Mieke Bal: Moments of Meaning-making. On Anachronism, Becoming, and Conceptualizing Actieprijs

Mieke Bal (1946) is a Dutch theorist, video artist, and a well-known writer and feminist. She has been a Professor in Literary Theory (University of Amsterdam). In 1994 she was a co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Bal has been teaching at many institutes and universities in Europe, US, and beyond. She is known for her specific ways of ‘deep-reading’ artworks (e.g. Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Louise Bourgeois, Nalini Malani), and intertwining her research with various disciplines, such as contemporary and nineteenth-century literature, psycho-analysis, gender studies, philosophy, bible studies. Bal also works as a video artist, which she approaches as a specific form of cultural analysis.
Now that Mieke Bal is getting older —being very active and involved in many art and research projects— she has been ruminating on how to reflect on a full life with different roles and experiences. She did not want to write a navel-staring autobiography and came up with an ABC of Memories, and the concepts these have generated: key terms that have a specific value to her, that interlink as a mesh of meaning, weaving together daily experiences and teaching, her know-how to art making, to the core concepts of her analytical work.