GERMANY AUTHOR · EXHIBITIONS · ART
Elisabeth Bronfen
Also known as: BRONFEN, Elizabeth Bronfen
Elizabeth is a feminine given name, a variation of the Hebrew name Elisheva (אֱלִישֶׁבַע), meaning "My God is an oath" or "My God is abundance", as rendered in the Septuagint.
If her early childhood was not idyllic, it came close.
— from Sylvia Plath
Most acclaimed
Pipilotti Rist
1996
Over the last three decades, Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist (born 1962) has been an original and impactful voice on the contemporary art scene with her sensuous, colorful and norm-subverting audio and video universes (the artist's first name is itself a nod to Swedish author Astrid Lindgren's rebellious, freethinking heroine Pippi Longstocking). With projections on ceilings, walls and floors, Rist liberates the moving image from the screen through installations and new electronic formats. While body and gender are central themes in her early pieces, the main focus of her recent work has shifted towards nature. Rist's art is sensually playful and compelling, while also diving deeply into existential abysses. Superbly produced with a die-cut cover, this book is published in connection with Rist's midcareer survey exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and comprises texts by some of the foremost specialists on Rist's work, as well as a selection of videos, which can be experienced as AR (augmented reality).
Crossmappings
"The influential cultural critic, Elisabeth Bronfen, sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema and visual culture. The crossmappings facilitated in and between these essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its visual representability, the gendering of war, death and the fragility of life, as well as sovereignty and political power. Each chapter tracks transformations that occur as aesthetic figurations travel from one historical moment to another, but also from one medium to another. Many prominent artists are discussed during these journeys into the cultural imaginary, include Degas, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Wagner, Picasso, and Shakespeare, as well as classic Hollywood's film noir and melodrama and the TV series, The Wire and House of Cards."--
Sylvia Plath
This study of Sylvia Path is primarily a search for the meaning of her work, in which coherent and persuasive readings of a poetry which is frequently hard to follow and at times impenetrable force us to attend to the deeper significance of the poet's existential dilemma--tragic in its personal outcome.