Lecture Performance: "Of Journeys and Journals"

Artists' journals and diaries are synonymous to an entry that extends artistic practice—stepping through this entry almost instantly permits us to retrace the connections, paths, and routes between the artistic work that results in material production and the thought processes, considerations, and ideas that drive the artists.

With BloodLetter, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju joins a genealogy which includes significant artists from the last two centuries of Western art history, such as Janice Lowry, Jack Whitten, Keith Haring, Frida Kahlo, Sonja Sekula, and Edvard Munch, and which can be traced back at least as far as Leonardo da Vinci.

The artist's diary, often casually anchored somewhere between literature, experimental protocol, notebook, and artist's book, is not based on external interpretation or re-narration. This is precisely why it lends itself to a tentative and non-binding analysis of artists' oeuvres. The lecture-performance Of Journeys and Journals aims to suggest and present observations based on the artist diaries of Kahlo, Whitten, Haring, and Lowry, offering an invitation to follow the paths outlined and undertaken by these artists, thus immersing oneself in their respective worlds of thought.

In German, with English texts and (loose) German translations or subtitles.

Jeanne-Ange Wagne is a creative art historian, knowledge mediator, and event coordinator and host who conducts artistic research into memory, colonial provenance research and trend cycles in art, culture, and fashion.

She regularly moderates, conceptualizes, and publishes critical mediation formats, artistic interventions, and short texts for cultural and art institutions, most recently for C/O Berlin, Creamcake Berlin, Goethe Institut Kamerun x Musée National Yaoundé, SAVVY Contemporary: The Laboratory of Form-Ideas, Brücke-Museum, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, amongst others. Until October 2023, she also worked for the German branch of the transnational research project The Restitution of Knowledge, at the Department of Art History at Technische Universität Berlin headed by the art historian Prof. Dr. Bénédicte Savoy. In 2022 and 2023, Wagne co-curated and coordinated the event series KuK-Tuesdays: Dislocation.