Nanna Debois Buhl and Jen Kennedy will discuss the figure of the flâneuse and the act of walking as a way to experiment with identity and to carve spaces for reflection and action – at once a physical act, a mode of production, and a metaphor.

Nanna Debois Buhl’s Street Haunting features three newly commissioned works that utilize the act of walking in unexpected ways.  For each work, Buhl has created a system where a walk becomes the impetus for images and stories, revealing new paths through urban and literary landscapes. In the accompanying publication, Jen Kennedy looks at both the material and imaginary walks that Buhl takes the viewer on in Street Haunting. Beginning as a conversation with the artist on the complex histories of flâneurie and dérive, as well as often on overlooked theorists of walking, Michéle Bernstein and Henriette Valet, Kennedy’s text also maps the literary and visual intertexts evoked in the works in the exhibition.

Nanna Debois Buhl received her MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006 and participated in The Whitney Independent Study Program, New York in 2008-09. Recent shows include: El Museo del Barrio, New York; Art in General, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Bureau, New York; Lunds Konsthall, Lund and Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense. Her work is in the collections of the Museum for Contemporary Art and The National Museum of Photography in Denmark. In 2010, Revolver Publishing published her artist’s book A Journey in Two Directions and the collaborative book City Grammar (with Liz Linden). Her work has recently been discussed in Art in America, Flash Art, Artforum, and The New York Times.

Jen Kennedy is a Social Studies and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow at Binghamton University. Her work looks at the radical redefinition of young womanhood in France during the years coinciding with the end of WWII and the collapse of France’s colonial empire, focusing on how this new fantasy of femininity was détourned, appropriated, and otherwise explored by Guy Debord, Michèle Bernstein, and Gil Wolman, among other postwar artists, writers, and filmmakers. Her writing can be found in Image & Narrative, Alphabet Prime, C Magazine, Fuse, and Grey Room. She was a critical studies fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2008-2009 and is part of an ongoing collaboration with Liz Linden that looks at the semantics of contemporary feminism.