MOMENTS OF DOUBT – MOMENTS OF MEANING-MAKING

Accelerator welcomes you to an event in two acts with the theorist, writer and video artist Mieke Bal. The event is part of Accelerator’s Art + Research programme and is presented in collaboration with Curating Art and the Department of English at Stockholm University.

Act 1: Screening of Reasonable Doubt, a film by Mieke Bal

16:00–18:30
Language: English
Location: Accelerator’s seminar room, accessed via Accelerator Café

The screening is followed by a conversation with Mieke Bal, Cecilia Sjöholm, and Kyoo Lee. The film screening is open to all, but seating is limited.

Reasonable Doubt (2016) is an experiment to audio-visualise thought. Mixing docu-drama with theoretical fiction, the project stages scenes from the lives of philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) and the Swedish Queen Kristina (1626-1689). After an intellectual relationship by correspondence, they met in Stockholm, where Descartes died a few months after arriving, due to the cold. The film is not a biography but a series of scenes that constitute a double portrait. Some scenes are historical, some are fictionalized to do justice to historical ideas relevant for today. In this project, Mieke Bal looks back from Descartes’s last book, The Passions of the Soul, and explores the ongoing struggle against dualism in different episodes of his life.

Act 2: Book launch Moments of Meaning-Making: On Anachronism, Becoming, and Conceptualizing, by Mieke Bal

18:30–20:00
Language: English
Location: Accelerator Café

Conversation between the author and Adnan Mahmutovic.

“I have resisted the enduring pressure to write an autobiography for decades, until an event that made me slightly turn a corner. I developed writings that take their starting point in a memory from my childhood or adolescence, which then, much later, inspired intellectual thoughts in my professional life. But although it is my most personal book, it is not about me. It is about the emergence of meaning; its flexibility, its constant innovation, transformation, mobility, and socio-cultural relevance. Meaning, not as in dictionaries, but as events that happen, in time, and in company. My entire professional life came out of such moments. Meaning is made, occurs, at specific moments, in particular situations, and so, ‘events of meaning-making’ is a more relevant phrase than ‘this means this.” – Mieke Bal

Participants

Mieke Bal is a Dutch theorist, video artist, and a well-known writer and feminist. She has been a Professor in Literary Theory (University of Amsterdam). In 1994, she was a co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is known for her specific ways of ‘deep-reading’ artworks (e.g. Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Louise Bourgeois, Nalini Malani), and intertwining her research with various disciplines, such as contemporary and nineteenth-century literature, psycho-analysis, gender studies, philosophy, bible studies. Bal also works as a video artist, which she approaches as a specific form of cultural analysis.

Cecilia Sjöholm is Professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University, and author of Through the Eyes of Descartes: Seeing, Thinking, Writing (2024), together with Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback.

Kyoo Lee aka Q, Professor of Philosophy at CUNY. Author of Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy, and Bad (2012).

Adnan Mahmutovic, Professor in English Literature at the Department of English, Stockholm University