Conference: Encounters, Affinities, Legacies – the 18th Century in the Present Day
May 31, 2013 § 1 Comment
Yinka Shonibare, ‘The Swing (after Fragonard)’ 2001, at Brooklyn Museum © Diana Quick
The University of York, 28-29th June 2013
As the field of eighteenth century studies continues to boom within the academy, the eighteenth century – invoked around names like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Adam Smith – is becoming an increasingly frequent interlocutor in contemporary debates in the international media about society, democracy, human rights, and the economy. Whilst social and political commentators are reading our present in dialogue with our eighteenth-century past, cultural appetites for the eighteenth century on page, stage, and screen continue to grow: powerful suggestions that intertwined discourses like (E)nlightenment and modernity, central to so much eighteenth- and twentieth-century thought, remain vital to the social, political and cultural construction of our contemporary moment. This interdisciplinary academic conference and arts festival seeks to explore the complex webs of interconnection between the long eighteenth century and the ‘long’ twentieth century, from 1900 to the present.
Over the course of two days, the historic King’s Manor in the centre of York will play host to leading academics, early-career scholars, and postgraduate students from around the world, as well as showcasing the work of exciting young artists, photographers, designers, and performers from across the UK. Encounters is funded by the University of York’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, Humanities Research Centre, and Centre for Modern Studies. Visit the conference website: http://www.18thcenturyinthepresent.com/
Conference: Photography and the Unrepresentable
March 29, 2012 § 1 Comment
Taisuke Edamura, 2012
Photography and the Unrepresentable A History of Photographic (Mis)representation, University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom, 15th May 2012
Keynote Address: Professor Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds) “When History Assumes an Image: Problems with Knowing What You Are Seeing”
Photographic representation is commonly viewed as partial and fragmented. With today’s extreme overflow of images, photography increasingly emerges as formally deceptive and ideologically manipulative in how which it serves the construction, circulation, and validation of chosen discourses (e.g. colonialism, social violence and scientific truth). Further challenges to the notion of photographic representation lie in recent history: after World War II, the ethical implications of representation became a primary concern, while the very possibility of representation of traumatic events was questioned by theorists and artists alike. Yet, more recently, writings by Georges Didi-Huberman, Jacques Rancière, and Jean-Luc Nancy have sought to question the impossibility (or taboo) of representation, opening a discussion on how the links between photography, trauma and historical memory can be re-examined. How does the notion of the unrepresentable influence assumptions of photographic truth? What might the unrepresentable look like? Is there a representational impossibility specific to photography? When photography is requested to perform “adequate representation,” how and in what context does the request become justifiable? How do today’s image-making technologies affect the understanding of the unrepresentable?
This conference aims not only to interrogate contradictions and arbitrariness inherent in the idea of the unrepresentable, but also to open up new perspectives on the relationship between photography and the unrepresentable in artistic, cultural and social practices today. You can access the full conference programme here.
