[spectre] CFP: Art & Activism (Leiden, 13-15 dec 17)

[Andreas Broeckmann]

From: Bram Ieven <b.k.ieven at hum.leidenuniv.nl>
Date: May 2, 2017
Subject: CFP: Art & Activism (Leiden, 13-15 dec 17)

Leiden, The Netherlands, December 13 - 15, 2017
Deadline: May 31, 2017

Art & Activism: Resilience Techniques in Times of Crisis
International Conference

Hosted by the Research Center for Material Culture of the Volkenkunde 
Museum and the Leiden University Center for Arts in Society (LUCAS)

Confirmed Keynotes:  T.J. Demos (University of California Santa Cruz), 
and Susan Cahan (Yale University)

The conference Art & Activism aims to understand the force of art to 
engage and express political sentiment. At the heart of any art that can 
be called activist is a firm revolutionary belief in the possibility of 
societies reforming and improving. Behind its obvious involvement with 
present issues and concerns, activist art is always oriented to shaping 
an ameliorated future. This public role is not uncontested. The arts are 
(perpetually) under attack. A sense of crisis, moreover, is widely felt 
among contemporary artists and activists, who experience precarity, 
marginalization, and vulnerability on a daily basis and may put their 
bodies on the line. The idea of crisis, both in the arts and in society, 
has been widely articulated by scholars and critics. This 
interdisciplinary conference aims to create a space in which 
participants from scholarly, artistic and activist backgrounds can learn 
from and collaborate on a horizontal plane.
It specifically invites contributions that scrutinize, assess and 
critique resilience techniques; technologies, technics and tools 
developed by individuals and groups in the form of material and/or 
knowledge practices that are developed to cope with (structural) crises. 
Resilience articulates more than simply a state of being, faculty or 
habit; it refers to an active ability to rebound and spring back from 
deforming forces, to recompose oneself and rebuild what has been 
destroyed or put under pressure. When we argue that the arts can 
contribute to and help build up civil and political resilience, 
resilience also points towards an element of civil, aesthetic and 
political ‘elasticity’.  The arts are a site where activist strategies 
and techniques can be developed and performed by fostering the 
imagination into new modes to “resist!” but also to “persist!”

List of possible topics:
- Why have there been no great [x] artists? The legacy of feminist art 
historical critique in an intersectional and transnational framework
- A Resilience Studies? Resilience in the context of shock and disaster 
capitalism in (post)modernity; Relational resilience as “supported 
vulnerability” (Judith V. Jordan); Artistic research into resilience 
techniques (somatechnics)
- Affective politics: Artistic and cultural practices of reparations, 
reconciliation and redressive gestures; Infrastructures of Feeling 
(Raymond Williams); Cruel Optimism and Intimate Publics (Lauren Berlant)
Whose lives matter? Material practices of collecting in the scope of 
colonialism and war with attention to bio- and necropolitics in art 
world wide
- Structural inequality in the arts industrial complex; Genealogies of 
particular social movements and artistic movements working together

We particularly encourage attention to the resilient voices in the 
“subaltern discourses” of Indigenous, Protest and Anti-globalization 
Practices; Post-Black Art; Bio-Art; Disability Arts; Trans* Cultural 
Production, and Migrant Aesthetics.

N.B. The conference venue is equipped for ramps and an elevator for 
people with mobility issues, wheelchair users, and equipment for 
visually impaired people. Sign language interpreters can be requested 
with at least one-month notice.

Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Art & Activism (Leiden, 13-15 dec 17). In: H-ArtHist, May 2, 2017. 
<https://arthist.net/archive/15391>.

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