Visual and performative arts have regularly responded to both historical and present conflicts. In the research in RePAST project Kasia and her colleagues have followed numerous contemporary artistic practices related to troubled pasts of Poland, Germany, Spain, Cyprus, Bosnia, Kosovo, Ireland and Greece. In her lecture she will address moments of rupture whereby societies revise and transform their attitudes towards difficult aspects of their collective identity and address the repressions of unwelcome contents and emotions (such as guilt, shame, repulsion). The presentation is based on conviction of the dialectical relationship between art and memory politics (or more broadly between image production and memory production) – these are not only interwoven but, more importantly, constitutive of one another.
With an introduction by Professor dr Ernst van Alphen.
Katarzyna Bojarska is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies of the SWPS University in Warsaw. She is the author of articles and translations interested in the relations of contemporary arts, literature, history, and psychoanalysis. Translated among others Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Warsaw 2016). She is the author of a book Events after the Event: Białoszewski – Richter – Spiegelman (Warsaw 2012) and the editor and one of translators of Ernst van Alphen’s Criticism as Intervention: Art, Memory, Affect (Krakow 2019). Kasia is also a co-founder and editor of View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture journal www.pismowidok.org and a president of View. Foundation for Visual Culture.
This event is part of the SPEME project.