VLC Forum 2024: Correct History*

Forgoing the expected stylization—be it the imperative: Correct history!, a call to revise and rewrite it, or the interrogative, Correct history?, questioning whether there might be a singular narrative—the asterisk in the title Correct History* suggests a more conditional and hypothetical approach.

The VLC Forum 2024: Correct History* explores how history and historiography invariably function as acts of correction and revision while examining some of the ideological mechanisms that drive them. Discursive strands consider how historical narratives and ideological formations are created, edited, altered, and contested, including historical revisionism, whitewashing, and rehabilitation by state and other hegemonic political actors. Over three days, the VLC Forum brings together scholars, artists, and curators whose reparative and recuperative artistic strategies point toward ways of redressing historical injustice, restitution of artifacts, memorialization, and negotiating conflict, competing claims, and historical relatedness.

Curated by Eriola Pira with Carin Kuoni, the VLC Forum is presented as part of the center’s 2022–24 Focus Theme Correction* and is accompanied by a new publication with a commissioned photo essay by Hande Sever.

For up-to-date event listings, please visit veralistcenter.org or register for our Monday newsletter here.

Day one: Thursday, October 24
Conversation, Re-visioning Native Histories: 6:30–8:30pm EDT
The New School, Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, Fifth floor, New York City.

In an expansive conversation introduced and moderated by VLC Borderlands Curatorial Fellow Larissa Nez, Cree artist Kent Monkman joins Nathan Young, a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, to revisit some of the foundational narratives of the so-called United States of America, centering Indigenous figures, events, and narratives that have been erased or denied as part of the settler-colonial project.

Day two: Friday, October 25
Keynote, Naeem Mohaiemen: Prisoners of Shothik Itihash: 6:30–8pm EDT
The New School, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center/Parsons, Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Avenue, Ground Floor, New York City.

The phrase correct history has many meanings. An early, sardonic use can be found in Naeem Mohaiemen’s 2014 exhibition and book Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Prisoners of Correct History). In his keynote lecture, Mohaiemen revisits this project in the present, inviting us to think about the corrosive state-enforced obedient and hagiographic histories that have insisted on a single narrative at every bend of Bangladesh’s journey since the partition of British India.

Dinner & performance, VLC Forum 2024: Community Dinner: 8–10pm EDT
The New School, Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, 5th Floor, New York City.

The Community Dinner anchors the VLC Forum, gathering program participants, the VLC and New School communities, and the public for a free dinner and celebration for all. This year’s dinner features music and a special performance by Selfless Abandon, a collaboration between visual artist and performer Miriam Parker and soundmaker and composer Luke Stewart.

Day three: Saturday, October 14
Conversation, Queer(ing) History: 11am–12:30pm EDT
The New School, Starr Foundation Hall, 63 Fifth Avenue, Lower Level, New York City.

Andrea Geyer, Adam HajYahia, and Carlos Motta discuss their work as artists, researchers, and curators to explore approaches to recuperating and rehistoricizing the obscured and erased pasts of women, queer people, and sex workers. More than simply rewriting inclusive histories and expanding the canon, queer approaches to historiography question the very construction of history as a singular, linear, universal experience undergirding notions of empire, nationhood, and heteropatriarchy.

Conversation, Relative Histories: 1:15–2:30pm EDT
The New School, Starr Foundation Hall, 63 Fifth Avenue, Lower Level, New York City.

Thinking through and beyond historical relatedness, relations, and relativism of past and ongoing colonial negation, imperial violence, and genocide, Palestinian architectural scholar and urbanist Mahdi Sabbagh and writer and genocide scholar Zoé Samudzi take on the coloniality of the museum, the ethnographic archive, and architecture. They discuss the role of objects and rituals in reckoning with history, narrating counter histories, and the potential for solidarity and liberation across past and ongoing struggles.

Performance lecture, Tactics of Transmission: 2:45–4pm EDT
The New School, Starr Foundation Hall, 63 Fifth Avenue, Lower Level, New York City.

Since 2022, artists Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo have researched Puerto Rican collections and holdings at the Smithsonian Institute. Their performance lecture Tactics of Transmission, which closes out the VLC Forum along with a reception, reflects on their experiences as unruly colonial subjects navigating the imperial archive and the historical gossip, findings, and revelations from their research process.

About the VLC Forum 
Launched in 2018, during the center’s focus theme If Art Is Politics, the Vera List Center Forum is an annual convening of leading voices and practitioners in the field of art and politics and a signature program of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. The VLC Forum is an open invitation to approach the political expansively. It is a platform for an in-depth, collective inquiry into the VLC’s biennial Focus Themes and showcases exemplary politically engaged art practices from around the world, including those of the Vera List Center Fellows, the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice recipient, and the Jane Lombard Fellows.

About the VLC
The Vera List Center for Art and Politics is an artist-focused research center and public forum for art, culture, and politics. It was established at The New School in 1992—a time of rousing debates about freedom of speech, identity politics, and society’s investment in the arts. A leader in the field, the center is a nonprofit that catalyzes and supports politically engaged art, public scholarship, and research throughout the world. We champion the arts as expressions of the political moments from which they emerge, and consider the intersection between art and politics the space where new forms of civic engagement must be developed. Through the VLC Seminars, the Jane Lombard Prize, artist and student fellowships, exhibitions, public programs, and publications that probe some of the pressing issues of our time, we curate and support new roles for the arts and artists in advancing social justice.