A Roundtable Discussion with Henry Tietzsch-Tyler, Leverhulme Artist in Residence,

German Department, University of Leeds

30 April 2009, 4pm

 Preceded by Papers by Professor Jonathan Long and Dr Mary Cosgrove

A roundtable discussion will be held on April 30th 2009 with Henry Tietzsch-Tyler, Leverhulme Artist in Residence, German Department, University of Leeds, Professor Stuart Taberner, Professor Jonathan Long, and Dr Mary Cosgrove.

The event starts at 4pm at The Leeds Humanities Research Institute (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/lhri/)

At 3pm, there will be short papers on contemporary Trauma Theory by:

Professor Jonathan Long (Durham)

Dr Mary Cosgrove (Edinburgh)

Both the papers and the roundable discussion are open to the public. Please register your interest with Stuart Taberner (gllsjt@leeds.ac.uk)

Henry Tietzsch-Tyler is an artist who works across the borders of painting, performance and installation. His dual British-German identity provides the context for his engagement with questions concerning  the inheritance of memory and the relationship of memory to forgetting. Rooted in his experience of growing up in an Anglo-German family in England and Wales during the 1950s and 1960s, his work is, at least in part, oriented on accounts of his German family’s history as it was passed down to him by his mother over a lifetime of storytelling that for her, as he understands it, served as a lifeline to a lost past but was also, through its selectivity,  a means of avoiding a confrontation with problematic issues surrounding  the attitudes, conduct and responsibilities of German citizens during the Nazi era. David Alston writes that ‘the work has been made against the backdrop of the mainstream simulacra of the contemporary, the modish shifting of trends which characterises our era. It has been made with a conviction about remaining as true to itself as is feasible and as the only modus operandi left or indeed sustainable. The trans-generational issues rooted in this work actually gain more definition with the recessional patterns of histories accompanied by their obfuscation, sifting, along with the actions and delusions of so-called collective memory and at one and the same time, the caricatural simplification and the growing complication of the understanding of action in history. A surfacing in various forms, writing, art, musical composition, gives rise to what might be termed post trauma types of expression and Henry Tietzsch-Tyler’s work can well be seen in such an arena but without subterfuge or distracting artificiality.’*

*David Alston was formerly Deputy Director of Arts in Sheffield, Keeper of Art at the National Museum of Wales, and Galleries Director of The Lowry and is currently Arts Director at the Arts Council of Wales.

During his residency at Leeds Henry Tietzsch-Tyler plans to create a new body of work bringing together paintings, photographic works, drawings, notebooks, collected objects and archival materials.

all images are copyright