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Profane Illuminations: Margaret Iversen

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Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

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Walter Benjamin credited the Surrealist movement with 'a true, creative overcoming of religious illumination' by replacing it with a kind of 'profane illumination'.

This talk by Margaret Iversen attends to two key moments in the art of producing technically mediated, profane illuminations. They are, first, the innovations of the Surrealist movement itself and, second, Leo Steinberg's 'Other Criteria' with its conception of the picture plane as a receptive surface or, as he put it, 'a consciousness immersed in the brain of the city'.

Hosted by the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre at Birkbeck.

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