An event which the organisers describe as ‘an afternoon of lectures and performances exploring Samuel Beckett’s lifelong engagement with the visual arts’ will take place on Saturday 29 August at the Bel Ami Gallery in Los Angeles. Drawing on David Lloyd’s account of painting as Beckett’s ‘thing,’ this symposium asks how language and aesthetics relate throughout Beckett’s oeuvre. The event coincides with Dan Mitchell and Richard Sides’ exhibition, The Woods (July 18 – September 12, 2026), a presentation of paintings and sculptures, which—echoing Beckett’s puns and language games—activate familiar words in absurdist rearrangements.
Four short lectures by scholars Leland de la Durantaye (Claremont McKenna College), Foad Dizadji-Bahmani (Cal State University, Los Angeles), Katherine Weiss (Cal State University, Los Angeles), and David Lloyd (University of California, Riverside) will be followed by two performances: Samuel Beckett’s Not I (1972), performed by Jeni Jones, and circa ten to the ninety (2025 – ), an interactive performance artwork by Foad Dizadji-Bahmani, Suan Santipreecha, and Luc Trahand that stages a chess game from Beckett’s first published novel, Murphy (1938), accompanied by a new sound composition from Luc Trahand.
Full schedule and entry details at this link.
The Samuel Beckett Society 