was founding director of the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography educational program at the International Center of Photography. The website he created for The New York Timesin 1996, “Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace,” was nominated by Times for a Pulitzer Prize in public service. Ritchin has also curated numerous exhibitions, including one on Latin American Photography, another on Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, and a recent exhibition for the New York Photo Festival called “Bodies in Question.”

This talk is generously supported by Penny Rubinoff.

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Recorded: Wednesday, November 9, 7 – 8:30 pm in Jackman Hall
Duration: 01:16:25

Inaugurating their collective enterprise in the heyday of the “medium is the message,” General Idea were often dismissed as camp “triviality.” Yet they created a fictional system based on popular culture that was as coherent as the media analyses of Marshall McLuhan and the International Situationists. The lecture considers General Idea’s contribution to the Toronto School of communication theory.

Philip Monk is Director of the Art Gallery of York University and has served as a curator at both the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Power Plant. A published writer since 1977, he currently is finishing his eighth book Glamour is Theft: A User’s Guide to General Idea, a book as if written in the 1970s and as if written by Roland Barthes (in English translation).

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Recorded: Wednesday, October 26, 7 – 8:30 pm in Jackman Hall
Duration: 01:22:42

David Jaffé, Senior Curator in the Department of Painting, National Gallery, London talks about  the work of 17^th Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens.  In particular he will discuss the Massacre of the Innocents by Rubens from the Thomson Collection at the AGO.

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Recorded: Friday, October 21, 7 – 8:30 pm in the Weston Family Learning Centre
Duration: 01:11:11

Dr. Allan Peterkin engages Dr. Susan Abbey and artist Deirdre Logue in a conversation around the issues of mindfulness in the arts and medicine. A selection of Deirdre Logue’s work is screened.

Dr. Susan Abbey specializes in psychiatry concentrated on the interface of mind and body – with a particular focus on depression, quality of life and stress management with the medically ill and transplant patients and families. Deirdre Logue’s film, video and installation work focuses on self-presentational discourse, the body as material, confessional autobiography and the passage of ‘real’ time.

Presented in partnership with the Wilson Center, the Arts, Health and Humanities Program and the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto.

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Recorded: Friday, October 21, 12 – 1pm in the Weston Family Learning Centre
Duration: 55:03

Join Todd Eberle for the first in a series of brown-bag lunch-time talks. Born in Cleveland, OH, in 1963, Todd Eberle is a professional photographer and artist based in New York City. He is currently photographer-at-large for Vanity Fair. First celebrated for his photographs of Donald Judd’s works and architecture, Eberle is best known for his interpretive work comprising of iconic subject matter such as art, architecture, interiors, design, and portraits. Turning his lens on these subjects, Eberle presents the disparate images that make up international architecture, landscapes, and society. His vision is united by a minimalist aesthetic; a potent mix of control, symmetry and proportion. A book signing for Todd Eberle: Empire of Space will follow from 1 – 2:00 p.m. in shopAGO.

The Brown Bag Lunch & Talk series is generously supported by

Maxine Granovsky Gluskin & Ira Gluskin

In association with

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Duration: 00:51:00

This talk is a personal look at the life of Marc Chagall and his art during a time of enormous social and political upheaval – World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917. The talk offers a glimpse into Chagall’s youth and Jewish upbringing, his search for a powerful new language of expression, his obsession with the village of his childhood and six decades of creative activity in exile. It also explores Chagall’s friends and rivals – the Constructivists – who created radical forms of art to capture their vision of a new, idealized world of social equality. David Wistow is an Interpretive Planner at the AGO.

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Recorded: Wednesday, September 14, 7 pm in the Weston Family Learning Centre
Duration: 01:12:49

Companies claiming to represent the “creative industries” have turned into unlikely advocates of censorship, surveillance and control. Entertainment industry associations have asked world leaders to remake the Internet as a nightmarish panopticon, in the name of defending the arts and copyright.

But for all the censorship, easy takedown, digital locks, and warrantless surveillance and seizure, copyright infringement goes on, and artists find themselves increasingly serving as the justification for totalitarian policies that could have been ripped from the Chinese politburo’s playbook. Can we design a copy-native, Internet-friendly copyright system? If so, what would it look like? Which artists would it serve? Which artists should it serve?

Cory Doctorow  is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of Tor Teens/HarperCollins UK novels like FOR THE WIN and the bestselling LITTLE BROTHER. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.