FRIDAY, MAY 6, 2022
Online
https://dieangewandte-at.zoom.us/j/62863967666
Meeting-ID: 628 6396 7666
4 PM
Reparative Memory: Trauma, Performance, and Repair (Keynote Lecture)
Diana Taylor
Moderated by Eva Kernbauer
Since the onset of Covid-19, many of us have had to deal with the trauma of loss—the lives lost, the livelihoods that have disappeared, the environmental destruction, the assumptions about social and political responsibility. Without pitting individualized experiences and treatments of trauma against collective ones, I propose here that art-based reparative memory practices and trauma-driven performances offer victims, survivors, and activists ways to address the global/ local repercussions of the pandemic that also, indirectly, help us imagine livable futures.
SATURDAY, MAY 7, 2022
FLUX 2, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7, 1030 Vienna
2 PM
Countering the Archive (Screening and Q&A)
Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński
Screening of the works The Letter (2019) and Fleshbacks (2021) followed by a moderated Q&A session. The Letter (2019) moves between video, performance, sound, and text. It takes as a starting point the haunting reminiscence of a group of West Africans in 19th century Vienna. By following the traces left, an analysis of archival structures and the objects housed within them is opened up, pointing to an understanding of the past as not past but as a gateway for interrogations of Diasporan temporalities.Fleshbacks (2021) is a three-part annotation to The Letter.
Telling History of Displacement Through Objects. Materiality and the “Civilizing Mission” in the Displaced Persons Camps in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria, 1945-1952 (Lecture)
Katarzyna Nowak
This talk explores how stories of war and displacement can be narrated through objects. It focuses on meanings attached to things refugees carried, created, and abandoned to demonstrate how material culture can be a key to reading the experiences of trauma and renewal, as well as evidence of practices of “uplifting” and Westernizing displaced victims of war. The case study of Displaced Persons in post-World War II Austria and Germany, where Western relief workers assisted refugees from Eastern Europe, offers insights on how objects bear witness to the history of negotiating and managing displacement.
My body is my close enemy (Artistic Lecture)
Nisrine Boukhari
To fear, freeze, flee or fight—I needed a body. To sit, stand, stuck, and move—I needed a body, but to wander, I needed my mind.
Memory is a selection of images; not all the time looking in its album and seeing beautiful moments. Some pictures are horrifying, from a past we are trying to forget, but those images have a possessed power to keep coming and interrupting life and remind us of what has happened. Forgetting doesn’t seem to be a functional mechanism all the time as we think—thus, here, I tried a different approach to navigate a new road while mind-wandering.
SHORT BREAK
4 PM
Performative – What’s in a word? (Lecture)
Tanja Schult
The term “performative” appears frequently to hint at art’s postulated efficacy. But what exactly does this mean? What do we mean when we describe an art work as performative? How can an art work’s performativity be described or measured?
Art historian Tanja Schult (Stockholm University / Guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Science) elaborates on these questions through a series of cases taken from her research.
Cleaning Time (Vienna) (Screening)
Steven Cohen
Projection of the video documentation of the performance Cleaning Time (Vienna).
Sitting Next to the Past: Heimrad Bäcker and Clara Furey (Lecture)
Martina Gimplinger
This talk looks at the dance work “When Even The” (2018) by Canadian choreographer and dancer Clara Furey, performing next to an object found by Austrian writer, publisher, and photographer Heimrad Bäcker. It explores how a contemporary dance-maker, her sensory perception, and the spectator’s ways of seeing relate to historical trauma and genocide. It traces an artist’s unexpected pathways next to the intensity of an object’s presence marked by a violent past. Thinking through the artist’s sensitive physical and gestural search, we are equally invited to ask: How do we want to remember today?
No Illusion (Screening and Q&A)
Israel Martínez
As part of the audiovisual installations “People behaving as real animals”, Martínez invited to Gerardo Montes de Oca, a Mexican student and activist who lives in Vienna, to perform an improvisation in which, through sound, he would express his memories and emotions for his country, after the killing of 43 students in the state of Guerrero. The action took place in Mexikoplatz, where a monument stands acknowledging the Mexican government for its official pronouncement against the Nazi invasion of this city. The work was produced during the artist’s residency at MuseumsQuartier in October 2014.
Organized and moderated by Kathrin Heinrich and Frida Robles
More information at https://addressingamnesia.uni-ak.ac.at