Art in Times of Destruction – Symposium (NICA/OSK)
*Image Credit: Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, c.1967–72. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Rawpixel.
Dates: 24 April 2025
Time: 10:00-17:00
Location: If I Can’t Dance, WG-Plein 881, 1054 SM, Amsterdam
Academic convenors: Dr. L.C. Hartnoll, Prof. Dr. C.M. Lerm-Hayes, and N.F. de Leij
Student convenors: I. Borger and I. Kaczyńska
Contact & Registration: l.c.hartnoll@uva.nl
Registration deadline: 24 March 2025
Credits: 1 ECTS
In the face of rising fascisms, political suppression, war, and systemic colonial violence this symposium asks how aggregate crises condition post-war and contemporary art, its institutions, and its infrastructure. How might art, art history, and art theory, as inherently embedded and implicated ‘social’ practices, respond to this increasingly proliferating destruction and immiseration? What conceptual, historical, tactical, or strategic tools might we have at our disposal for understanding and evaluating our contemporary conjuncture? And what might an account of these shifting historical and material conditions enable us to think or rethink anew? What, in effect, are we to do with the mess we are in? With contributions addressing, among other things, art after the defeat of the cultural turn, managerial and material aesthetics, Palestinian histories, fascist and post-fascist art histories, this one-day symposium, organised in the context of If I Can’t Dance, gathers international art historians and theorists as well as local artists and institutional actors to begin to broach these concerns. The day will end with a roundtable to which participating students are expected to contribute. In due course, a full programme will be circulated among registered students.
Speakers include:
Elise Archias (University of Illinois, Chicago)
Sabeth Buchmann (Akademie der bildenden Künste, Wien)
Larne Abse Gogarty (University College London)
Louis Hartnoll (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Blake Stimson (University of Illinois, Chicago)
To register, please email l.c.hartnoll@uva.nl.
This event has been jointly funded by the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis and the Onderzoekschool Kunstgeschiedenis.
Credit Details
To obtain 1 ECTS
- i) Attend the symposium and submit three questions for consideration.
- ii) Submit a minimum of two questions for consideration as part of the roundtable/open session. These questions should respond to the literature, should consider the current social and political climate, and should be generative for discussion. These must be submitted a minimum of one week before the symposium.