This lecture considers Isa Genzken's fearless engagement with issues of perception and consciousness. It argues that Genzken creates a site of possibility at the intersection of form and feeling, an unfixed border she has investigated for much of her fifty-year career.
In studying a largely unknown, early performance of Genzken's alongside three key series of works, Isabel Parkes emphasizes precariousness as a defining feature of the artist’s oeuvre. Throughout, she asks how Genzken's continual process of reorientation might help us better understand the potential of our own lived experience.
Isabel Parkes is a curator based in London. Recently she has worked with Performance Space New York, Creative Time and Lincoln Center to realize a variety of projects with artists including Sophie Calle, Phil Collins and Leilah Weinraub. She is currently curating an exhibition series called Public, Relations and working on her second book, a compilation of interviews with artists from Berlin’s Sammlung Hoffmann including Roni Horn, Pipilotti Rist, Wolfgang Tillmans, among others, to be published by Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.