The GWW Centre has two online events coming up in the next week. Please see below for details of ‘Loving the monster: David Lynch’s The Elephant Man as cultural history, a talk by Dr Suzannah Biernoff’ on Thursday 12 November 1-2pm,and the launch of the Art | Work arts professionals in conversation series on Wednesday 18 November 12-1pm, with Rachael Disbury, Production Director at Alchemy Film and Arts. Both events are generously supported by Aberdeen City Council’s Creative Funding programme. All very welcome!
LLMVC’s George Washington Wilson Centre for Visual Culture and the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine would be delighted if you could join us for our next free online event ‘Loving the monster: David Lynch’s The Elephant Man as cultural history’ by Dr Suzannah Biernoff on Thursday 12 November 1-2pm. Please register via Eventbrite – we will send a Zoom access link to registered participants on the day of the event.
Ostensibly a tale about Victorian London, David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980) became a modern parable of tragic ugliness and inner beauty at a time when disfigurement was being redefined as a disability, and disability was being recognized as a civil rights issue. The film, and wider elephant man phenomenon, tapped into contemporary anxieties about genetic mutation and monstrous birth and informed the way neurofibromatosis and other potentially disfiguring conditions were seen: as a “curse” that could finally be broken by modern medicine.
Taking The Elephant Man as an object lesson, this talk explores some of the challenges of using films as historical documents, and begins to plot a history of disfigurement as a cinematic trope.
Bio: Suzannah Biernoff is a Reader in Visual Culture in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, and co-director of Birkbeck’s Medical Humanities Research Group. Her publications, focusing on histories of the body, faciality and ways of seeing, include Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages and Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement. Her current research, on cinema and the unbeautiful, investigates the ways in which film has created, perpetuated and challenged stereotypes of facial difference over the past century.
Art | Work
arts professionals in conversation
Art | Work is a new series of online one-to-one conversations with arts professionals. Students and others will have a chance to hear from people working in the arts about what their jobs involve, the work their organisations do, how they got to where they are, what motivates them, their thoughts on the future and what advice they can offer to aspiring arts professionals.
In the first event in the series, Alan Macpherson, Programme Coordinator of the MLitt Film, Visual Culture and Arts Management, will be in conversation with Rachael Disbury, Production Director at Alchemy Film and Arts.
The conversation will be held on Microsoft Teams on Wednesday 18 November from 12-1pm. All are welcome. There will be time for audience questions at the end. Join the conversation here.
Art | Work is supported by the George Washington Wilson Centre for Visual Culture (GWW), the University of Aberdeen and Aberdeen City Council.
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