Academic Sessions: London 2008
Dis-Locations: Movements and Migrations
Session Convenor:
Rosemary Betterton, Lancaster University, r.betterton@lancaster.ac.uk
Dorothy Rowe, University of Bristol, d.rowe@bristol.ac.uk
Speakers:
Alex Rotas (Cardiff University) Re-Placing Britain: How migrant artists are helping redefine ‘British Art’.
Jutta Vinzent (University of Birmingham) Ideological Locations and Dis-locations. Visual responses from post-communist countries
Lisa Binder (Museum for African Art, New York) Continental Shift: (Re)Locating contemporary art from Africa in the 52nd Venice Biennale
Angela Dimitrakaki (University of Edinburgh) Beyond the Global Flâneuse: Travelling Women and the politics of art as labour
Marsha Meskimmon (Loughborough University) Passage: Affect and event in the global movement of bodies and images
Deborah Schultz (University of Sussex) Art and Place: Crossing borders in the work of Perejaume
Alexandra M. Kokoli (Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University) On Probation: Tracey Emin, Great Britain
Siobhán Shilton (University of Bristol) Transcultural Encounters: ‘Franco-Maghrebi’ Women’s Art
Session Abstract:
Dis-located and nomadic subjects have become privileged signifiers in recent feminist and post-colonial theory (Rosi Braidotti, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha), sometimes hailed as empowered inhabitants of in-between locations and interstitial spaces or as catalysts who question ‘our’ everyday existence. How do such figures, embodied or virtual, relate to art practice and theory? Do such concepts ‘travel’ across academic and aesthetic borders? What happens to such theories and practices in their new ‘locations’? This session addresses these and related questions in the context of artistic, academic and curatorial practices in the art world and academy. Papers explore the issues in relation to the visual arts and curatorial practices, as well as by examining the problems and potentials of moving through time and space as living agents.
Debates about art and museum practices have been renegotiated over the last decade in exhibitions and institutions that address issues of intercultural and multicultural exchange across virtual and physical borders. The attention given to location and identity, culture and ethnicity by centres such as INIVA in London, KIASMA in Helsinki or Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin have become sites of cultural and artistic exchange, offering new possibilities for encounter between artists, curators and audiences. But hybridity and mobility have also become fashionable commodities on the international art circuit; they can become the signifiers of a postmodern aesthetic detached from location and of a curatorial practice that pays as little attention to specificities of gender and race as did its modernist precursors.
How do new curatorial practices migrate across locations and borders within a global art market? How do the dis-locations and movements of artists contribute to the migration of practices and theories? How do artists represent the specific locations and dis-locations of peoples and ideas? What happens when practices and theories move across disciplines and locations? To what extent does it matter if they are changed in the process and, what makes them useful in another location? Are certain concepts more able to travel across national or disciplinary borders than others? And, how can engagements with different locations – and dis-locations – cut across a globalised, mass-mediated culture and address us as subjects of different identities, genders and nations?
Rosemary Betterton, Lancaster University, r.betterton@lancaster.ac.uk
Dorothy Rowe, University of Bristol, d.rowe@bristol.ac.uk
Speakers:
Alex Rotas (Cardiff University) Re-Placing Britain: How migrant artists are helping redefine ‘British Art’.
Jutta Vinzent (University of Birmingham) Ideological Locations and Dis-locations. Visual responses from post-communist countries
Lisa Binder (Museum for African Art, New York) Continental Shift: (Re)Locating contemporary art from Africa in the 52nd Venice Biennale
Angela Dimitrakaki (University of Edinburgh) Beyond the Global Flâneuse: Travelling Women and the politics of art as labour
Marsha Meskimmon (Loughborough University) Passage: Affect and event in the global movement of bodies and images
Deborah Schultz (University of Sussex) Art and Place: Crossing borders in the work of Perejaume
Alexandra M. Kokoli (Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University) On Probation: Tracey Emin, Great Britain
Siobhán Shilton (University of Bristol) Transcultural Encounters: ‘Franco-Maghrebi’ Women’s Art
Session Abstract:
Dis-located and nomadic subjects have become privileged signifiers in recent feminist and post-colonial theory (Rosi Braidotti, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha), sometimes hailed as empowered inhabitants of in-between locations and interstitial spaces or as catalysts who question ‘our’ everyday existence. How do such figures, embodied or virtual, relate to art practice and theory? Do such concepts ‘travel’ across academic and aesthetic borders? What happens to such theories and practices in their new ‘locations’? This session addresses these and related questions in the context of artistic, academic and curatorial practices in the art world and academy. Papers explore the issues in relation to the visual arts and curatorial practices, as well as by examining the problems and potentials of moving through time and space as living agents.
Debates about art and museum practices have been renegotiated over the last decade in exhibitions and institutions that address issues of intercultural and multicultural exchange across virtual and physical borders. The attention given to location and identity, culture and ethnicity by centres such as INIVA in London, KIASMA in Helsinki or Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin have become sites of cultural and artistic exchange, offering new possibilities for encounter between artists, curators and audiences. But hybridity and mobility have also become fashionable commodities on the international art circuit; they can become the signifiers of a postmodern aesthetic detached from location and of a curatorial practice that pays as little attention to specificities of gender and race as did its modernist precursors.
How do new curatorial practices migrate across locations and borders within a global art market? How do the dis-locations and movements of artists contribute to the migration of practices and theories? How do artists represent the specific locations and dis-locations of peoples and ideas? What happens when practices and theories move across disciplines and locations? To what extent does it matter if they are changed in the process and, what makes them useful in another location? Are certain concepts more able to travel across national or disciplinary borders than others? And, how can engagements with different locations – and dis-locations – cut across a globalised, mass-mediated culture and address us as subjects of different identities, genders and nations?