The seminar introduces the concept of display as a form of knowledge production and entertainment. By exploring sites of exhibit such as films, museums, the lecture halls of science, the theatrical stage, landscape painting, and sporting events like the Paralympics we will interrogate the political, cultural, historical, and social implications of how we see what we see and the narratives we construct that enable and are enabled by such viewing. The course applies performance as a medium to interrogate constructions of the gaze, questions of representation and (in)authenticity, and how the spectator and the spectacle are constituted, for example, through intersecting narratives of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and speciation.

 
 
Sarah Lewis-Cappellari (PhD, UCLA) is a researcher, dramaturg, and teacher whose work engages the interface of performance, contemporary art, colonial visual economies and Black and Caribbean Studies. Previously based in Berlin, she worked with the art & science collective Mobile Academy as one of its primary curators and researchers. Lewis-Cappellari has also researched and worked with collaborative art practices as a member of the performance collective LEWIS FOREVER (which presented work at Performance Space 122 and the New Museum in NYC, among other venues), and independently with SOIT in Brussels, Agora and Sophiensaele in Berlin and Tanzhaus NRW in Düsseldorf. She currently teaches critical theory to master film students in co-creation and innovation for social change at the IFS in Cologne.