Paper short abstract:

Drawing on personal and professional experiences, this talk thinks about the underbelly of urban heritage transformation processes and its ideologies.

Paper long abstract:

Between 2013-2014, I conducted fieldwork in the German Ruhr region, working closely with artists, refugees, and cultural politicians. This research focused on those on the margins and at the centre of cultural production in the region: well-funded theatres with professional ensembles on the one hand, and small collectives with precarious participants on the other hand. In both cases, these artists engaged with the ambivalent legacy of a region that for decades if not centuries was considered the industrial power-house of German empire; and yet also its grimy and dirty and poor periphery. This paper analyses the ambivalent ways in which cultural politicians and urban planners sought to redefine the legacy of the industrial region as a glorified past on which one could build the artifice of a postindustrial culture heritage industry. It focuses on the ways in which my interlocutors resisted, reframed, and criticised the myth of postindustrial culture, and worked instead to uncover its darkness.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on fieldwork among artists in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) in order to explore the international instrumentalization of contemporary art in the country. I argue this has led to the resurgence of utopian neo-avant-garde practices that oppose the objectives of the international community.

Paper long abstract:

Between 1995 and 2015, the international community funded contemporary art alongside a then-unprecedented level of intervention in BiH. Contemporary art was expected to promote post-conflict reconciliation, the public inclusion of minorities, and achieve 'democratization' through the stimulation of civil society.

As others have found in relation to parallel initiatives, this 'use' of contemporary art has led to the entrenchment of difference rather than its erasure, and the 'warping' of public discourse toward particular buzzwords. It has also failed, in that BiH remains trapped in a paradoxical (and dystopian) state of 'permanent transition': what Jansen has called the 'meantime' (2015). In this context, young artists have come to rely on international funding for their work. They often justify this work in relation to international priorities, but are privately critical of them.

Some of these artists have turned to the Yugoslav neo-avant-garde as a model for their work (and, indeed, lives). This practice values nonsense, irrationality, liminality, and bleak humour, and ultimately seeks to maintain art's mimetic qualities against its rationalization in transition and post-conflict societies. As such, the failure of the utopian vision of post-conflict BiH has led to some paradoxical outcomes. Artists have sought an alternative utopia, and some have found this in the earlier, socialist society that the country is supposed to transition from. Their work opposes the rubric under which it is funded, but also represents the very thing that this funding is designed to achieve: the (re)creation of a vibrant and critical public sphere.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on an ostensibly ordinary architectural office, the paper explores the problems and possibilities they find within the intersticial spaces of these routinely surprising realities.

Paper long abstract:

Architectural critics tends to imagine radical alternatives to existing professional practice, utopian professional futures premised on overcoming the constraints of present working conditions. By contrast, through an ethnographic focus on an ostensibly ordinary kind of practice, this paper explores the possibilities they find within existing constraints. Focusing on a small practice in the UK, I highlight how architects occupy, in their own terms, 'spaces between', fabricating specific reconciliations to things that are opposed, incompatible or in tension.

Paper short abstract:

This presentations inquires into expressions of care for Armenian historical remains in Anatolia by Islamised descendants of survivors in the context of dispossession and denial.

Paper long abstract:

In the mid-2010s, the descendants of Islamised and kurdified survivors of the Armenian genocide came together in the provincial town of Mus to form an association. One of the stated objectives, or rather dreams, of this coming-together, was to map, assess and in some tentative and tender way claim responsibility for Armenian communal material remains in the city and its surroundings. No practical step or action was ever taken, as the state soon took a turn towards authoritarianism and rekindled the war with the Kurdish movement, throwing the region once again into a state of conflict, tension and insecurity, particularly for an already marginalised community. Indeed, according to the logic of this nation-state, these people, the descendants of survivors of a genocide, should not exist, should not even be. Against the background of murder, dispossession and radical denial, I want to think about the absurdity, frank ridiculousness, but also utopian beauty of such fantasised gestures of care for the material remains of Armenians, across a great distance of loss and unknowability.

Paper short abstract:

Apprehending the legacies of slavery as irrevocable haunting past, this research proposes to examine the potential in the "debris" inherent to the Archive, its excess, in order to think about the their actualisation in curating as strategies of resistance

Paper long abstract:

My doctoral research seeks to understand how visual art is used to build narratives about the history of slavery in museum exhibitions. In order to study these questions, I adopt an approach that combines an analysis of the politics of art and curating, with an understanding of its theoretical, aesthetic and poetic strategies.

Drawing on Achille Mbembe's remarks on the "debris" as the excess that archival regulations cannot neutralize, I wish to explore the ways in which curatorial projects can reconfigure the material remnants of transatlantic slavery in ways productive of resistance potential.

As other archival practices, curating, despite being a process of ordering, always produces excess. I will be taking as reference point the exhibition "En MAS: Carnival and Performance Art from the Caribbean", curated by Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson in from 2014 to 2018. Claire Tancons explains that she needed to engage in a conversation about carnival beyond the ethnographic, and defend a genealogy grounded in the history of slavery. The project appeared to seek to record scenes of carnival in an unruly way, reflecting the unruly practice of Caribbean carnival. Museums acted solely a second hand showcase for the remnants of experience.

By seeking to answer the question "Why should Carnival enter the museum?", I wish to propose that the lived experiences of the haunting past of slavery that "excesses" the exhibitionary and curatorial orders can be assembled to threaten their stability.

Paper short abstract:

This text is a modest compilation of symptoms of this colonial encounters with the untranslatability and the limits of Western epistemology in dealing with spirituality in contemporary art context

Paper long abstract:

This text is a modest compilation of symptoms of this colonial encounters with the untranslatability and the limits of Western epistemology in dealing with spirituality in contemporary art context: The Western translation compulsion facing the unknown; patronising gestures in the exhibition room; Fixation against processes; the (mis?)translation of Art by K'uh "a sacred state of thinking-feeling" (In Katchiquel language); Winaq (or personhood) as an impossible Place-thought in its translation, and other dilemmas as How to heal without naming?

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the multiple potentialities through which Aboriginal rock art comes into being. By unfolding the versatile network through which those images circulate I will address the durability and continuity of Aboriginal practise in face of local and global challenges.

Paper long abstract:

There are two rock art traditions in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The Wandjina paintings - anthropomorphic figures, creator spirits that left their 'shadows' on rock surface where they entered the earth after creating the landscape. The second are the Gwion Gwions - figurative paintings of people, 'shadow images' that through thousands of years have seem impregnated into the rock with no apparent trace of pigment. These ancient indigenous paintings have inspired fantasies of primitive art, their location in caves fascinated viewers by the interplay of light and darkness that distinguishes their vivid beauty. Their cultural vitality resonates in contemporary Aboriginal art production. Yet in art history, rock art stands at the periphery, while their primarily static condition of immobility on rock creates an invisibility that has been curse and blessing. In this paper, I will explore these rock pictures potentialities of which 'art' is just one amongst many. Other potentials in which those images come into being are amongst others 1) evidence of indigenous occupation in land claims, 2) public icon of Aboriginal heritage, 4) samples in archaeological research and 5) registered trademark.

In such a versatile network of actors, the images prove a recalcitrance, as political theorist Jane Bennett puts it; the vitality of matter becomes apparent as potentially disruptive and/or productive force. In this paper, I want to take a detailed look at this force of the matter at hand: figurative images that materially manifest through the presence of red, yellow and white ochre on sand- and limestone.