Christian Marclay announced as Liz Diller's special guest for The John Edwards Lecture 2012

We are delighted to announce that the special guest speaker in conversation with Liz Diller (Diller Scofidio + Renfro) at this year's John Edwards Lecture, will be Christian Marclay, creator of the Golden Lion winning installation The Clock, at the Venice Biennale 2011. The conversation will be chaired by architect and designer, Nigel Coates.

Held at the Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium, the conversation will explore the porosities and possibilities of architecture, the city, perception, visual culture, and more.

Liz Diller and Marclay both studied at Cooper Union, New York City, in the late 1970s, and swiftly emerged to become dynamic voices within New York’s experimental art scene of the time, materializing ideas and synthesizing disciplines in installations and multi-media performances. For both practitioners mediatisation, technology, performance and the notion of the audience were topics up for transformation, play and dispute.

In 2002 the pair collaborated on Diller + Scofidio’s Blur Building, for the 2002 Swiss Expo. A non-building composed of fog, an architecture of atmosphere, floating on Lake Neuchatel, the pavilion, described by Diller as “a spectacle with nothing to see,” was accompanied by an immersive acoustic installation by Christian Marclay.

The Architecture Foundation’s annual John Edwards Lecture couples a global leading architect in conversation with a contemporary from a separate discipline. The AF is delighted to be welcoming Elizabeth Diller and Christian Marclay to the stage for 2012, providing a unique opportunity for the public to engage in a lively conversation across borders, offering a wide-ranging discussion of architecture and its relationship to the wider world.

The John Edwards Lecture is kindly supported by The Estate of Francis Bacon.

Tickets are available now, early booking advised.

Image: Christian Marclay. Photograph Dr J. Caldwell, image courtesy White Cube.