Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) is pleased to present the public lecture "Tending to Attending", a performative talk by Stefanie Hessler and Isabel Lewis.

We’ll talk about attention and art.

There will also be sound. Music. Smells. Definitely movement.

Much of our attention is directed to the visual.

It is no accident that in a culture where the visual sense is given dominance, quantitative modes of understanding the world take precedence over qualitative sensings.

Is how we understand what is or can be attention tethered in some way to gender?

Might there be alternative formats of artistic practice that organize modes of attention differently than the centralized observation of the autonomous art object or gesture?

Who can afford to pay attention? Or give it?

When was the last time you paid attention to art and how?

Stefanie Hessler is a curator and writer. Her work focuses on interdisciplinary processes, close and long-term collaborations with artists and researchers from different fields, and systems at large, be they ecological, economic, or societal. She recently curated Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II at Ocean Space, Venice (2019); the 6th Athens Biennale ANTI (2018); the symposium Practices of Attention (with D. Graham Burnett) at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (2018); Armin Linke: Prospecting Ocean at the Institute of Marine Science in Venice (2018); Sugar and Speed at the Museum of Modern Art in Recife (2017); the 8th Momentum Biennial in Moss (2015). Hessler has edited books such as Life Itself, including 173 texts from different disciplines on the question of what life essentially is (Moderna Museet and König Books, 2016), and Tidalectics. Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science (MIT Press, 2018). She is currently writing a cultural theory book on extractions in the deep-sea (forthcoming 2019, MIT Press).

Left: photo by Brittany Nelson

Isabel Lewis (b.Santo Domingo, 1981) is a Dominican-American artist based in Berlin since 2009. She lived in NYC where she worked as a dancer and choreographer showing work at The Kitchen, New Museum, PS122, Danspace at St. Marks Church, and Movement Research at Judson Church before moving to Berlin in 2009. Trained in literary criticism, dance, and philosophy Lewis created the format she calls hosted occasions that are immersive experiences including assemblages of dances, sounds, smells, and decor in heteroptopic spaces of social encounter. Lewis’s work has been presented internationally by theaters, music festivals, and contemporary art institutions including Tanz Im August at the Hebbel Theather (HAU 1) in Berlin, Kunsthalle Basel, Steirischer Herbst in Vienna, Tate Modern in London, Dia Foundation in New York, and Ming Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai among others.

Right: photo by Joanna Seitz