The Conference
The conference employs the concept of haunting to create a language for the ways in which an unfinished past makes itself known in the here and now (Avery Gordon) and violent histories, or stories, initiate ongoing disruptions, wronging the wrong (Eve Tuck). Haunting often takes place when an official narrative insists that the violence of subjection and injustice is overcome (e.g. after the liberation from colonialism, after Stonewall, at the end of a war) or when their oppressiveness is strictly denied. Now ghosts “appear” as agency in-between subjectivities, images, and spaces and insist on a response. As the haunting becomes real, it stimulates an imagination of how things could be otherwise. What are the means and possibilities of our inquiries to welcome the specters of the past and make unresolved social violence demand its due?
Keynote lectures: Avery Gordon (UC Santa Barbara) and Eve Tuck (University of Toronto), Lectures_performances_artists’ presentations, organized by EARN, www.artresearch.eu
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna's exhibition at the Research Pavilion in Venice
The exhibition welcomes the appearance of specters: events, signs, images, practices and objects that point towards a violent past and sketch a possible future in one gesture. In the context of arts-based research the show introduces conjuring specters as a proper method. Building on a glossary of hauntopia the exhibited works are looking for traces or even negations of things, stories and future visions, while in many instances making use of formats that employ ephemeral, opaque or sci-fi elements. As hauntopia's prospects for unsettling is tested out, the exhibition explores the range of a ghostly aesthetics.
Artists: Aline Benecke, Katalin Erdödi, Zsuzsi Flohr, Sílvia das Fadas, Masha Godovannaya, Moira Hille, Zosia Holubowska, Hristina Ivanoska, Janine Jembere, Ruth Jenrbekova, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Rafal Morusiewicz, Lisa Nyberg, Read-in, Naomi Rincón-Gallardo, Keiko Uenishi
Curators: Anette Baldauf and Renate Lorenz
Exhibition Guide and Glossary at ISSUU:
https://issuu.com/academyoffineartsvienna/docs/hauntopia-what-if_zine_web
14. Lisa Nyberg: Unsettling II: A guided meditation to the sea, Soundpiece, 2017, Sounds by Julia Giertz.
9. Masha Godovannaya & Silvia das Fadas:
Her* Hands and His Shape: Incantations, Slide Projection, 2017.
Two carousel slide projectors, asynchronous loop, one hundred sixty 35mm color and b/w slides.
5. Zsuzsi Flohr: Grandpa's Backpack, Installation with research book and backpack, 2017