Investigating publics: archives, art, and politics
This double panel will unfold aspects of public archives in order to investigate
interrelations of art and politics. The concept of the archive is challenged from different
artistic and theoretical positions. Special focus will be on the constitution of publics and
the politics of archives. Following Diana Taylor’s discussion of the archive and the
repertoire, the panel questions how enactments, and re-enactments of archival knowledge
of identity, community and memory can challenge and negotiate relations of power: How
does the archive function as a stabilizer of cultural norms? How are cultural traditions
transferred through repertoires and “living archives”? We will examine how archives and
repertoires create publics – ranging from specific audiences to democratic public space –
through specific case studies covering a wide area of cultural manifestations: public
radio, visual arts, performance, activism, and new means of social interaction in digital
media and event culture.
The panel gathers scholars from different disciplines and backgrounds. The double panel
will be organised in two streams: Part 1: Politics of Memory will focus on archives as
establishing or disturbing public memory and cultural identity, while Part 2: Critical
Publics? will discuss cultural events that draw upon or question the politics of publics.
Part 1: Politics of Memory
Moderator: Malene Vest Hansen, Dept. of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of
Copenhagen, vest@hum.ku.dk
Discussant: Diana Taylor, Tisch School of Arts, New York University,
diana.taylor@nyu.edu
Presentations:
Gunhild Borggreen, Dept. of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen,
gunhild@hum.ku.dk:
“Private Matters on Public Display: Yoshiko Shimada’s art project Bones in Tansu
– Family Secrets”
This presentation starts off from the contemporary Japanese artist Yoshiko
Shimada’s on-going art project Bones in Tansu – Family Secrets, in which the
artist constructs a public and aesthetic archive from ephemeral and embodied
practice of family life. The artist turns written statements of family secrets into
visual art works, and in the gallery, the art works can be scrutinized by visitors,
who in turn are invited to write their own family secret and submit it to the
project.
If archives sustain power (Taylor, 2003), we can see this artistic project of turning
secret practices and memories of family life into tangible pieces of visual and
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linguistic text as a way of revealing various kinds of invisible social repertoire.
The process of transforming concealed and ephemeral repertoires into enduring
archives is an exposure of hidden power structures in society, and a way of
drawing certain kinds of knowledge from the privacy of family life into public
and political discourse.
Rivka Eisner, Visiting Scholar, Aarhus University, Department of History and Area
Studies, rivkasyd@gmail.com:
“Dancing Archives: Performing Preservation and Transformation”
Vietnamese-French choreographer, Ea Sola, creates performances that both
preserve and alter cultural traditions. Her works comprise a hybridized form of
‘living archive’ where public and private memory, old and new cultural traditions,
and contemporary political issues are engaged in and through the moving body.
Her earlier work drew on and employed Vietnamese art forms, in combination
with European performance practices, as a means of addressing traumatic
personal and social memories of war in Vietnam. Her most recent performances
have shifted in scope and aesthetics to take on what she calls a more ‘global point
of view’ through the use of contemporary, cross-cultural ‘repertoires’ (Taylor
2003). This paper will explore ways in which Ea Sola’s performances embody,
extend, and interrogate archives as a means of critically investigating social
problems and engaging ‘transnational publics’ both within and outside Vietnam.
Peter Van der Meijden, Dept. of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen,
pmeijden@hum.ku.dk:
“This Way Brouwn: The Emphatic Archive”
[text will follow]
Part 2: Critical Publics?
Moderator: Gunhild Borggreen, Dept. of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of
Copenhagen, gunhild@hum.ku.dk:
Discussant: ?
Presentations:
Mathias Danbolt, Depart. of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of
Bergen, mathias@trikster.net:
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“Touching History: The Affective Economies of Queer Archival Activism”
What does it mean to touch and be touched by history? This question is at the
center of this paper investigating the role of affect in recent artistic interventions
in queer historiography. Through an analysis of three recent art projects by
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorentz – Normal Work (2007), N.O. Body (2008),
and Salomania (2009) – this paper explores how encounters with the past can set
the present in (e)motion. Boudry and Lorentz describe their work as a form of
“archival archeology”, where “anachronistic narration or ‘fiction’” is employed to
resist the tempting simplistic narratives of progression in relation to Western
LGBT politics. Their staged “collaboration with friends from the nineteenth
century” is an apt example of what Carolyn Dinshaw has described as a “queer
historical impulse … toward making connections across time”. Desire, touch,
tactility, and sensation are at center stage in Boudry and Lorentz’s art projects.
Their video installations deploys strategies of “touching history” not only through
an exploration of the physical encounter with the past in the present, but also
through an examination of our emotional and affective dimension of confronting
the past – ranging from the pleasurable and erotic to the hurtful and violent. This
paper will explore the role touch in Boudry and Lorentz’s work in relation to the
widespread interest in what might be called queer archival activism, where
archival encounters functions as the starting point for developing queer politics in
the present.
Laura Luise Schultz, Dept. of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen,
laura@hum.ku.dk:
“Framing political events as theatre”
In April 2009, the Swiss artist’s collective Rimini Protokoll invited theatre
audiences to participate in the Daimler AG General Assembly. In June 2009 the
Danish performance company Das Beckwerk re-enacted the victory speech of
President Obama in a Swedish theatre. The paper discusses how such strategies of
framing and re-enactment of political events – while, or almost while, they are
taking place – are not really attempts at direct social and political intervention, but
rather try to affect the cultural construction of these events as historical: What will
come to count as the lasting impact of these events – how will they eventually
come to figure as part of our cultural memory.
Malene Vest Hansen, Dept. of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen,
vest@hum.ku.dk:
“The Istanbul Biennale: Investigating critical art publics”
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The Istanbul Biennale of contemporary art has built a solid platform for
contemporary art in the Turkish capital during the past decades and managed to
place itself prominently on the global art scene. My paper will discuss what sort
of publics is addressed/performed by the biennales, and with special focus on
Istanbul Biennale 11 I will address the question of the critical potential in
contemporary art practices: what happens when critical art is implemented in a
public space not traditionally formed by a Western concept of art?
Bente Larsen, Dept. of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Coordinator
of the LARM archive, bentelar@hum.ku.dk:
“Broadcast Publics: Radio Democracy, Avant-Gardes and Activism
- two cases on public service in Danish Broadcast Radio”
[text will follow]
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