HOUSTON HAUNTOLOGY

CURATED BY VALENTIN DIACONOV

JANUARY 26 | JANUARY 27 | FEBRUARY 3
2024

The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology is proud to present Houston Hauntology, a series of revealing conversations about Houston's hidden visual culture featuring noted local artists, architects, art historians and critics, curated by Valentin Diaconov.

ABOUT THE CURATOR
VALENTIN DIACONOV

ART CRITIC / CURATOR
phd in culture studies

Valentin Diaconov (b. 1980, Moscow) is an internationally recognized critic and curator. He is the critic in residence at the Core Program in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

He writes on art for Glasstire, Burnaway, e flux Criticism, and other publications.

As a curator, he worked at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, and independently.

Among his projects are Sekretiki, a show about hidden knowledge and religious practices in Soviet underground art; The Fabric of Felicity, an exhibition of artists working with the notion of a uniform; Laughter in the Gallery, a show about Soviet anti-Modernist cartoons; and others.

CURATOR STATEMENT

Houston Hauntology is a series of conversations and talks on the hidden, the ephemeral, and the esoteric in H-town's visual culture.

Over the course of three evenings at the TransArt Foundation, the event will feature artists talking about esoteric aspects of their work, historians and architects remembering lost buildings, artistic practitioners in palliative care, forensics, and other topics.

Houston is famously averse to historicizing due to an increasingly dynamic and sprawling nature of its development. Layers are lost or abandoned, connections are thinning out, and this makes the city a welcoming place for all kinds of specters, that is, unburied traces of the past.

Houston Hauntology aims to describe and summon some of these specters. The event recognizes the elusive status of historical knowledge in the city and seeks to address both the facts and the distant "vibrations" surrounding them.

JANUARY 26

6 pm. Stephen Fox (Rice University) on the legacy of Eugene Aubry
7 pm. Cameron Amstrong on repressed architectures, in conversation with Stephen Fox
8 pm. Terrell James and Terry Suprean on summoning Virgil Grotfeldt

JANUARY 27

6 pm. Lynn Randolph in conversation with Ilana Gershon (Rice University)
7 pm. Pete Gershon (The Orange Show) on Bert Long Jr.
8 pm. Angel Lartigue in conversation with Aisen Caro Chacin

February 3

6 pm. Mary Ellen Carroll and Rebecca Matalon (CAMH) in conversation
7 pm. Jillian Conrad and Salle Vaughn in conversation
8 pm. Susan Plum and Arielle Masson in conversation
9 pm. Valentina Jager on conversing with the dead