“Another problem for me now is the welling up of the “Wet,” the insistent preoccupation with narrating certain aspects of the discredited past, things I may never be ready to tell.
Previously I have incited myself to write by beginning with the most pressing thing, but the problem now is that I can’t face writing about the Wet.
I think about giving it a masquerade, or perhaps the Wet will duly give way to something else”
In INDEX CARDS, the latest collection of essays from Moyra Davey, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker begins with a daily encounter – with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book – and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists – Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman and Roland Barthes – layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.
Join Moyra Davey in conversation with writer and translator Alison L. Strayer on July 2 at 9pm CEST (8pm BST, 3pm ECT) for a conversation on INDEX CARDS, translation, writing a ‘pathography’ of the self, auto-fiction and filmic writing. Davey’s ‘Les Goddesses’ trilogy will be made available to watch for those signed up to the event. Sign up here.
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Three films by Moyra Davey – the ‘Les Goddesses’ trilogy – will be made available to those signed up to the event. You will receive an email when you sign up which contains the links to:
‘Les Goddesses’, 2011 (61’) ‘Hemlock Forest’, 2016 (42’), ‘Wedding Loop’, 2017 (23’)
Filmed almost entirely in the artist’s New York apartment, in ‘Les Goddesses’ Davey draws parallels between her familial experience and the family of 18th-century writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
‘Hemlock Forest’ begins as Davey searches for a definitive filmic subject while reflecting on the value of a life lived versus a life recorded. At the same time, she examines her own artistic strategies alongside the work of the influential Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. During the making of Hemlock Forest, Akerman took her own life. The filmmaker’s unexpected death soon engulfed Davey’s awareness, prompting a broader exploration of Akerman’s and her own biographies, amidst more universal themes of compulsion, artistic production, life and its passing.
‘Wedding Loop’ recounts a wedding party and the women involved, reflected through the work of 19th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron
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Moyra Davey is an artist based in New York, and whose work comprises the fields of photography, film, and writing. She has produced several works of film, most recently i confess (2019), which will premiere in North America at the Museum of Modern Art. She is the author of numerous publications including Index Cards and The Problem of Reading, and is the editor of Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood. Davey has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including Portikus, Frankfurt/Main (2017); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2016); Camden Arts Centre, London (2014); Kunsthalle Basel (2010); and Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2008). Her work is found in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Tate Modern in London. She is a 2020 recipient of the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and in 2004 was granted the Anonymous was a Woman Award.
Alison L. Strayer is a Canadian writer and translator. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literature and for Translation, the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal, and longlisted for the Prix Albertine. Her translation of The Years was awarded the 2018 French-American Prize, shortlisted for the Man Booker International in 2019, and awarded the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, honouring both author and translator.