Such persistent, open questioning has a long tradition at the Institute Art Gender Nature, for, over the course of more than two decades, we have invited countless guests to visit and share with us. Thus, although the Art Taaalkssss series reflects interests from within our programs and is a chance to reveal them to the public, these lectures also constitute a practice format in themselves. Having a succession of artists and other cultural practitioners speak publicly about their work and methods allows the audience of Art Taaalkssss to trace the different ethno-aesthetic paradigms of art making in a given region or community while moving them towards an understanding of the traits that our community shares – or doesn’t share – with other artistic groups from outside.

Over the course of this lecture series, we will begin to register the diverse, complex mental ecologies that situate art in relation to doing, gender, ideology, materiality, architecture, social interaction and technology. These relations are highly unstable, fluctuating over time to define ever-changing approaches to ideas and form. They affect the way we understand art expression and manifestation, whether as project or process or realized work, as program or the result of chance decisions.

The Art Taaalkssss lecture series is the living, visible face of the activity we perform daily at the Institute Art Gender Nature, guided by a force compelling us to be heard and, therefore, constituting a very special form of research into the way empathy works. The series is not an exercise in art mediation but, rather, a means of connecting ideas of making with those who, artists or not, may, for even just a moment, identify with them.

Art Taaalkssss is curated by Filipa Ramos.

During each season, Art Taaalkssss are dedicated to a very special artist, thinker or cultural worker, who we recall with love and special attention. For the fall 2024 series we have June Leaf (1929 – 2024) in our mind. A unique dreamer and visionary, she created fantastic and mythical beings: humans, animals, and machines, that inhabited outlandish lands and mindsets. Working in Mabou, Nova Scotia, in the company of Robert Frank, June Leaf made drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographies, and collages that portrayed her characters and landscapes in constant metamorphosis.