Event | ‘Dialogue. The Time of the Object: Temporality, Trace, Decay’ – Workshop (NICA x OSK)
Event | ‘Dialogue. The Time of the Object: Temporality, Trace, Decay’ – Workshop – (NICA x OSK)
Date: 20 June 2024
Time: 15:00-17:00
Location: University of Amsterdam (Room TBA)
Organizers: Julia Alting & Sanjukta Sunderason
Contact & registration: j.alting@rug.nl
Registration deadline: 10 June 2024
Credits: 1 ECTS
In art history the question of (historical) time is taken up more widely today as the discipline faces anxieties about its colonial foundations. As linear historical time is complicit with imperial ideologies of ‘progress’, alternative conceptualizations of time and history have been proposed, yet they have not been conceptually elaborated upon. This dialogue aims to follow the lives of art objects’ materiality, exploring the nonlinear temporalities that a focus on material brings with it. Never timeless, matter decays; it changes color; travels; and leaves traces.
Artist and filmmaker Zuza Banasińska will show Kontrewers, a short film that asks how an artifact can be understood not as a document in need of ultimate classification, but as a trace. The film shows temporalities expanding into multiple directions, defying linear progression. Meanwhile, art historian Archishman Sarker explores geological timescales and the topic of conservation and decay. His research looks into the medieval murals at the Buddhist monasteries in Lamayuru and Mangyu in Ladakh, northwestern India, suffering under a combination of climate change, ill-planned development and a lack of conservation efforts. Visual artist Raslene revisits an old Indonesian phrase on domestic responsibilities that marginalizes women. By gathering and exploring her experience, curating found and personal objects, she speaks of the mini museum she has built together with several other women.
The dialogue will offer space for questions and discussion, moderated by Julia Alting.
This dialogue is developed as pre-conference event to the 36th CIHA World Congress panel session The Time of the Object: Temporality, Trace, Decay convened by Raslene and Julia Alting.
Schedule
15-15.10 introduction by Julia Alting
15.10-15.20 Zuza Banasińska’s Kontrewers
15.20-15.40 Q&A Zuza Banasińska
15.40-16 Archishman Sarker presentation
16.-16.10 Q&A Archishman Sarker
16.10-16.30 Raslene presentation
16.30-16.40 Q&A Raslene
16.40-17 final discussion with all speakers and reflections
Speakers
Zuza Banasińska is an artist and filmmaker from Warsaw, currently based in Amsterdam. Their essay films and installations utilize video, game engines, sound and sculpture to explore spectral realities sedimented within archives. Their newest film is distributed by EYE Filmmuseum and Video Power, and premieres at International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Archishman Sarker is an art historian based in New Delhi, India. He teaches at Ashoka University and recently submitted his PhD dissertation at Jawaharlal Nehru University. His research focuses on the art and iconography of medieval scholastic Buddhist traditions of South Asia.
Raslene is a Jakarta-based video and visual artist, art/project manager, researcher, and occasional writer. In her artistic practice, mostly, she works with found footage and archives, re-questioning and engaging the historical and contemporary moving image-making.
Moderator and organizer
Julia Alting is a PhD candidate at the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG), where she researches nonlinear approaches to art historical time. She teaches on decolonial and feminist theory in art history, and she is a remote editor for Soapbox, journal for cultural analysis.
Responsible teacher
Dr. Sanjukta Sunderason is a historian of 20th-century aesthetics, working at the interfaces of visual art, left-wing thought, and historical transition. She has recently been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for her project ‘ENTANGLED FREEDOMS: Decolonial Modernisms as Transnational Relations of Resistance, 1940s-1980s’.
Credit details
Conditions for obtaining 1 ECTS:
- Attendance of the session and active participation;
- Preparatory reading assignment;
- Preparatory assignment: students are asked to submit questions for the speakers before the event;
- Reflection after the session: students are asked to submit a reflection of 1000 words on how the dialogue has influenced their thinking about their own research topics.
Relevance & Impact
This dialogue proposes a reconsideration of the temporal structures that undergird the discipline of art history, while focusing on the particular histories and complicated temporalities that art objects often carry with them. As structures of exclusion embedded in our disciplines, museums, narratives and universities are widely debated in society today, we deem it important to look at the fundamental temporal logics on which our stories are based, and through which we make sense of continuity, rupture and change. The workshop brings together the disciplines of artistic research and art history in its search for alternative conceptions of time that take material histories seriously. It simultaneously provides a way for these emerging scholars and artists to enter into conversation with one another and reach new publics in Europe.