University of Johannesburg (Faculty of
Art, Design and Architecture) - South Africa
EESA Conference
13-15 March 2015
Between democracies
1989-2014: Remembering, narrating and reimagining the past in Eastern and
Central Europe and Southern Africa
Keynote speakers:
Prof Achille
Mbembe, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (Wiser)
Contemporary theoretical framework for the
conference: South Africa and Eastern and Central Europe
‘South Africa’ refers to a geographical
location as well as to a constructed cultural space. In 1994, new ideological
and political shifts in South Africa were entrenched by a neo-liberal
democracy. Artists and art historians have in recent years revisited the
contestations interconnected with the ideas of a racialised and gendered
political landscape and the renegotiation of constructed social spaces.
Post-apartheid South Africa from 1994 to 2014 is marked by the initially
jubilant ideals of nation-building strategies such as the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, the notions of the Rainbow Nation and the African Renaissance
as vehicles to grapple with the social constructions of identities in a ‘new’
South Africa. These strategies reflected a rationalisation of the post-colonial
recovery with a sense of self and place and were premised on the assumptions of
interchange, mixing, inter/transculturations, hybridity and creolisation.
In the 1990s,
paradigm shifts were noted in the international mainstream art arena. New York
was no longer the international art capital, Eastern and Central European
artists were now more visible as a result of the end of the Cold War and South
African art was awarded several international platforms. But many South African
artists continued their artistic practices of the ‘struggle years’. They were
also under enormous pressure both at home and from abroad to visually embody
the political changes, as well as to explore innovative approaches in their
art. Art produced in the public domain of South Africa is still located in the
political place of unresolved identities and remains in search of a recovery of
self. Historical and political disruptions of transforming contexts
periodically propelled artists into spaces of contention and disjuncture in
continuing and discontinuing artistic practices. Contemporary artworks in the
national South African context encompass representations of place, memory,
active ideological forces in society, new public places and acculturated places
of intermingling and negotiation.
The ‘post-communist condition’ is not
restricted to the space of the former Eastern Europe, but it also affects ‘the
former West’. It has become at least a pan-European phenomenon, if not a global
one, taking into account the pervasiveness of capitalist relations in the
present world order. Instead of defining a clearly regulated geographical
space, the expression has rather referred to a heterogeneous and conflicting
discursive terrain. The collapse of the Berlin Wall prompted a reimagining of
the formerly divided Europe on the grounds of different political imaginaries,
economies and bio-political regimes. This process has been regarded as
dependent on a shifting temporal logic (“back from the future”, as Boris Groys
puts it), pertaining to a post-utopian attitude, given the prospective
dimension of communist utopia. Artists and curators revisited the logic of
modernity and explored its unrealised possibilities (Svetlana Boym), while at
the same time questioning contested territorial marks and processes of
un-belonging. From a socialist perspective, the recent crisis of global capital
requires a reconsideration of social relations constructed by the Soviet
imaginary, proposing alternative economies of knowledge and desire and
different imagined collectives.
In relation to temporality, issues of
identity and reconstruction of the private and the collective selves became
central themes in the recently unmarked and de-territorialised places of the
‘former East’. Thus, the question of coping with the socialist past and its
heritage has been an important political issue in much of the art after 1989,
overlapping issues of gender, ethnicity, class and national belonging. It has
been dealt with primarily by means of a psychoanalytical approach, for which
terms such as trauma, amnesia and desire pervaded art historical explanation of
recent shifts in those societies and their art. Equally important is the
post-colonial perspective, according to which the reconstruction of collective
identities corresponding with a shifting political and social imaginary and the
gradual disruption of the social fabric in an unstable political milieu are key
factors in understanding many of the artistic concerns with their present, as
well as, and especially with their past. In this respect, an “aesthetics of
post-history”, as envisaged by Irit Rogoff in order to deal with the German art
after the Holocaust, may be considered in relation to the ways in which
collective and personal memory of the communist past is represented, performed,
its former narratives and certitudes critically destabilised or its effigies
commercialised in recent political gestures and artistic practices.
Sub themes:-
·
uses and
limitations of postcolonial theory in art historical methodologies
·
constructs of place
and political disruption
·
the discourse of
memory and commemoration
·
transforming
ideologies
·
new contexts of
acculturation
·
acculturated places
of intermingling and negotiation
·
negotiating
postcolonial identities
·
national
(re)constructions and their visual representations
Convenors:
Judy Peter
(University of Johannesburg, South Africa)
Cristian Nae (George Enescu" University of
Arts, Iasi, Romania)
Ljiljana Kolešnik
(Institute of Art History, Croatia)
Karen von Veh
(University of Johannesburg, South Africa)
