Seminar 8 // 31 January, 1, 2 February 2008 // MuHKA, Antwerp
Seminar 8 // 31 January, 1, 2 February 2008: Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen Leuvenstraat 32 2000 Antwerp Belgium
1. Opening party for SANTHAL FAMILY: positions around an Indian sculpture
2. Irit Rogoff session on Deleuze & Guattari's Kafka; Towards a Minor Literature and Post-Colnialism
3. Brunch at MuHKAFE; Irit Rogoff and Geeta Kapur in conversation Click for texts Further information about the sessions can be found below:
THURSDAY 31 JANUARY: Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen Leuvenstraat 32 2000 Antwerp Belgium Room tba
8:00pm Opening of SANTHAL FAMILY: positions around an Indian sculpture, an exhibition of modern and contemporary art that takes as its point of departure Santhal Family, a work made by Indian artist Ramkinkar Baij in 1938.
FRIDAY 1 FEBRUARY: Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen Leuvenstraat 32 2000 Antwerp Belgium Room tba As we will be meeting in Antwerp on the occasion of the Santhal Family exhibition at MuHKA which has been organised by Grant Watson and Anshuman Dasgupta and which will be looking at one major work by Ramkinkar Baij as the opening moment for a reexamination of current arts practices in India. I wanted to take this opportunity to think about different points of entry and models of thought about cultural positions and cross cultural relations. We've put several texts on the website including segments from Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature as well as some texts by the Indian theorist and curator Geeta Kapoor who will be speaking at the opening of the exhibition and by Francoise Verges who is currently working in La Reunion on building a new museum of colonialism and creolite. What these texts might be able to help us with is the task of mapping a series of relations between cultures that do not reproduce relations of center and periphery or of dominant and dominated, but instead posit questions of what cultural issues are not just presented , but actually conceptualised, from elsewhere. When the African theorist Achille M'bembe asks "Can we think the world from its edge?" meaning, can Africa become a place from which we can think the world, again and differently, he sets up an important question that allows us to shift away from so many of colonialism's preoccupations with inserting the local specificities to the narrative of colonialism i.e. from the perspective of the colonised as well as questions posed by globalisation studies concerning relations between the local and the global. You will recall that two seminars ago Jean-Paul brought in a text by Patrick Chamoiseau which he wanted to think of as a 'send-off', a moment of entry into a discussion or an enterprise in a completely different vein. In it Chamoiseau quotes an older writer saying that colonialism introduced and boxed them into a 'bound' world and their work has been to be able to see these boundaries. What I am hoping to try and do with the texts we have set up here is to look moments of cultural colonialism, not characterised as liberation from domination but rather as eruptive forces that work to change the nature of how we understand writing or artistic practices, in the world.
11-1pm: Irit Rogoff Deleuze & Guattari's Kafka; Towards a Minor Literature
2-4pm: Irit Rogoff Session on Post-Colonialism Click for texts
SATURDAY 2 FEBRUARY: Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen Leuvenstraat 32 2000 Antwerp Belgium Room tba Click for texts
12-2pm Brunch at MuHKAFE
2-4pm: Irit Rogoff and Geeta Kapur In conversation Kapur and Rogoff met a year ago in India at a conference about the artist Ramkinkar Baij, whose sculpture, Santhal Family (1938) is the starting point of the exhibition in Antwerp. They started talking about modernism, nationalism and transnationalism, art history and visual culture. We are very pleased that they will continue their talk at MuHKA. Click for texts
