Since its inception, the Walker has hosted talks by artists, writers, and other great thinkers whose insights and ideas have informed our world. Throughout the month of April, the Mack Lecture Series showcases four presentations by explorers of our culture, environment, and political landscape delivered in unique formats—from poetry recitation to the dissection of current events.
Typically offered as one-off lectures, this is the first year the lectures are programmed as a series throughout April.
LECTURE SCHEDULE
Rukmini Callimachi: ISIS, Journalism, and the Internet
Wednesday, April 3
Walker Cinema, 7pm
$25 ($20 Walker members, $12 students)
New York Times foreign correspondent and three-time Pulitzer Prize–finalist Rukmini Callimachi is widely acknowledged as one of the preeminent reporters on Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. In this lecture and Q&A, Callimachi draws on her in-depth knowledge of the militant group to examine the pervasive effects of the internet both as a journalistic tool and political weapon.
Callimachi has become the go-to reporter on the Islamic State. Callimachi began covering terrorism in 2013 when locals in the city of Timbuktu, Mali, led her to the headquarters of al-Qaeda’s North African branch. There she found thousands of pages of internal al-Qaeda documents, providing a window into the terror group’s operations. Scouring the nearly 15,000 pages, Callimachi published “The ISIS Files,” which examined how the Islamic State have stayed in power through brutality and bureaucracy. In Caliphate, the Time’s first serialized podcast, Callimachi tracks the rise of ISIS from their encrypted, online chatrooms to their spread across four continents. With over 25 million downloads and consistently ranked as one of the best podcasts of 2018, Esquire hailed Caliphate as “gripping, disturbing and ferociously addictive.”
Claudia Rankine: Notes on The White Card
Wednesday, April 10
Walker Cinema, 7pm
$25 ($20 Walker members, $12 students)
Author of innovative and thoughtful texts on race, selfhood, and contemporary American life, Claudia Rankine is a powerful and influential cultural force. Join Rankine as she reads and reflects on her recently published play, The White Card, which unpacks the insidious ways racism manifests itself in everyday situations and questions how our society can progress if whiteness stays invisible.
Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, two plays, and numerous video collaborations. She is also the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, she cofounded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII), which is “committed to the activation of interdisciplinary work and a democratized exploration of race in our lives.” Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.
Don’t miss Rankine’s new performance with Will Rawls, What Remains, March 7–9, in the McGuire Theater.
Mark Kingwell: Boredom and the Interface
Wednesday, April 17
Walker Cinema, 7pm
$15 ($12 Walker members, $8 students)
Are you bored of the endless scroll of your social media feed? Do you skim articles on your screen in search of intellectual stimulation that never arrives? Philosopher and critic Mark Kingwell examines the pressing issues of screen addiction and the lure of online outrage—raising the possibility that current conditions of life and connection are creating hollowed-out human selves, divorced from their own external world.
Kingwell is renowned for engaging subjects as varied as liberal-democratic theory, moral philosophy, communication studies, aesthetics, and cultural studies in accessible ways that resonate and enlighten. He is currently professor of philosophy and fellow of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. He has previous held visiting posts at Cambridge University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Chicago, and City University of New York. Between 2001 and 2004 he was chair of the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum. To date he is the author or coauthor of dozens of articles and eighteen books of political, cultural, and aesthetic theory including A Civil Tongue (1995), the national bestsellers Better Living (1998), The World We Want (2000), Concrete Reveries (2008), and Glenn Gould (2009). In 2018, Kingwell was named a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in both Canada and the United Kingdom.
Ed Atkins: I (can scarcely move or draw my breath)
Wednesday, April 24
Walker Cinema, 7pm
$15 ($12 Walker members, $8 students)
British artist Ed Atkins will “attempt an adequate recitation of American novelist Gilbert Sorrentino’s poem ‘The Morning Roundup’ (1971), with songs and histrionics throughout,” as he describes. The artist is known for computer animated videos that sit unsteadily between sentimentality and grim realism. Atkins’s Happy Birthday!! (2014), a video about mortality, dementia, love, and the digitization of our lives, is on view in the Walker exhibition The Body Electric, opening March 30.
Atkins lives and works in Berlin and Copenhagen. His solo presentations include Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; MMK, Frankfurt; DHC/ART, Montreal (all 2017); Castello di Rivoli and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; The Kitchen, New York (all 2016); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015); Serpentine Gallery, London (2014); and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2012). His written works include the anthology of his own texts called A Primer for Cadavers (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016) as well as an extensive artist’s monograph (Skira, 2017) In early 2019, Atkins will present exhibitions at K21, Düsseldorf, and Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria. A novel, Old Food, will be published in November 2019. Atkins is currently a guest professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen.
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