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- Convenors:
-
Sophie Lembcke
(University of Bayreuth)
Valerie Gruber (University of Bayreuth)
Dandara Maia (University of Bayreuth)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Linguistic and visual (de)colonialisms
- Location:
- Room 1015
- Sessions:
- Thursday 9 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
The Workgroup "Artistic Research" based at BIGSAS Bayreuth explores the methods of artistic research, with a focus on visual, performance, and practice based arts. This panel discusses artistic practices which contribute valuable knowledge to pressing matters or envisage societal transformation.
Long Abstract:
Based on the premise that knowledge is neither universal nor single, artistic research bridges the gap between arts and science. It articulates different modes of relating, reflecting and representing in order to reconfigure epistemological hierarchies and contribute to visual decolonialisms. This panel welcomes artists and researchers engaging with artistic practices which contribute valuable knowledge to pressing matters or envisage societal transformation.
We specifically invite contributors who connect Europe, Africa and its diasporas, translate pasts into futures, and deal with the following topics:
- Artistic research as agent of change and social transformation
- Art production as collaborative and decolonial research
- Entangling epistemologies within artistic co-production of knowledge
The panelists will give insights into idiosyncratic and creative ways of activating and translating bodily, tacit and habitual knowledges, which are generally overlooked by academic approaches. By discussing the potentialities and limitations of artistic research methodologies, the panel will enrich the debate on the situatedness of knowledge and everyday racism in societies marked by colonization and enslavement.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 9 June, 2022, -Dandara Maia (University of Bayreuth)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation narrates the use of the Bildatlas Mnemosyne applied as a methodology for visual analysis of wax prints fabrics. On a almost pure visual approach panels are build to demonstrate the multiple temporalities and cultural appropriations in the development of a textile print style.
Paper long abstract:
Waxatlas is a methodology of visual analysis developed following the study of Aby Warburg's Bildatlas Mnemosyne. The existence of a warburgian methodology is a highly debatable subject among Warburg scholars. Warburg used images to understand the tensions between antiquity and European Renaissance through the migrations of images to create a cultural psychological history of the depiction of human expressions. Although it may be difficult to find in Warburg's writings an explicit theoretical structure, several authors have examined Warburg's vocabulary as a means to access his highly personal approach to art history. Metaphor, expressive values, pathos formula, and specially Nachleben are the elements in Warburg's legacy that opened the possibility to an adaptation of Mnemosyne for the study of wax prints. Wax print is a hybrid fabric produced by coloniality. Its visual materiality is produced by various temporalities, geographies and impacts individuals and provoke sorts of feelings, emotions, and actions as it recollects memories yet to be lived. The cartography metaphor used by Warburg is well suited wax since wax material product of spatial and cultural circulation. Prints are not static, they do not encapsulate the time in themselves, they are dynamic, metamorphic, and difficult to grasp. The Waxatlas is a collection of purely visual panels that follows the development of wax prints and the tensions produced within colonization. Using metaphor as a tool it demonstrates that wax is the product of cultural hybridity, and this hybridization process has generated and continues carrying out emotions throughout decades within itself.
Sophie Lembcke (University of Bayreuth)
Paper short abstract:
This contribution focuses on the remediation of musealized objects by contemporary artists. Their artistic research practices deal with colonial continuities in ethnographic museums. Thinking with their projects, I argue that such research practices lead to concepts of museums as polyvocal spaces.
Paper long abstract:
The 19th century saw the birth of ethnographic museums in Europe - impressive buildings in which exhibitions and research forged a crucial link between colonized, "othered" cultures and white superiority. Decolonizing such institutions is a pressing matter. I divided my presentation into three parts. I'll begin with a more general introduction of artistic research within my Ph.D project "Disrupting Colonial Displays: Translating and framing collected objects as practices of artists and curators toward a reconfiguration of ethnographic museums," which focuses on colonial display formats and postcolonial remediations of objects. For exploring notions of artistic research in museums, I will then provide you with an example The Other Nefertiti by Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles (2015). Finally, I will highlight aspects of the performance series Ondaanisa yo Pomudhime - Dance of the Rubber Tree (2018 - ongoing) by Namibian scholar and artist Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja. Both artworks highlight problematic aspects in contemporary museums' practices, like claiming property and regulating access to objects. They criticize current approaches to cultural heritage preservation in its broader sociopolitical contexts; hence they propose a usage of such objects that takes their ephemeral qualities into consideration, like fire and decay. Artistic research offers new perspectives for museums to navigate complex power relations within their collection.
Oluwatoyin Olokodana-James (University of Lagos) Ademola Kazeem Fayemi (Australian Catholic University)
Paper short abstract:
This study and methodology document findings from artistic research in site-specific theatre, interrogates ‘Esther’s Revenge’, a play that chronicles the love and hate between Esther (Nigerian) and Mark (British). The selected paradigm is interrogated from a triplex position: as an anti-racial statement, engaging the theatrics of site-specific theatres, and developing a body of knowledge from artistic research for academia.
Paper long abstract:
Artistic research in recent times has become a formidable method in creating knowledge of the past, juxtaposed against the present and future forms. The emerging results from such research either employed as a dramaturgical process or examined from the interrogation of these works of art suggest that specific enablers provide platforms for human behavioral and social reformation agenda. Thus, such results have created acceptable methodologies and ways of reconfiguring African studies, particularly in the academia. Therefore, this study considers artistic research in line with its functional and utility value in creating a knowledge pattern poised for academic excellence, thus, decolonizing the space in the racialized theatre. In justifying the position of this paper, this study interrogates Esther’s Revenge. Esther’s revenge falls under the category of site-specific theatre. Its thrusts engage racial profiling, social injustice, abuse and violence against women as conceived by the playwright developed experientially along with the environment in which the actual event took place in 1953. The play chronicled the love and hate between Esther (Nigerian) and Mark (British, and how she was sentenced to death by hanging in 1956 following Mark’s death. The performance presents the audience as members of the special jury to later fight in favour or against Esther’s case. This study therefore interrogates the selected paradigm from a triplex position: as an anti-racial statement, engaging the theatrics of site-specific theatres, and developing a body of knowledge from artistic research for academia.