[Reader-list] SAA Friday Lecture on 21st Oct

[rohitrellan at aol.in]

The School of Arts and Aesthetics
Jawaharlal Nehru University
is pleased to announce the forthcoming visit of
 
Prof Griselda Pollock
 
in October 2011
-----------
 
Public Lecture

 
 Why, When and Wherefore Feminism and Art History'?
 
This lecture will look back upon and assess the contribution, need and likely future of feminism in art history and feminist art histories.
 
Friday 21st October 2011, 5 pm
School of Arts and Aesthetics Auditorium 
In the preceding week: 
an intensive a lecture series 
by 
Prof. Griselda Pollock: 
 
 
 
Art in the Time of Trauma: Aesthetics in a Post-Traumatic Era 
 
10th -14th October 2011
 5-7 pm daily at the SAA Auditorium, JNU
 
Monday, 10 October:  Horrorism and Trauma: Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing and Compassion
Tuesday, 11 October:  Dangerous Memory and the Image: The Feminist Legacies of Aby Warburg and the Virtual Feminist Museum
Wednesday, 12 October:  Concentrationary Memories: Some Questions of Cinema and Sexual Difference
Thursday, 13 October:  Art as a Transport Station: Trauma and its Dangerous Objects (Sarah Kofman, Chantal Akerman and Bracha Ettinger)
Friday, 14 October: Remembering/Forgetting Africa: Some recent issues

 
 
Most cultures and societies carry the burden of traumatic moments in history.   At the end of the twentieth century, theorists and artists increasingly registered the pressure of this burden.  Literary critics and historians have turned to Freudian theories of trauma both to analyze the legacies of war, violence, natural and man-made catastrophes and to understand themselves, as intellectuals, as registering theoretically the symptoms of such traumas in their own cultures.  The engagement with trauma has, however, only recently been taken up in the field of the visual arts, notably through engagements with the legacies of the attempted genocides of Jewish and Romany Europeans in the middle of the twentieth century, but also in the study of events in Korea, Taiwan, South Africa and the legacies of colonialism, AIDS and other more global events. 
In this series of lectures, Prof. Griselda Pollock will explore the concepts of trauma and cultural memory, and specifically examine the role of the aesthetic in relation to it, not through the contemplative response to art, but through the transformation poiesis involved in making art: the passage from trauma into culture.  
Using the various examples from Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America which has been the focus of her recent work, she will also use this model to explore the challenge of internationalizing art’s histories since the theorization of trauma both opens a passage into specific, local and contingent historical circumstances, and finds common ground in the conceptualization of such events and experiences. These lectures indicate  new directions in feminist studies in the visual arts that actually reveal the depth of its historical and human commitments.
 
***
 
Prof Griselda Pollock, Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art in the Department of Fine Art at the University of Leeds, is an eminent art historian. Her influential work has engaged with issues of gender, race and class in the formations of modernism in late nineteenth century Europe and America; the history of women in the visual arts; the work of Vincent van Gogh; women's cinema 1940-9; the legend of Tarzan: myths of empire, identity and place, and contemporary visual arts by women. Well known publications by her include Vision and Difference (1988); Differencing the Canon (1999); Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2007); Avant Garde Gambits 1888-1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (1992); and Vincent Van Gogh: Artist of His Time (1978). This lecture series draws upon her current research on trauma, history and memory after the Holocaust and Jewish Art and Modernity.
 
These lectures are free and are open to all by pre-registration which starts from September 15, 2011. Those attending lectures will be expected to engage with relevant readings, which will be made available by the School. Please write to swahijnu at gmail.com to register.