On September 19, 2012, Devora Neumark, MFAIA faculty member at the Vermont campus, gave a presentation titled Dialogic Live Art Performance and the Exploration of Third Realm Beauty as part of the Hexagram-Concordia Research-Creation Brown-Bag Series. The presentation was convened with the following overview:
As with other forms of community-engaged art, dialogic performance is process-oriented, capable of provoking social change, and nurturing the emergence of new ways of knowing. Within such projects, especially those that are deliberately focused on an interrogation of power dynamics and motivated by the desire to address social injustice, collaboration is often embraced as a locus of and agent for an encounter with the aesthetic, ethical and political forces that shape personal and public life. Over the past several years I have convened a series of such events as a way to invite embodied experience and critical reflection about the role that material culture plays in the resettlement process for individuals who have experienced forced displacement. Borrowing Arthur Danto’s conceptual framework of “Third Realm beauty” – which implicates deliberative attention to, appreciation of, and manipulation involving material effects – my aim has been to create the conditions in which to explore how house-beautification is at once indicative and expressive of the readiness to be(come) at home (again) following forced dislocation, as much as it is performative in its practice.
This presentation series includes ontological, methodological, and epistemological discussions, addressing how artistic practices create knowledge as well as what the notion of research-creation encompasses, among other topics. Bringing together artists/researchers from Concordia University’s faculties of Fine Arts, Arts and Science, and Engineering and Computer Science, Hexagram-Concordia fosters high-level work in a broad range of interdisciplinary domains relating to new media art, design and technology.
In addition to serving as a faculty member in the MFAIA program, Devora Neumark is completing her PhD in the Humanities program at Concordia’s Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture.
