CK

Seminar 68 // 22, 23, 24 March 2018 // London

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Curatorial/Knowledge Seminar, 22 – 24 March 2018

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Thursday 22 March 11am – 5.00pm

Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325

11am – 1.30pm Morning session

Stefan Nowotny

This session is meant both to continue our discussions around breathing (or, the sense that ‘we can’t breathe’) and open a space for reflection on questions related to the recent strike action at UK Universities, and more broadly, the ongoing struggle against the marketization of education. We will be looking at ‘Infernal Alternatives’ and ‘Minions’ – two chapters from Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers’s 2005 book Capitalist Sorcery – as well as a 2011 interview with Stengers on ‘The Care of the Possible’.

Readings:
– Philippe Pignarre & Isabelle Stengers, chapters ‘Infernal Alternatives’ & ‘Minions’ from Capitalist Sorcery
– Isabelle Stengers, ‘The Care of the Possible’ (Interview with Erik Bordeleau)

1.30 – 2.30pm Lunch

2.30 – 4.30pm Afternoon session

Testifying to the Image
Theodor Ringborg

What does it say when testimony is not an avowed observation or recollection of an event but a position with respect to an image and testimony itself seems situated in the body. What I have set out to do is to trace the moment when in encountering an image a body bears witness. Through Roland Barthes winter garden photograph, Adolf Eichmann’s encounter with the film Night and Fog, George Holliday’s video of Rodney King’s beating as well as my own relationship to images of my departed mother, I want to ask what can a body know of an image. If testimony is “the sharable and unsharable secret of what happened to me” (Derrida) the body seems able to say something outside of speech. What I am interested in and want to take seriously is when the structure of testimony is shown to be a feeling embodied, when a shudder, a moan, a corporeal reaction before an image is testimony itself.

(No Readings)

Friday 23 March 11am – 5.30pm

Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325

11am – 1.30pm Morning session

Elvira Dyangani Ose

Elvira Dyangani Ose is Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, independent curator and member of the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada, where she has curated the exhibitions, Theaster Gates’s True Value, Nástio Mosquito’s T.T.T. Template Temples of Tenacity and Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer, among others. She was part of the curatorial team of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2016 in Geneva, Curator of the eighth edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary art, (GIBCA 2015) and Curator International Art at Tate Modern (2011 – 2014).

Elvira’s theoretical work has focused on new forms of environment that artists have evolved in the absence of conventional institutions and contexts as for example in many cities in Africa. The pursuit of common space in the public and private sphere as well as sound and performance of tradition, together make up an affective context that is communal rather than concretely spatial.

In the morning Irit will lead a discussion of the text that Elvira would like to refer to in her presentation. Elvira will be joining us after lunch.

Readings:
- Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude. Trans. Chike Jeffers. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull, 2011, p. 97-136.

For context:
- Clémentine Deliss, "Brothers in Arms: Laboratoire AGIT'art and Tenq in Dakar in the 1990s” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 2014, 36, p. 4-19.
- Gabi Ngcobo and Elvira Dyangani Ose, 'Everyone Is Welcome: Terms and Conditions May Apply.’ In: Visible: Where Art Leaves Its Own Field and Becomes Visible as Part of Something Else. Sternberg Press: 2010, p. 64- 105. http://www.visibleproject.org/assets/medias/pdf/visible_book.pdf.

1.30 – 2.30pm Lunch

2.30 – 5.30pm Afternoon session

Elvira Dyangani Ose

 

Saturday 24 March 12 – 4pm

Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325

Silvia Caso and Claudia Tsang

Reading from In Praise of Forgetting, we aim to open a discussion on the equivocality of historical remembrance and collective memory. Should we understand the concept of history as "a biased salience" (where the collective memory of a group of individuals can be affected differently by their geographic or cultural proximity of an event) and a category perpetually changing across time and space? In the context of post-colonialism, what is the morality, if any, within the discourse of history and memory? 

We will use what has been often described as the "Asian Holocaust" as a departure point, to explore how the same nation (Japan, in this case) can be at the same time (WWII) aggressor and victim; we have included two other excerpts, one from The Rape of Nanking, a book on the Japanese atrocities committed on the Chinese population of said city in 1937, and a text from James Orr on “Victims and Perpetrators in National Memory”.

On this topic, we will also bring to the table a few current issues, ranging from the idea of "perfecting" history via the revision of historical textbooks, to the role of apology in the process of historical reconciliation. 

Readings: 
- Rieff, David. "The Victory of Memory over History." In Praise of Forgetting - Historical Memory and its Ironies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 60-75.
- Orr, James J. "Victims and Perpetrators in National Memory – Lessons from Post-World War Two Japan." Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 1st ser., 57, no. 2007, 42-44. http://doi.org/10.5169/seals-98953.
- Chan, Iris. “Epilogue.” The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: Basic Books, 1997. 217-221.

 

Seminar Dates: 
Thu, 22/03/2018 - 11:00 - Sat, 24/03/2018 - 16:00