*Please note, this event will be held at Fisher-Bennett Hall (SE corner of 34th & Walnut), Room 401, 3340 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA.

Penn Book Center, the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures, and the Institute of Contemporary Art are proud to present Elisabeth von Samsonow for a performance and discussion of her book Anti-Electra: The Radical Totem of the Girl.

The feminist counterpart to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Anti-Electra is a philosophy of “the girl” as a model of contemporary transgressive subjectivity. Elisabeth von Samsonow asserts that focusing on the girl’s escape from the Oedipus complex leads to a fundamental shift in our most common views on media and art. The book offers a new view on gender, the contemporary world dyed by symbolic girlism, and the (universal) girl in critical dialogue with media, ecology, and society. Joining Samsonow in conversation is artist Andrea Hornick.

ELISABETH VON SAMSONOW is Professor of Philosophical and Historical Anthropology at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and was a Visiting Professor at the Bauhaus University Weimar (2012-2013). She is involved in various international activities both as an artist and curator. Her teaching and research focus on collective memory, the relationship between art and religion, female identification, sacral and profane androgyny, and the dissolution of the modern self. Her work as an artist is concerned with the systematic and symbolic place of sculpture in the frame.

ANDREA HORNICK work irreverently engages historiography and feminism. She exhibits meticulously copied old masters’ portraits of women, re-imagined with their animal spirit guides. She also works in text-based sound installation and performance, as in her 2017 Barnes Foundation exhibition, Unbounded Histories, the first contemporary piece to be included in the Barnes Foundation’s Collection Galleries. Hornick has a B.A. from Oberlin College and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Since 2012, she has been teaching in the Fine Art and Architecture department at the University of Pennsylvania.