Saturday, August 29, 3:30-7:30pm
Please RSVP to mail@belami.info
Bel Ami invites you to an afternoon of lectures and performances exploring Samuel Beckett’s lifelong engagement with the visual arts. 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, Saun 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.
SCHEDULE — Each lecture will be followed by a short Q&A. Light refreshments will be served.
3:30pm: Beckett’s Art of Mismaking, Leland de la Durantaye (Claremont McKenna)
4:00pm: Beckett and Duchamp, Foad Dizadji-Bahmani (CSULA), on Beckett’s subsumption of Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915-1923) into the novel, Murphy (1938)
[Break]
4:45pm: “… another like herself…”, Katherine Weiss (CSULA). Weiss’s talk will explore Beckett’s lasting impact on contemporary women artists such as Claire-Lise Holy, Arlene Shechet, Dorothy Cross, and Deb Lacusta
5:15pm: Beckett and Rage, David Lloyd (UCR): on the unaccountable fury that flares across Beckett’s work, read alongside Avigdor Arikha’s drawing Self-Portrait Shouting One Morning (1969)
[Break]
6:00pm: Samuel Beckett, Not I (1972), performed by Jeni Jones
6:30pm: circa ten to the ninety (2025 – ), by Foad Dizadji-Bahmani, Saun Santipreecha, and Luc Trahand
Leland de la Durantaye is Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of three works of scholarship, Beckett’s Art of Mismaking, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction and Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov. He is also the author of a novel, Hannah Versus the Tree, recently translated into Italian. He is the translator of Jacques Jouet’s novel Upstaged and of Giorgio Agamben’s The Unspeakable Girl and The Church and the Kingdom.
Foad Dizadji-Bahmani is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, and his research has focused on philosophy of physics and science, as well as Wittgenstein. Recently, he has turned to modernist studies. Persistence of Memory, his paper on Salvador Dalí’s eponymous 1931 painting and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), was published in the July 2026 issue of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui. Dizadji-Bahmani is also an artist, and recently collaborated with Saun Santipreecha and Luc Trahand to create circa ten to the ninety (2025 – ), an ongoing performance project rooted in a fascination with chess as a form of creativity.
Katherine Weiss is the Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at California State University, Los Angeles. Her publications include Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive (co-edited with Seán Kennedy, 2009); The Plays of Samuel Beckett (2013); Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art (co-edited with Robert Reginio and David Houston Jones, 2017), and Simply Beckett (2020). She has authored chapters in Beckett’s Afterlives: Adaptation, Remediation, Appropriation (2023) and Samuel Beckett and Ecology (2025), as well as articles in the Journal of Beckett Studies and Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (where she has served as a guest editor). Weiss was an invited lecturer at the Samuel Beckett Summer School (2019); a lead organizer of the Samuel Beckett Society’s Beckett and Justice conference (2024); and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Ashland Beckett Shorts Festival (2024).
David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of several books, including Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre (2016) and Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (2019), as well as the poetry collections Arc & Sill (2012), The Harm Fields (2022), and Archipelago (2026). The Press, Shelter, and The Pact, a book of three plays by Lloyd, was published in 2025. His latest book, Rage, Shame, and Dread, is forthcoming from Seagull Books in October 2026.
Jeni Jones is a Beckettian practitioner who has worked for 30 years as a director, producer, actor, writer, and rapper. She earned her BA in Theater Directing & English Literature from Fordham University, New York, and an MFA in Directing from California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita. Jones has directed Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Waiting for Godot, Not I, and Rockaby. Her 2018 short film, CLUB RAT$, received multiple awards. Between 2025 and 2026, Jones performed her double bill of Beckett’s Not I and Rockaby at the Beckett Society Conference, Edinburgh; University of California, Los Angeles; Beckett Conference at the University of Antwerp; and Drama Bookshop, New York. Her performance of Not I was reviewed in the 50th-anniversary edition of The Journal of Beckett Studies.
Saun Santipreecha is a composer and artist based in Los Angeles. In addition to producing his own feature film scores, he has worked alongside composers including John Debney, Danny Elfman, The Newton Brothers, and Abel Korzeniowski. His score credits for film and TV include Justice League (2017), Doctor Sleep (2019), Horizon: An American Saga (2024); Five Night’s At Freddy’s (2023); and Daredevil: Born Again (2025). Santipreecha has been the subject of two solo exhibitions at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, Los Angeles (2023, 2024). In 2024, he was commissioned to create an installation at The Wende Museum, Culver City. Santipreecha was a guest speaker at the 9th Annual Conference of the Samuel Beckett Society at California State University, Los Angeles.
Luc Trahand is a French-American interdisciplinary artist. His practice incorporates sculpture, sound, literature, and software. He has collaborated with Foad Dizadji-Bahmani on circa ten to the ninety (2025 – ), and with Saun Santipreecha on the exhibitions ...These Things That Divide The World In Two…, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, Los Angeles (2024) and Per/formative Cities: A Nest of Triptychal Performances, Galleria D’Arte Contemporanea Bruno Lisi, Rome (presented by Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, Los Angeles, 2024). Trahand has released several EPs, an album titled In Coherence (2020), and DÉS.ILLUSIONS (2023), a series of sound works with an accompanying essay.