Knut Ebeling (Berlin):
“Digging for Now. An Archaeology of Contemporaneity”
In the 20th century, any immediate recognition of contemporaneity was hit by a fundamental crisis. On one hand (art-) historical notions only barely represented 'time' while on the other aesthetic theory found itself incapable of thinking the 'contemporary' in an artwork. At the climax of this crisis, the idea of the 'contemporary' in an artwork came to serve simply as a sarcastic joke, like in Tino Sehgals classic This is so Contemporary (2005). Departing from this diagnosis, this lecture asks for material conceptions of time that would allow us to think contemporaneity differently: What would a material contemporaneity be and how is the contemporaneity of materiality thinkable? What happens if we substitute the concept of a history of contemporaneity with its archaeology? What could be an archaeology of contemporaneity?
Paul Gladston (Nottingham):
“Contemporary Art and the (Differentiated) Limits of Criticality”
Since the late eighteenth century a critical function in relation to society and institutionalized culture has been attributed to art as part of western(ized) post-Enlightenment discourses. This attribution has persisted throughout shifts from modernist to post-modernist sensibilities as well as the more recent turn toward notions of the contemporary and contemporaneity. Claims made for the critical efficacy of art in this regard are both persistent and ambitious. In this paper I shall examine claims made for the critical function/efficacy of art, drawing attention to the absence of any substantial corroboration in fact as well as the problematic dialectics associated with artistic criticality in western(ized) contexts. I shall conclude, with specific reference to the historical status of art in Chinese cultural contexts, that not only are there historical alternatives to the western(ized) post-Enlightenment conception of artistic criticality, but also that fundamental assumptions associated with latter are profoundly misplaced.
Atreyee Gupta (Berlin/San Francisco Bay Area):
“The Future-Oriented Topographies of Desire: Insurgent Photomontage in Interwar India”
Against the backdrop of a world veering precariously close to the Second World War, the Indian artist Abanindranath Tagore began a series of 207 photomontages. Extracting photographs, advertisements, and typography from contemporary newspapers, Tagore composed collages that, in retrospect, qualify as the first photomontage created by an Indian artist. Although Tagore’s photomontages can be opened up to a range of diverse intellectual and cultural production that was unfolding in the same intellectual milieu, the enterprise had no immediate artistic precedence as such. In essence it belonged to a new register of modernist aesthetic thought and practice, one that sought to theorize the lacunary nature of perception. As we will see, the photomontages, as symptomatic of an interwar modernism articulated from the colony, made space for imagining an expansive topography of a post-imperial future that exceeded the limits imposed by an already tottering imperial world order. As a technique, photomontage, then, gave form to a future-oriented topography of desire.
Fabian Heubel (Taipei):
“Revolution and Transformation in Contemporary Mountain-Water-Painting”
Since the late 19th century China has been shaken by cultural and political upheavals that have changed the field of art profoundly. The dynamics of hybrid modernization, with the old and new, Chinese and Western becoming entangled, has led to a complex situation, embossed by many confusing contradictions and irresolvable paradoxes. The mountain-water-painting (shānshuǐhuà 山水畫, landscape painting), which is one of the classical genres of Chinese literati culture, has also been deeply influenced by revolutionary changes. I will try to discuss this perspective through the example of four painters. In different ways, the paintings of Liú Guósōng 劉國松 (Liu Kuo-song), Yú Péng 于彭, Yuán Huìlì 袁慧莉 und Jiāng Sānshí 蔣三石 (Chiang San-shih) express a broken continuity in their confrontation with the classical aesthetics of nature: a renewal of mountain-water painting, which explicitly subscribes to the intention to finish with literati painting in a revolutionary manner; nature as sexual desire and practice is introduced into scenes which look very traditional; male dominance in classical literati culture leads to the question of a feminist challenge to image structure; the alienation from formal clichés (shape of mountains, pavilions, etc.) gives way to an experimental approach, trying to regain a new relationship between painting and nature, in which the tension between continuity and discontinuity becomes a constitutive aspect of painting.
**CANCELED** Monica Juneja (Heidelberg):
“Between Abstinence and Re-Enchantment – Making Place for Tradition in Contemporary Art”
The notion of tradition has grown hydra-like and expanded to become one of the most slippery concepts when writing about art. Yet it continues to be invoked, bringing into play a range of feelings and meanings including cultural authority and distinctiveness, transmission across time, and the reassurance of a shared, if illusory, resource that could bring both stability and renewal. At the same time, it has been cast as a “nightmare that modernity creates” (Dipesh Chakrabarty) or simply dismissed as a platitude. This is most frequently and recurrently encountered in discussions of non-Western art. Rarely is the term used in the context of modern or contemporary art of the north Atlantic West. Yet the dissolution of certain distinctions induced by the contemporary art world – such as the art/artisan, or the author/participant dichotomies – or the blurring of the space between empathy and detachment, have meant that the ‘traditional’ now shares the temporal frame of the present rather than belonging to the past. What are the challenges faced by art critical writing as it seeks to find a resolution between the contemporary and the traditional? How do artists negotiate the tightrope between modernist skepticism, politicized ethnicity and the magnetic pull of inherited cultural materials while seeking an anchor for subjectivities of a post-national present? And how do the aesthetic and material intersect within the topology of relations that make up the “art matrix” (Claire Farago)?
Lourdes Morales (Mexico City):
“On the Notions of Direct and Testimonio: Constructing Sync Temporalities Through Cinema”
This paper explores the cinematic aesthetic construction of social documentary in relation to two simultaneous movements in cinema during the mid-70s: cinéma direct in Quebec, Canada; and cine testimonio in México. Five films were produced, out of which four were filmed in Mexico by the Canadian directors Gilles Groulx and Maurice Bulbulian, and their Mexican counterparts Paul Leduc and Eduardo Maldonado; meanwhile Mexican director Bosco Arochi filmed a fifth one in Canada. Within their agendas, these film directors aimed to create a cinematographic language that attempted to express diverse social realities mired in political temporalities. But at the same time, cinema itself was immersed in a process of questioning how modes of social narratives were being constructed. Some directors worked on democratization exercises of the media, while others intended to construct a film d’auteur. This paper will analyze the “polyphony of aesthetics” in this context, in order to address the enactment of the narration and its consequent construction of political temporalities. Which were the shared urgencies in cinematographic discourse at the time? I aim to open up a space for rethinking and re-signifying the role of collaborative visual narratives in cinema, pinning down specific concepts on the construction of temporalities and the way they function as an ensemble of operations for the representation of social struggles.
Philip Rosen (Providence):
„The Fragment and the Forecast”
Fragmentation of the spatio-temporal field is fundamental to film editing, and the status of fragmentation has a key place in histories of cinema stylistics. Such different commentators as Jean-Louis Comolli and Fredric Jameson now argue that by the 21st century, a cinematic aesthetics of fragmentation has lost the politically radical, avant-garde implications of the earlier 20th century. Instead, mediatic fragmentation is universal within a global media universe that makes images of the world into a flood of small commodified bits. This paper considers the hypothesis of such a shift on grounds of temporality. It counterposes fragmentation in film and other technologies of the global media universe with another structuring practice, the forecast. From action cinema to television ads, mediatic fragmentation is characterized by the sudden, the unexpected, the explosively affective. It manifests a kind of absolute or perpetual "nowness" of the instant. But the forecast conceives of the "now" as linked to a future. The forecast draws actuality into the realm of the expected rather than the sudden, and claims basis in the rational projection of continuity rather than affective impact. It's "nowness" is never separable from an inference of what will come to be, something strikingly evident in media news coverage but related to the persistence of narrative in many forms of film and even some digital media.
The fragment and the forecast thus organize nowness and temporality, and do so in part by reference to some long-lasting, hoary oppositions, for example between intellect and emotion as well as between discontinuity and continuity. This suggests that it can be productive to propose hypotheses about these media forms through an old concept: ideology.
Francesca Tarocco (Shanghai):
“Berlin Buddha: Contemporary Art Practices and Post-Secular China”
This paper looks at contemporary art practices in relation to the global diffusion and transformation of traditional Chinese Buddhist-image veneration and worship. It examines works from across different times and locations that reflect fundamental themes of traditional iconography as sites invoking a ‘reworking of the imaginary’ for contemporary artists. By examining Xiao Xuan’an’s lens-based work and Zhang Huan’s large-scale installations, I seek to illuminate contemporary artists' yearning for figuration and the many entanglements between contemporary art and post-secular China.
Tobias Wendl (Berlin):
“Neoliberalism and Contemporary Arts in Africa”
In the last two decades, the term 'contemporary' became a self-congratulatory buzz word in the arts, heralding the successful overcoming of (post)modernism and its teleological linearity in favor of a global contemporaneity. My paper will focus on the trajectory of the notion of the contemporary and its semantic shifts from a formerly ‘temporal category’ to the designation of an ‘art genre’ associated with issues of the present and an emphasis on social practice, criticality, and participation. In addition, I will discuss two tendencies, inherent to this shift and observable in many countries of Africa: the tendency to exclude certain contemporary art practices that no longer fit the new regime of the 'Contemporary' (writ large); and the neoliberal politics of reshaping the art sector on the model of development cooperation. It appears that the recent mushrooming of new contemporary art spaces and art festivals such as “The Artist as Citizen” (Cotonou 2012) or “Producing the Common” (Dakar 2014) are direct results of an adjustment to the agendas and ideologies of Western donor agencies and foundations, aiming at exploiting art for social engineering and civil society building. In this process of an “NGO-isation of the arts” (Hanan Toukan 2010), the term 'contemporary' runs the risk of becoming a “brand name without a brand” (Hito Steyerl 2010).
Artist Talk: Melanie Klein (Berlin) in Conversation With Ato Malinda (Rotterdam/Nairobi) and Milumbe Haimbe (Lusaka)
“Of Heroines and New Homosexuals."
Artists Milumbe Haimbe and Ato Malinda will talk about strategies of queering and addressing same-sex intimacies in their works. Malinda offersboth a spatial understanding of the limits of visibility and audibility of queer people in Kenya as well as a differentiated account of their stories and identities in her performance Mshoga Mpya, or the new homosexual. Haimbe pursues a visual narrative in her ongoing graphic novel project The revolutionist that thwarts stereotypes of gender, race and sexuality and negotiates dynamics of identification and sexual desire on various, sometimes conflicting levels. Both works were first shown at the Dak’Art 2014. In the discussion both artists’ artistic approaches will be compared. We will explore their involvement in specific discourses on queer issues especially in Africa as well as their experiences in different exhibition contexts.
