Academic Sessions: London 2008
Monuments and Memorials
Session Convenors:
Deborah Cherry and Sutapa Biswas, TrAIN /Research Centre for Transnational Art Identity and Nation, University of the Arts London. d.cherry@uva.nl
biswas.rodgers@virgin.net
Speakers:
Tracy Anderson (University of Sussex) Commemorating the Life and Death of Charlotte Canning
Sophie Berrebi (University of Amsterdam) 'An Enormous Intellectual Machinery’: Jean Dubuffet’s Group of Four Trees, and corporate modernism in the United States of America
Zeynep Çelik (New Jersey School of Architecture) Empire, Monument and the City
Annie Coombes (Birkbeck College) Engendering Memory In Post-Apartheid South Africa
Anne Ferran (Sydney College of The Arts) The Ground, The Air
Gayatri Sinha (Curator and critic, New Delhi) Remembering Gandhi
Thomas Lange (University of Amsterdam) Fleeting Images and Past’s Presence: Memory and the role of the image in Anselm Kiefer’s paintings of the late 1970s and 1980s
Sue Malvern (University of Reading) The Counter Monument Feminised: Recent projects by Sanja Ivekovi?
Emily Mark Fitzgerald (University College Dublin) Performing Famine: The politics of community remembrance in Ireland and the Diaspora
Peter Osborne (Middlesex University) ‘The Truth will be Known When the Last Witness is Dead’
Stephanie Snyder (San Francisco Art Institute) Revolt and Anti-Authorship,1975 Daniel Spoerri at the San Francisco Art Institute
Aliya de Tiesenhausen (Courtauld Institute of Art) From War Memorial to the Beatles: Locating Kazakh Monumentality
Session Abstract:
Monuments and memorials are characteristic features of colonial and postcolonial cities, and they have long been located in rural as well as urban contexts. Often produced in the artist’s studio, widely studied in the academy, monuments and memorials frequently exist outside the purview of the museum. They come into being at precise locations, perhaps marking the unique site of a traumatic event or the longer historical moment of epistemic violence.
This session asks what prompts the installation, re/location and destruction of monuments and memorials. How have their meanings been contested, as for example during decolonization or profound political change? The focus is on the trans-national, the inter-cultural and the post-colonial, on the contemporary as much as the historical, and on monuments and memorials in global settings. The session will be organised in panels to enhance debate on the key themes.