28–30 November 2014
All lectures are open to public, no application required
Stiftung Universität Hildesheim
Department of Fine Arts and Art History
Kulturcampus Domäne Marienburg
Hohes Haus 202
31141 Hildesheim
Germany
The conference addresses the visual arts’ approach to “history” through the fields of art history, art practise and the role of the institution. Not so much focussing on the question of evidence, but on the question of how art visualizes (and therewith produces) notions, ideas, concepts and—equally important—sensual, bodily inquiries of history.
The conference wants to ask how artistic visualizations of events past and present create and reveal a sense of history that cannot be possibly reached by historiographical methods. This does not mean that art is illustrating history or historical events. It means to ask for (and carefully analyse) the genuine contribution of artifacts towards creating and visualizing the interwoven layers of time, their potential to reveal the strong connections of a given present towards multiple pasts, the denial of (progressive) timelines and the simultaneity of that which does not belong to the same time period, the anachronism and hetero-chronism, the reappearance of the “ghosts” or “phantoms” of—mistakenly overcome, mistakenly “closed cases” of “history”—as a vital (but mostly unaware) part of every present. Similarly, the conference will assess the role of the institution and exhibition making in producing and speculating on history. The museum as both civic site and pedagogical device offers a unique space within which to formulate, mediate and challenge different historical positions and methodologies. At a time when the museum´s relationship to its public is being re-calibrated and society appears in the grips of a perpetual presentism institutions seem to offer a vital forum from which to present new models for approaching history.
The three-day conference is part of a EU-funded five-year project called The Uses of Art initiated by the museum confederation L’Internationale, which brings together six leading European museums of modern and contemporary art: Moderna galerija (MG, Ljubljana, Slovenia); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS, Madrid, Spain); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA, Barcelona, Spain); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium); SALT (Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey) and Van Abbemuseum (VAM, Eindhoven, the Netherlands). L’Internationale is working together with complementary partners such as Stiftung Universität Hildesheim (UH, Hildesheim, Germany), but also Grizedale Arts (GA, Coniston, United Kingdom), Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU, Liverpool, United Kingdom), and University College Ghent School of Arts (KASK, Ghent, Belgium).
Program
Friday, 28 November
9:30am
Welcome and introduction (Thomas Lange, Hildesheim)
10am
Steven ten Thije (Eindhoven), “Shattered Monuments―Notions of History in Riegl, Benjamin and Dorner”
11am
Coffee break
11:30am
John Byrne (Liverpool), “Revolution 3.0: Arte Útil and the Use Value of History”
12:30pm
Lunch break
2pm
Nick Aikens (Eindhoven), “Speculative histories in exhibition and institutional practice”
3pm
Juan Cruz (London), “The Exhibition Research Centre: tangible histories”
4pm
Coffee break
4:30pm
Lena Reisner (Braunschweig), “Usership at dOCUMENTA (13)”
5:30pm
Wendelien van Oldenborgh (Rotterdam), “Beauty and the Right to the Ugly” (film screening and discussion)
Saturday, 29 November
10am
Christina Clausen (Hildesheim), “Designing Cultural Memory: The Medieval Cathedral as a “Monument of History” in 19th Century Painting”
11am
Coffee break
11:30am
Jesús María Carrillo Castillo (Madrid), “Art history as ‘story telling;’ an approach to Reina Sofia’s collection displays”
12:30pm
Lunch break
2pm
Sara Stehr (Hildesheim), “From History to Imagination: Yael Bartana’s Trilogy ‘And Europe Will Be Stunned’ Between Anachronism and the Counterfactual”
3pm
Thomas Lange (Hildesheim), “History at present: The revealing void of Schlingensief’s Container”
4pm
Coffee break
4:30pm
Alistair Hudson (Middlesbrough), “An Extended Lecture on Tree Twigs (An Ecology of Aesthetics)”
5:30pm
Georges Didi-Huberman (Paris), “Between Hysteria and History: The Dialectics of Montage in Jean-Luc Godard”
Sunday, 30 November
9:30am
Srđja Popović (Belgrade), “The Role of Art in contemporary nonviolent movements”
10:30am
Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmuş (Bucharest/Berlin), “Immaterial collections and the museum of the future”
11:30am
Coffee break
Noon
Roundtable discussion
Organized by Prof. Dr. Thomas Lange, Department of Fine Arts and Art History, at the University of Hildesheim. Conference developed by Stiftung Hildesheim Universität and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.
“The Uses of Art: History” is supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union, Mondriaan Fund. This conference is part of the five-year programme The Uses of Art—The legacy of 1848 and 1989, organised by L’Internationale.
