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Summer School "Walking the line - Art of border zones in
Universität Heidelberg, July 26 - 31, 2015
Deadline: May 31, 2015
Summer School "Walking the line - Art of border zones in times of crisis"
The Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context"
welcomes applications for the Summer School "Walking the line - Art of
border zones in times of crisis." It will take place from July 26 to
31, 2015 at Heidelberg University in Germany.
The summer school will engage with the production, circulation and the
disruption of art and visual practices as they navigate the (thin) line
between creative and destructive impulses in times when wars, struggles
for national independence and conflicting ideologies result in border
contestations and territorial partitions. These crises produce both
immediate and enduring physical, economic and political consequences
for persons living within affected regions, including flight from one's
homeland, traumatic histories left unprocessed between generations, and
the elaboration of repressive political systems and surveillance. Art
might be used as a propaganda weapon that affirms and enforces
demarcations or it could be a creative path to transgress contested
borders, a space to envision alternatives. The notion of the border
will be explored both as a divisive force and as a zone of crossing by
discussing larger questions about the complex and often seemingly
contradictory relation between trauma and visual/aesthetic practices on
the one hand, and complex issues of space and politics that (in-) form
these practices on the other.
The summer school is organised around three themes dealing with
Partitions, Art and Civil Society, and Trauma and Memory. In
particular, it will examine narrative modes and structures which emerge
when the raw history that inhabits subjects is transformed into
representation, or its refusal. While artistic articulations in
conflicted border zones often explicitly reflect upon collective as
well as individual experiences, they might equally be marked by the
attempt to gloss over the existence of wounds and political and social
divides. Artistic strategies become necessary as expressions in/on
border zones. The complex spatial dimensions involved call on
disciplines such as art history and anthropology to develop critical
approaches for analyzing these artistic negotiations as striking
aesthetic and cultural practices. Eschewing an understanding of art as
a looking glass to view cultures in terms of geo-political units, the
discussions will encourage critical ways of locating transregional and
transcultural relationships within a discursive field of knowledge
production and disciplinary practice.
We welcome advanced graduate students and junior researchers to apply
and present their research on the relation between art and
border/political/societal conflicts or crises. The summer school
provides a unique opportunity for learning through participant-oriented
discussions and a hands-on approach to writing. Instruction will be
delivered through individual lectures, a plenary forum and interactive
afternoon sessions consisting of guided group workshops. Participants
will bring their own written and visual material for dialogue with an
international community of peers and distinguished scholars present at
the summer school, with the objective of developing individual visual
essays relevant to the participants' research project or new
trajectories for future work.
The keynote address will be delivered by Iftikhar Dadi - art historian,
artist and curator (Cornell University) - who has extensively
researched Islamic Modernism and is currently investigating new avenues
of civic participation among emergent urban publics in South Asia.
Confirmed guests include art historian and independent curator Eckhart
Gillen who will discuss the impact of the East-West division on art
production in post-War Germany, Raminder Kaur (University of Sussex)
who will focus on issues of censorship and cultural regulation in South
Asia, Friederike Wappler (Ruhr University Bochum) who will question the
productive use of trauma as a concept for analyzing modern and
contemporary art, and Patricia Spyer (University of Leiden) who will
elaborate on the circulation of Muslim jihad VCDs in Indonesia in the
2000s. Contributing scholars from Heidelberg include Christiane Brosius
and Cathrine Bublatzky (Visual and Media Anthropology), and Monica
Juneja and Franziska Koch (Global Art History).
Interested candidates should make their applications online by May 31,
2015.
For further details of the programme and how to apply, visit the Summer
School website at
http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/summerschool.
Kindly circulate this information among graduate students who might be
interested.
