You are warmly invited to a lunch workshop on November 6 with the artist Aliza Shvarts, who will be giving a guest lecture, “Dark Play,” on her recent work later that evening. The workshop is an opportunity to engage in an extended conversation with our guest speaker and with each other. We will take as point of departure Shvarts’ controversial work Untitled (Senior Thesis), censored by Yale University in 2008 and recently included by Artnews in the “100 best artworks of the 21st century.” Graduate students are especially welcome to attend this event! Soft-start at 11:30 to chat and start lunching; conversation to begin by noon, feel free to arrive around then and feel free to leave for afternoon classes at 1:15 (we’ll wrap up formally by 1:30).

To propel discussion over lunch, and also in preparation for the evening lecture, everyone is invited to read the following three essays:

Jennifer Doyle, “Blind Spots and Failed Performance: Abortion, Feminism, and Queer Theory,” Qui Parle (2009)
Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,” October (2009)
Aliza Shvarts, “Figuration and failure, pedagogy and performance: reflections three years later,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory (2011)