About this Event
Deutsches Haus at NYU presents “Speaking in Pairs: Horror and Humor,” a conversation between independent curator and art historian Lynn Gumpert and Susanne Rohr (Professor Emerita or North American Literature and Culture at the University of Hamburg), which will be moderated by Reiner Leist (Professor and Photography Area Head at Hunter College, The City University of New York). This conversation is presented in the context of the exhibition Speaking in Pairs, which will be on view at Hunter College’s Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery until April 19, 2026, and was curated by Reiner Leist with MA and MFA students enrolled in Hunter College’s Advanced Curatorial Certificate Seminar. The exchange among Lynn Gumpert, Reiner Leist, and Susanne Rohr which will discuss the pairing of “Horror and Humor,” with a special a focus on Christian Boltanski’s work, will be preceded by short presentations by Adrienne Keller (Hunter College) and Vivek Sebastian (Hunter College), based on their work for the Speaking in Pairs exhibition, which they co-curated.
About the Speaking in Pairs exhibition:
Can a portrait represent violence and healing at the same time? A photograph made by artist August Sander of Hermann Leubsdorf in 1938, in Cologne, Germany, suggests that it can. Speaking in Pairs, presented in a gallery endowed by the Leubsdorf family, looks at the aesthetic, material, social, and political layers that portraits offer—revealing how the people they portray, their makers and viewers, and the changing world they exist in connect and conflict in shifting cycles over time.
More than eighty contributors—artists, historians, lawyers, doctors, writers, curators, and more—come together for this exhibition, which presents works in a continually evolving installation and uses books, posters, and ephemera to visually illuminate the connections between vernacular photography and art, nobody and somebody, the personal and public. An array of viewpoints blurs the lines between artists, curators, and other subjects, and between non-fiction and fiction.
About the speakers:
Working independently from Paris, served as Director of New York University’s Grey Art Museum from 1997 to 2025. Among the more than seventy exhibitions she oversaw there include Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde (2024–25) which concluded its tour at the Musée de l’Orangerie; Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 (2023); Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby W**d Grey Collection (2019); The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2018); Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 (2017); Global/Local 1960–2015: Six Artists from Iran (2016); The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles / Recent Art (2008); The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984 (2006); and Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography, A Project by Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari (2005). She previously worked as a writer, consultant, and freelance curator, organizing shows in New York, Japan, and France. From 1980 to 1988 she was curator and senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. She also authored the first major monograph on French artist Christian Boltanski (Flammarion, 1992) and has contributed essays to numerous publications. In June 1999, Lynn Gumpert was honored by the French government with the distinction of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.
(moderator) is the author of South Africa: Blue Portraits, American Portraits, Window: Eleven Septembers, South Africa: Another Country. Leist taught in the Visual Arts Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently a professor and Photography Area Head at Hunter College, The City University of New York.
Susanne Rohr is a retired professor of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Hamburg. Her research at Stanford University, Harvard University and New York University was supported by grants of the DAAD and Fulbright, among other institutions. She taught at the John F. Kennedy Institute, at Smith College, Stanford University, Fudan University, Shanghai and at the University of Wyoming. Susanne Rohr has published widely in the fields of literary and cultural theory, semiotics, American pragmatism, epistemology, and on a broad range of topics in American literature. Susanne Rohr was awarded an “opus magnum” stipend by the Volkswagen Foundation to finish her book on representations of the Holocaust in a comparative perspective in the U.S. and Germany, Von Grauen und Glamour: Repräsentationen des Holocaust in den USA und Deutschland [Of Horror and Glamor: Representations of the Holocaust in the U.S. and Germany], which was published in 2021 at Winter Verlag.
Adrienne Keller earned a BA from Arizona State University and is an MA candidate in Art History at Hunter College, City University of New York. Specializing in twentieth‑century modern art, she combines textual research, interviews, and experiential fieldwork to reexamine modernism in the German Democratic Republic, bringing greater visibility to the artists who shaped it.
Vivek Sebastian earned his BFA from the University of Texas at Austin and is an MFA candidate at Hunter. He works as a painter and has exhibited in New York, Texas, and India. His work predominantly focuses on the agency of subjects in historic photography and the social and political contexts that images exist in and what that means for contemporary visual culture.
Attendance:
While NYU has ended COVID-19 related restrictions and policies, we continue to remind and recommend to members of the NYU community that they stay up-to-date on their boosters and stay home if they feel sick. Masks are always welcome.
Accessibility:
The first floor of Deutsches Haus at NYU, where our auditorium is located and where a majority of our events take place, can be made wheelchair accessible through the use of our ramp. If you would like for a Deutsches Haus staff member to set up this ramp for you, please call our Front Desk at +1 212-998-8660 upon your arrival. For any other accessibility-related questions or concerns, please email us at [email protected] or call us at +1 212-998-8660.
“Speaking in Pairs: Horror and Humor” is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).
Image Captions:
Christian Boltanski, Grand Central Station, New York, 1993, © Reiner Leist, VG-Bildkunst Bonn
Boris Lurie, 1945, Courtesy Boris Lurie Art Foundation, © Boris Lurie Art Foundation
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Deutsches Haus At New York University, 42 Washington Mews, New York, United States
USD 0.00
