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the Avantgarde:
Lecture Brian Dillon
31 october 2009
Lecture by Brian Dillon followed by a talk with Dieter Roelstraete
On Saturday October 31st, writer and essayist Brian Dillon gave a lecture at Marres following his recently published book Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives. After his presentation he talked about the book with writer and curator Dieter Roelstraete.
Tormented Hope is a book about mind and body, fear and hope, illness and imagination. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. and in an intimate investigation of those nine lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body, by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings.
Healthy or unhealthy, robust or failing, ignored or obsessed over, our bodies respond daily to our shifting state of mind, whether we are aware of the process or not. This book is about an especially dramatic instance of that relationship: the mind's invention of physical disease. Through his witty, entertaining and often moving examinations of the lives of its nine subjects - Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Marcel Proust, Andy Warhol and others - Brian Dillon brilliantly unravels the tortuous connections between real and imagined illness, irrational fear and rational concern, anxiety and imagination, the mind's aches and the body's ideas.
The presentation takes place parallel to the exhibition Depression.
Brian Dillon is a research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the School of English, University of Kent, and UK editor of Cabinet, a quarterly magazine of art and culture based in New York. He writes regularly for Frieze, Art Review, the London Review of Books and the Guardian. He is the author of Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009) and a memoir, In the Dark Room(Penguin, 2005). He is working on a novella, Sanctuary, to be published by Sternberg Press in 2010.
Dieter Roelstraete is curator at the MuHKA, Antwerp. He is co-editor for Afterall magazine and writes for A-prior, Dot Dot Dot and several art publications.
The lecture is free of charge.
