S. Hustvedt photo: Mario Ettinger (Seix Barral)
In this exchange, two New York-based creatives, painter and author, reflected on the concept of the collective self -- the many ways in which human identities are created, disassembled, and reconfigured in the context of social, political, historical, cultural, and familial systems.
Featuring visual artist Cornelia Thomsen and renowned novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt. Moderated by Eric Banks, Director, New York Institute for the Humanities.
They discussed how the complex process by which countless influences bear upon the formation and evolution of the self has impacted their personal histories and memories. How, for instance, did their selves evolve at the interstices of different languages, cultures, and political systems? What influence has this multiplicity of belonging had on their later lives? How do memories, and present circumstances, continually reshape one’s sense of being and self -- and, in that context, how has the experience of motherhood reshaped their identities? How are their multifaceted and multitudinous identities reflected, discussed, and negotiated in their literature and art?
This talk was organized in collaboration with Deutsches Haus at NYU and the German Consulate General New York.
Photo: Mario Ettinger (Seix Barral)
Siri Hustvedt, a novelist and scholar, has a PhD in English literature and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is the author of a book of poems, seven novels, four collections of essays, and two works of nonfiction. She has published papers in various academic and scientific journals and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, the European Charles Veillon Essay Prize, an American Academy of the Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction for The Blazing World, which was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Cornelia Thomsen was born 1970 in Rudolstadt in former East Germany. Recognized for her artistic skills from an early age, she was selected to be a student at the prestigious school of the Meissen Porcelain Factory. When the wall between East and West was razed in 1989, Thomsen weathered the time of ideological and economic collapse through personal reinvention. She enjoyed the freedom of travel for the first time, and her world was liberated by the discovery of abstract art, which was completely suppressed in East Germany as a capitalist construct. Thomsen enrolled and received BA and MFA degrees in the University of Art and Design in Offenbach, Germany, where her thesis marked the beginning of her investigation of abstract Stripes and led to her Role Models series, a realistic and robust examination of the East German political leaders. In 2006 she moved with her husband and three children from the Frankfurt area to New York.
An artist by profession, she works with the media oil, watercolor, and ink and is primarily known for her abstract Stripes series. She recognizes that being born into and living within the confines of East German socialism for her first twenty years has had a huge influence on everything she does. “How I think, what I want, what I need - you can relate it to everything I do,” she says.
Thomsen has had solo and group exhibitions in Tokyo, New York, and Duesseldorf, Germany, and is an active public speaker focusing on the recent history of Germany and the role of women in society. Her work is in numerous public collections, including that of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and Friedrich Fröbel Museum, Bad Blankenburg, Germany. The artist currently lives and works in Manhattan with her family.
Eric Banks, Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, is a writer and editor based in New York. A former senior editor of Artforum, Banks was editor in chief of Bookforum from 2003–2008. From 2011 to 2013, he served as president of the National Book Critics Circle. Banks’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, Aperture, Town and Country, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He has contributed essays to monographs on a number of artists, including Franz West, Christopher Wool, and Grant Wood, and is the consulting editor of the Robert Rauschenberg Catalogue Raisonné.