Danube Exodus Opens

Marsha Kinder News

Critical Studies professor Marsha Kinder reports that “The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River,” an installation produced by USC’s Labyrinth Project in collaboration with Hungarian media artist Peter Forgacs, opened at the Jewish Museum in Berlin on April 19. 

Originally premiering at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2002, this multimedia installation has been on tour ever since—in Barcelona, Budapest, Berkeley, Karlsruhe, Helsinki and Ulm. Partly in recognition of this work, Forgacs received the Erasmus Prize this year, which is one of the most prestigious awards that a European artist can receive. 

On April 7, Kinder gave the keynote address at a conference titled, “The Future of the Archive, The Archive of the Future,” at the University of Rochester.  In conjunction with this lecture, three interactive projects by Labyrinth were on exhibit--”Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill,” “Bleeding Through Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986,” and the on-line constructivist courseware project, “Russian Modernism and Its International Dimensions.” 

She also gave a presentation on Labyrinth’s on-line constructivist courseware project, “Russian Modernism and Its International Dimensions” at the Digital Library Federation Conference in Pasadena on April 23. The panel was organized by Todd Grappone, Director of the AIMS group (Archiving, Imaging, Metadata Services) in USC’s Doheny Library. 

Kinder has organized and will moderate a panel for the annual Screen Studies Conference at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, for July 6-8. Titled “Sexual Representations as Social Change,” the panel will feature three papers on transgender representations as a means of cultural change in China—from Taipei to Beijing, and from independent video to mainstream movies and reality TV.  All three panelists are doctoral students from China or Taiwan who are completing their degrees either in China or the USA: Chunchi Wang from Taiwan successfully defended her dissertation in USC’s Critical Studies Division on May 3; Jia Tan from Beijing is completing her Ph.D. in critical studies at USC under the guidance of Critical Studies professor David James; and Zhipeng Xu is a doctoral student from the Communication University of China in Beijing.

Kinder is chairing the dissertation committees both for Chunchi Wang and Zhipeng Xu.  On May 31, Marsha will go to Washington, D.C., to serve on a panel for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Associated Person:	Marsha Kinder
Associated Projects:	Labyrinth