Susan Silas: untamed
Abstract
This lecture, "untamed," is about the work I have made with birds and how my thinking about them has evolved over time. The arc of my work, both with and without birds, has been about embodiment and the way we think about ourselves with respect to that container which is the body. Close attention to the body began for me with photographs of piled-up desiccated bodies shot in liberated concentration camps at the end of the Second World War. Those images populated my imagination as a small child. My work is also held together by my own subjectivity. That may be totally obvious, but my focus on the self and what a self is and the inclusion of my own body in much of the work is inherent to how it has grown over time to include the subject of aging, the decay of the body, and my thinking about hybridity and biological enhancements to the body. — Susan Silas
Biography
Susan Silas has had recent solo exhibitions at Koli Art in Istanbul, Turkey, at Studio 10 in Bushwick, New York, and at CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles. Her work was included in exhibitions at Stadgalerie Saarbrücken in Germany, at Haus N Athen in Greece, and at bitforms gallery in New York. Silas was invited by the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence to speak at their recent conference, "Digital (Im)mortality: Philosophy, Ethics and Design" at University of Cambridge and by Horasis USA to participate in their "Shaping America's Role in a Post-Pandemic World" conference on a panel titled "Reimagining the Contemporary." Her work has been featured in AntiUtopias, Camera Austria, Fotómúvészet, Artnet Magazine, and Hyperallergic. She is the author of numerous reviews and occasional essays.
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