Out of Rubble: Towards Empathic Unsettlement

Abstract: OUT OF RUBBLE is a book and curatorial project that reacts to the wake of war - war's realities and its representations. The rubble that each war leaves behind shapes today and tomorrow - physically, psychologically and spiritually. OUT OF RUBBLE presents works by international artists and architects who consider war's causes and consequences, its finality and future, moving from decimation and disintegration to the possibilities of regeneration and recovery. Facing the failure and wreckage of war, the poet Wislawa Szymborska wrote: "Reality demands that we mention this: Life goes on." Artists meet this demand through responses that are both tender and unflinching, though invariably somber. They expose and mourn the havoc we wreak through images and narratives bound up in the crises of truth and measures of empathic unsettlement. They acknowledge yet strive toward the impossible task of comprehending the incomprehensible. Bio: Professor Susanne Slavick is an artist, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, and editor and curator of Out of Rubble (Charta, 2011), a traveling exhibit featuring international artists who respond to the aftermath of war. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Slavick has exhibited internationally, with recent solo shows at the Chicago Cultural Center, McDonough Museum in Youngstown, Accola Griefen Gallery in NYC and Bernstein Gallery at Princeton University. She studied at Yale University, Jagiellonian University in Poland, and Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Rome and Philadelphia. Her articles and visual essays have appeared in: Cairo: Images of Transition (transcript Verlag 2013); Cultural Heritage and Arts Review; Cultural Politics; Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies; Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics; and AlterNet.