Images: Brache L. Ettinger, And My Heart, Wound-Space Within Me. Eurydice - Medusa, 1984-2015. 15 oil paintings (1992-2013), 75 notebooks (1984-2015), audio recording and an installation (2015). Photo: Sahir Ugur Eren, Istanbul Biennial, 2015.

THINKING UNDER TURBULENCE GENEVA COLLOQUIUM Tuesday March 22, 2016 - 7pm FROM THE VIRTUAL FEMINIST MUSEUM TO THE ANALYSIS OF BIENNIAL CULTURE: CURATORIAL CHALLENGES AND THE POLITICS OF CRITICAL THINKING, READING AND MAKING ART GRISELDA POLLOCK (Leeds) with response from the BEYOND THE MONUMENT research group

HEAD, Boulevard Helvétique 9, 1205 Geneva, seminar room CCC, salle 27, 2nd floor

“For the last 15 years, my work as a feminist scholar has focussed on trauma and cultural memory and the uncertain place of feminist analysis in the fields of art, art history and exhibitionary formations of the distribution and consumption of art. Informed by a range of social-historical and psychoanalytical frames, my proposal of the virtual feminist museum worked with several new concepts for resisting despair in the face of globalization and the effacement of critical initiatives: these included concepts emerging from the artistic and theoretical work of Bracha Ettinger: fascinance, art as a transport station of trauma, aesthetic wit(h)nessing and the encounter-event. These are now being invoked to undertake a research project on contemporary curation and critical curatorial practices, focussing on an analysis of DOCUMENTA since the landmark historical moment signalled by the date 1989.

I pose three questions: How can contemporary history be approached through artistic practices? What can such an exhibitionary focus reveal about the history of contemporary art at the end of the history of art? Can curation be a critical and a political practice? Could an exhibition history constitute a method of studying such questions?

In the modern era, the temporary exhibition is one of the major forms through which knowledge, as well as appraisal, of contemporary art is produced. As an event, an exhibition is experienced and remembered by those who visit. What they experience is scripted by the selectors’ concepts for the show and the selection of work included. These function as units of a larger statement, objects of observation and analysis, and the furnishings of a cultural dramaturgy. Of course, any show is open to unanticipated readings. The exhibition has, however, a historicizing afterlife through formal critical writing that places the event in cultural memory and through the catalogue or other publications that become the monument to the event and also its long-term historical form. Since the middle of the twentieth century one exhibition, DOCUMENTA, begun by Arnold Bode in 1955 as an attempt to reconnect the broken thread of modern art in Germany shattered by Nazism’s expulsion of modern art as ‘degenerate’ in the 1937-8 has become one of the most significant and influential sites for a quinquennial review of current art, increasingly gaining its place as the most important temporary exhibition even amidst the proliferation of biennials worldwide. Conceived in the context of the massive historical trauma of Nazism and the aftermath of racist genocide, addressing the significance of art in the face of such a history and its traumatic legacies, the DOCUMENTA exhibitions can be studied as important indices of the critical relation between the artworld and its changing artistic forms and debates and contemporary histories studied through the device of authorial curatorship, critical response and the temporary exhibition as an extended form of cultural practice and theoretical intervention. My current research project involves a feminist, queer and postcolonial analysis of DOCUMENTA since 1989.”

The talk will be responded by Pierre Hazan, Denis Pernet, Catherine Quéloz of the research project Beyond the Monument, which has been developed in the context of the CCC-Master Program since 2010, and Nicole Schweizer (Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne).

GRISELDA POLLOCK was born in South Africa, grew up in Canada and is Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of Centre for Cultural Analysis, History, and Theory at the University of Leeds. Her most recent publications include Concentrationary Imaginaries: Imaginaries of Violence and the Violation of the Human (editor, with Max Silverman, 2015), After-affects | after-images. Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum (author, 2013), Visual Politics and Psychoanalysis: Art & the Image in Post-Traumatic Cultures (editor, 2013), Digital and Other Virtualities: Renegotating the Image (editor, with Antony Bryant, 2010), The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference (editor, with Victoria Turvey-Sauron, 2008), Museums after Modernism (editor, with Joyce Zemans, 2007), and Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum Time, Space and the Archive (2007).

The research project BEYOND THE MONUMENT: POLITICAL MOBILISATION, CITIZEN INITIATIVES AND ART INTERVENTIONS IN MEMORIAL PROCESSES [BM] aims to explore the connection between the paradigm shift in memory politics that occurred in the 1990s (evolution of the normative framework of transitional justice) and situated art practices (from the counter-monument to interventionist, discursive and “performative” proposals) and their situation in the public space. The study examines (1) the transformation of memorial policies since the 1980s; (2) the simultaneous emergence of original artistic formats in this area at the intersection of citizen, activist and artistic initiatives; (3) the impact of developments in transitional justice on art practices; (4) the contribution of art practices in the development of memorial policies. Beyond the Monument is conceived by PIERRE HAZAN, DENIS PERNET, CATHERINE QUÉLOZ, YAN SCHUBERT, MÉLANIE BORÈS and MISCHA PIRAUD.

The evening is the public part of the one-year colloquium “Thinking under Turbulence” that frames the curriculum during the transition of the CCC Master Programme in 2015/16 at Haute école d’art et de design in Genève. Contributors to the Colloquium are invited guests in conversation with CCC-students and faculty members. The one-year Colloquium takes place at a transitional moment of CCC, the research-based programme on curatorial concerns in globalizing times and in techno-politics under new direction of Doreen Mende. It will offer time to think how such a programme can process itself further and against itself in times of accelerationist imperatives brought by financial global capitalism. The Colloquium departs from literally “a speaking together”: from com- “together” + -loquium “speaking”. A speaking together outside/inside the academy. Therefore, the concept of the Colloquium does not propose thinking to be a philosophical method to study a subject matter but departs from a moment under conditions of turbulence when knowledge is in crisis that makes it necessary for us to think, to think differently.