8th Annual Berkeley/Stanford Symposium: “The fog comes ... and then moves on”: On Transience and Translucence

The Berkeley/Stanford Symposium is an annual gathering of emerging voices in the arts organized by graduate students at Stanford and UC Berkeley.

For the eighth annual Berkeley/Stanford Symposium, graduate students working across disciplines and time periods will take fog, San Francisco’s friendly ghost, as a common point of departure. Between water and air, earth and sky, fog presents an opportunity, or demand, for pause. Things transform when cloaked in mist, sometimes forcing a reversal of common sense; in foggy conditions, high-beam light creates even more haze.

In such states of low visibility, what other senses displace sight in experiencing the world? What forms could art history take if, rather than stretching towards clarity, the field savored obscurity and hiddenness as spaces for discovery? What are works of art that embody the ephemeral ethos of fog in their making, material, or possibility? And what are works of art that push against fog, clearing historical forces of obscurity to allow what has been hidden to come into vision — into being?

The symposium will interpret fog widely, whether as guiding visual motif, conceptual or methodological underpinning, meteorological intervention, or poetic engagement.

Free with RSVP: https://www.sfmoma.org/event/eighth-annual-berkeley-stanford-symposium/

Accessible seating is available at this event. Accessibility accommodations such as American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and assisted listening devices are available upon request 10 business days in advance. Please email publicengagement [at] sfmoma.org (publicengagement[at]sfmoma[dot]org).

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