The Institute of Contemporary Art and the Sachs Program in Contemporary Art are pleased to present a lecture by Tamar Garb, the Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art and Director of UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London.

Garb’s lecture, Painting/Photography/Politics: Marlene Dumas and the Figuration of Difference, will look at the politics of portrayal, photography, and figuration in relation to the colonial/apartheid archive. It focuses on the Dutch/South African Marlene Dumas’s reworking of selected images–both personal and public–in order to question contemporary painting’s capacity to address history, in particular its spectacular/photogenic trace. Using the painted reworking of both an old school photograph and an iconic depiction of Mme Pauline Lumumba, it asks what painting can do when it takes on the photographic past.

Tamar Garb is the Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art and Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London. She is also a fellow of the British Academy. Her many research interests include 19th and 20th century French art and visual culture; contemporary art; feminism and global politics; art and culture in South Africa; the image of the “Jew”; as well as race and representation in modern and contemporary art.

Sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania’s Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Program in Contemporary Art, the Department of the History of Art, the Center for Africana Studies, the Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies Program, and the Institute of Contemporary Art.