Meena
Alexander
'Translated
Lives: The Poetry of Migration'
What does it mean to produce
art in a condition of migrancy? What becomes of memory that
irrupts into the present?
The attempt to make up a past requires a febrile, perilous
translation. And at times
this species of translation sets up a powerful reverberations
between the activities of
decolonisation and the fraught world of multicultural America. And
there is an edge of violence
in this connection, part of the current of the public world as I
understand it. I muse on
the shifting worlds I inhabit, the borders I cross in my dreams. There
is a violent edge to the
migrancy that marks my life in New York City, a dense, compacted
racialised metropolis, where
immigrants from all over the world have poured in, bound under
the sign of America. And
it has structured my reflections. Who am I? Where am I? When am
I? At the tail end of the
century, these perfectly ordinary questions that a poet asks herself
require an acknowledgement
of the violent densities of place. How can we move into a truly
multicultural world, reimagine
ethnicities, without an acknowledgement of hard, overlapping
worlds? The Muslim woman
raped in Surat, the Hindu women stoned in Jersey city, co-exist
in time, cleft by space
they forge part of the fluid diasporic world, a world in which I must live
and move and have my being.
I think of Derek Walcott’s lines: "that terrible vowel, / that I!"
And I understand that my
need to enter richly into imagined worlds, cannot shake free of
what my woman's body brings
me. I cannot escape my body and the multiple worlds of my
experience, as a child
I moved between India and North Africa and those years are vivid to
me. And the sort of translation
the poem requires, ’translate’ in an early sense of the verb
meaning to carry over, to
transport - for after all what is unspoken, even unspeakable must
be borne into language -
forces a fresh icon of the body, complicates the present till memory
is written into the
very texture of the senses.
Francesco
Bonami
'Kula of
Contemporary Visions: Rituals of Exchange in a Ring of Cultures'
I borrowed the idea from the anthropologist Branislaw Kasper Malinowski who, in his famous book Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), described the Kula as a system of exchange in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, where the transaction of objects, mostly armshells, acquire a symbolic value during the course of travel and where the travel itself becomes a magic ritual of communication and success. Today, working and looking a the contemporary art circuit, we are witness to an increasing development of events, the expanding geography and a tightening of professionals' discussion toward a complex network of ideas and contradictions. We have created our own cultural Kula, where the movement of ideas and contemporary art objects creates a new perspective on the symbolic value of those ideas and objects. A new economy of culture is rising from a not-linear panorama of international art exhibitions. Even the same concept of "Otherness" assumes the role of a new currency. Passing from one curator's hand to another, Otherness reaches an abstract value and a virtual dimension. Otherness is transformed into a "geographic expansion" where different visions are converging and moving. Otherness itself becomes a nomadic entity, a floating raft where contemporary culture survives the self-defeating idea of globalisation. Approaching the turning point of our civilisation and the shattered vision of art history, our questions focus on the challenging idea
Isaac Julien
’Resisting
Representations’
The first hundred years of cinema have
demonstrated how problematic is the representation of peoples of African
descent. From Birth of a Nation to Pulp Fiction we find “the repertoire
of stereotypical figures drawn from ’slavery days’ has never entirely disappeared”
(Stuart Hall).
Sexuality and race are so powerfully
intertwined in the visual repertoire of racism in cinema that in my own
work I have been compelled to commit myself to a political diasporic consciousness.
I make films which use a palimpsest aesthetic, one which goes against the
grain of conventional expectations of cinema. This can be one way of “undoing
the colonialist imaginary of the archive”. Contesting the visible and psychic
mechanisms which govern the racist fantasies and stereotyping of African
peoples in the world can be a way of unlocking the hidden desires and anxieties
at work in global moving image culture.
I am interested in the relationship
between theory and practice and its application to the cultural politics
of filmmaking and art. In this presentation the question of identity will
be of paramount importance - it has occupied a central position in debates
for black practitioners involved in the field of representational practices
of fine arts, photography and film in Britain for the last decade. As opposed
to the easy essentialising of an identificatory politics that comes from
both white supremacist thinking and black nationalist reactions to my oeuvre
(in part due to its sexual representations), I see making films or installations
as sites of resistance, contesting the narrow placing that black
artists and film-makers find themselves in, in a culture where debates
about ’black authenticity’ or ’categorical imperatives’ reign. Who is your
audience? Are these images which deal with race or racism really art? Does
making films about blackness and gayness mean one is always only countering
racism? Can one resist discussing ’race’ when one is looking at art or
film, when there are representations of peoples of colour in it? How does
one attempt to re-signify black representations which have been ’fixed’
in the moving image culture? Can racism in global-image culture be transcended
just by constructing a critical genealogy of visual knowledge? In discussing
my own work, I hope to explore the above questions, through showing extracts
from my films, from Territories (1984) to Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White
Mask (1996), as well as my recent installation work, ’Trussed’.
Armin
Medosch
Geography
is (not) History: From-Munich-to-London-to-Johannesburg (via Sao Paulo)
Recently a British Telecom billboard of map of the earth included the phrase "geography is history" written in large type that almost covered the globe. Marketing strategies like this suggest that with the worldwide flow of information in digital networks almost every form of human experience can be substituted by technological forms of communication, making the space that we inhabit with our bodies obsolete (perhaps even obsoleteness is outdated since history will come to an end in a technological heaven). This crude form of technological determinism is also often linked to even more repressive thought patters such as social Darwinism and economic neoliberalism, and stands as a significant attempt to replace thinking, analysis and critique through mere ideology and target group manipulation. The so-called technological impact on society is not created by technology, which has no agency of its own, but rather through people, through the way in which they develop, apply, market, manufacture and spread things over the world. Yet there remain certain qualities which are perhaps intrinsic to a technology, an opportunity one technology would offer over others and thereby have a potential to change the world in one way or the other. But there is no automatism that guarantees that this potential is fulfilled. So we have to look at the factors influencing the technology-culture relationship. These factors or players are the well-known ones from real life - a complex and intertwined system of money, political regulation, consumer habits, media, culture and, yes, some aspects of technology. To give a brief example, a recent article in the FT revealed that the recently privatised Telkom in South Africa has since 1994 installed less then 150'000 new phone lines a year. "Distribution of telephones in South Africa is one of the starkest legacy's of apartheid", writes the FT, which I cite here because one would not consider it a 'stormfront' medium for battling social inequalities, and the article concludes that "there are 64 lines per 100 whites, compared with fewer then 3 per 100 blacks". The paper which I will present is like a speedy journey around some questions, geographical spaces and cultural identities, which I found live, online and in media between Munich and London, Sao Paulo and Johannesburg.
Salem
Mekuria
'From the
Diaspora'
New diaspora,
old diaspora, at one time or another, we all try to imagine 'our' Africa,
wherever we may be. In this presentation, I would like to look at a few
examples of how African women in the diaspora have attempted to engage
with issues of African women on the continent, as well as how we have represented
the women and the issues on film to audiences in the West. I will look
at works by Ngozi Onwurah (Nigerian/British, based in London), Alice Walker
(African American in the USA), Safi Faye (Senegalese in France) and my
own work (Ethiopian in the USA). I will present short clips from Monday's
Girls by Onwurah; Warrior Marks: The Sexual Blinding of Women by Walker;
Selbe: One Among Many by Faye; SIDET: Forced Exile and Ye Wonz Maibel (DELUGE)
by myself. Through these clips, I will examine our confused relationships
with our 'mothers' and our 'homes' as well as explore how we may not be
exempt from the attitudes and representational influences to which we are
subject in our present environments. Some of the questions I will explore
include:
1. Who is our
audience?
2. Where is
'home' for those of us who are still struggling with Africa as a site of
our 'imaginary'?
3. How do we
connect with this 'imaginary' when we embark on the road to representing
this 'home'?
4. How do we
'see' ourselves vis-a-vis the African women we capture in our films?
Kobena
Mercer
'Postcolonial
Corpse'
Considering depictions of the cruciform body in work by Keith Piper and its significant absence in work by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, this paper opens up a more differentiated view of the nude as it is figured in diaspora aesthetics. Navigating spaces within the nexus between identity, desire and death, it draws in a wide range of references - from recent cinema by Ousmane Sembene, Raoul Peck and Salem Mekuria, through the afro-kitch cliché of the Black Christ, to contemporary work by Albert Chong, Rene Stout and Kara Walker - to examine how the postcolonial subject responds to the historical challenge of cutting one's losses.
Manthia
Diawara
’What
is World Cinema, and What is African Cinema in World Cinema?’
This paper will explore the grammar of world cinema and African cinema’s relation to it. By world cinema I mean the international cinema that is motivated and nurtured by art, movie-theatres, festivals, schools, and cultural centres in cosmopolitan settings. The world cinema is also defined by its opposition to Hollywood cinema, just as world music is defined in opposition to popular American and British music. I will look at Clando, Dankan, Tableaux Ferailles, and Les Damiers to show how they deploy the mise-en-scene, thematics, and montage system of world cinema.
Charles
Merewether
'Aftermath'
This paper will explore the concepts of place and the past in a time of migratory cultures and culture of mass media that are founded within an economy of total mobalisation and circulation. What does it mean to experience the identity of oneself as defined by one's place of origin and own history through media technologies. Does the media produce an experience which is traumatic - a catastrophic knowledge that we can neither integrate into our own experience nor communicate with others, and therefore an amnesiac condition within ourselves. Through the work of Benjamin and Heidegger on technology and the image, this paper will address how technologies of communication have the power to bring forth and emplace the subject but withhold the experience and knowledge which it presents. This will provide the ground on which to delimit 'representational thinking' in favour of the concept of the trace and begin unravelling some of the reasons for the contemporary fascination in monuments and memorials, cultural heritage and the archive.
Naín
Nómez
'Exile Writing:
The Rooting Memory and the Search for the Lost Identity'
Based on the
discussion of some general features of the phenomena of exile and migration,
I will show how certain intellectual groups from the Chilean diaspora search
for explanations for their exile through the symbolic representations in
their writings. Literary discourse thus acts as a source, product and installation
of elements to recover and regenerate lost identity.
The exiles'
constant moving between their home countries and the new spaces where they
have to unwillingly dwell for survival, and the eventual return home, creates
an unprecedented situation for these uprooted subjects. They experience
a pendular motion between their uprooting and the reconstruction of a never
finished identity. Chilean exile writing alludes obsessively to this pendular
movement undergone by the exile, who makes efforts to recover the original
source of memories and roots while, at the same time, experiences failures
that make him/her aware that such identity is in endless motion and reconstruction.
Thus, exile, uprootedness, memory and the search for lost identity seem
to be, in our time, not only the distinctive features of the exile but
also a life paradigm of an increasing number of people in the world.
Andries
Oliphant
'Diversifying
Arts Funding Through Strategic Partnerships'
This paper will provide an overview of local and international policy contexts with regard to funding the arts, and proceed to make some specific suggestions on strategic partnerships as a way of enhancing financial and other resources for the arts in the 21st Century.
Richard
J. Powell
'Three Artists
on the Implications of Diaspora'
Looking back on the careers of painters Wifredo Lam (1902-1982), Gerard Sekoto (1913-1993), and Loïs Mailou Jones (b.1905), this paper will examine the phenomenon of a modernist aesthetic that employs a conscious (and wilful) intercultural exchange between artists and the rest of the world. For Lam, Sekoto, and Jones, transversing national, racial, and linguistic boundaries was both liberating (in terms of their own respective art forms) and necessary (for their own personal and professional survival). Of course what individuated the concept of diaspora in the works and lives of these artists was the realisation that the cultures and peoples of Africa in particular provided them with new and radical ways of seeing themselves and others. Whether this view of Africa revised and restructured the prevailing primitivist discourses in modern art (Lam), turned the continent of Africa and its peoples into multi-dimensional, complex entities (Sekoto), or replaced colonialist and imperialist ideas of black cultures with views informed by universalist and cultural nationalist positions (Jones), it signalled the beginning of a postmodern global strategy in the arts that, in these and other instances, peoples of African descent played a major role in its implementation. Even within our own late 20th century moment of cultural redefinitions and multiple paradigms, this perspective on a "transAfrican" reality (to paraphrase the African American artist and scholar Jeff Donaldson) resonates with other artists and intellectuals worldwide who are similarly motivated to have their life's work connect to something or someone beyond the local and familiar.
Giyatri
Chakravorty Spivak
'Women'
Globaisation is defining a singular woman in the name of diversity. This, to follow Mahmood Mamdani's powerful formulation, is "feminism by analogy". What are some of the aporias of this fix? How do s-called diasporic women figure here? How is telecommunication being used to consolitate the situation? Where international conferences remain out of touch with the subalter, telecommunication need not. In a somewhat previous conjuncture, postfordism masqueraded as "small is beautiful", yet helped centralise capital. Would it be 'politics by analogy" to see the cultural self-presentation of telecommunication in the same way? How do we displace the polarisation between hybridity and ontopology by thinking about the separate space of women in the politics of culture? What is it to think women's specificity in the hybridity of the rural and the urban in the South, of the newly emerging NGO-culture that negotiates borders - and in migration, exile, diaspora, shuttle? How synchronous is this space? What is diachrony here? Are the epistemic theories of Colonial Discourse studies restricted to a historically specific phenomenon?
Ravi
Sundaram
'Endless
Beginnings: Reflections on Troubled Electronic Journeys in the Periphery'
Any critical consideration on the digital age from the vantage point of a peripheral society like India is a lonely exercise. Consider, for example, that the cultural representations of science and technology have historically been state-sponsored and monumentalist. The phantasmagoria of the technosphere has not excited dissenting cultural voices, who in fact have been ambivalent about technology. Add to this the violence of unequal development and peripheralisation with one of the lowest telephone saturation rates in the world.
Paradoxically, all this has not stopped the digital imaginary from inserting itself firmly in urban India. Part a result of temporal acceleration from the rise of East Asia, part Western multinational assault, the digital world is in fact crucially implicated in the new technocultures of violence and speed that have emerged in daily life in India's cities.
This paper looks
at the implications of this new irruption by juxtaposing fragments from
older technological journeys - those of colonialism and nationalism. In
the case of colonialism we examine the space of the train, which first
introduces the speed of western modernity in colonial India. We then look
at the abstract monumentalist technological space of nationalism, which
simultaneously mythologised the Village as the crucial reference point
of cultural politics.
In looking at
the current conjecture we seek to look at the troubled implication of digital
space in the violent transitions of the 'Third World' city, and attempt
to complicate received notions of 'hybridity' and modernity now current
in the West.
Pauline
Terreehorst
'The Place
You Want To Be'
The emergence of the Internet as the outcome of telematics has raised questions, hopes and fears about every aspect of our future society. Sometimes it is perceived as a global revolution, which will create total new relationships towards people and objects. However looking closer to the developments in the last two centuries, we should concede that the possibilities of the Internet are nothing more and nothing less than the outcome of a long process. I will argue that the emergence of the Internet is a major event in a long journey that will us bring back home. The last two centuries have made it possible that we bring the whole world into our homes. Not only images and sounds, by radio and television, but also fabrics and tastes due to the immense global trade accumulating in our homes. We travelled a lot more, everyone was mobile, but at the same time we used this mobility to stay where we are and yet be a cosmopolitan. Our homes and their surroundings therefore need more attention. It does matter where you live, where your family lives, how your home looks like, how you enjoy every aspect of its surroundings because in general home is the place where you want to be. Although it will become possible to work and live 'everywhere' with the aid of telematics, and to become a nomad, this is neither an inevitable, nor a desirable outcome. The speed of communication will install a need for life in a slower gear, for intense sensuality, for the re-evaluation of personal relationships.
Els
van der Plas
'Funding
and Culture: Searching for New Approaches'
It is important
to realise that funding organisations are mostly western-based. The dependence
of African art exhibitions on western money is therefore a complex subject
that needs to be addressed. This issue raises an important question: Is
there a contemporary approach towards funding that can balance the two
parties, bearing in mind that equality is always difficult to reach when
power is involved and it is no easy matter to break with a structure based
on inequality?
The new policy
of decentralisation is now being adopted by many organisations involved
in joint development projects. These organisations aim to go beyond neo-colonial
attitudes and approaches while still holding the purse strings, sometimes
with strange results. While international co-operation has always been
a matter of negotiation, communication and coming to joint decisions to
the benefit of both parties, treating your next-to-one-neighbour differently
to your next-door-neighbour is an odd way of showing respect. On the other
hand, some have more than others.
It is equally important that our focus remains art within the domain of global solidarity. The involvement of the sponsor in art is necessary in order to judge the merits of projects. Culture is not an easy field to judge, and expertise within the 'field' is needed in order to make balanced decisions.
Achille
Mbembe
’Narratives
of Identity and Difference in Late 20th Century Africa’
This lecture will point to
the necessity of reconceptualising the relationship between the study
of African identities and
the place-bound theorisations implied in such terms as ’territories’,
’region’, ’nationality’,
’race’ and ’ethnicity’. Combining in various registers cultural studies
approaches with an interpretative
political economy, I will open up the question of identity
and difference as both politics
and inheritance, fluidity and fixity, as based on mobility and
locality. I will argue that
the dynamic - and deadly - tension between the diversity of subjects,
cultures and identities
on the one hand, and the homogenising ideologies of African racial
and cultural essences (black,
white, coloured, indian*) on the other, holds the key to our
understanding of difference-making
in contemporary Africa. Finally, I will highlight the ethical
implications of the intertwining
of narratives and practices of difference with the "formations
of violence" in late 20th
century Africa.
Sarat
Maharaj
’"semi-Semitic
Serendipitist*you*Europeanised Afferyank": diaspora, damaged life, difference’
This contribution looks at
’diaspora’ as the unending scene of translation. How to deploy the
idea as an exploratory rather
than an explanatory term - one that allows us to probe rather
than explain away contemporary
experience as ceaseless rephrasing of elements thrown up
by cultural collision and
mix? The more tricky inflections of diaspora - the penumbra of
binaries such as homeland,
identity, origin, authentic self/other that it rakes up and does not
find easy to shake off are
scanned. How to keep our understanding of diasporic
consciousness open-ended
as ’liquidities of différance’ - a tight rope walk between
fundamentalist demands for
absolutist notions of identity and the desire to fix ’hybridity’ as
something resoundingly positive,
celebratory? Historical violation, scarring and damage are
inscribed in ’diaspora’.
In institutionalised discourses on the diasporic this has tended towards
fixing ’victimage’ as some
sort of accusing, privileged point of authenticity. Against this how
to voice an ethics of ’memory-work’
- to search out ways of articulating the intensities,
unspeakables and untranslatables
of the experiences of survivors and victims. Such
memory-work implies a constant
review of the gains and losses of ’cultures in diaspora’ -
something this contribution
touches on through a look at artworks and art practices.
Howardena
Pindell
’Diaspora/Realities/Strategies’
African-American artists
in the diaspora face continuing cutbacks in American government
funding of the arts due
to conservative pressure in Congress, leading to the restriction and/or
curtailment of organisations
serving African-American communities and the general public.
Contradictory and often
negative reception and rejection of their work in the mainstream
American and international
European-based visual arts communities is accompanied by the
suppression and ferocious
censure or trivialisation of art historians and art critics who wish to
change and diversify the
canon.
African-American artists
willing to cynically indulge in producing negative-stereotype
imagery of African Americans
often find the reception warms in the European community as
their works become acceptable
commodities for the consumption of mainstream Eurocentric
communities. This panders
to racism and further enhances excuses for negative formations
of public policy set in
motion by conservative elements. Various strategies have been
developed by African-American
artists to counter this and cope with other complex forces
that seem to implant permanently
the malicious practices of the past that restricted women
and non-Europeans.
The dialectics of
the past embedded and reproduced in the global and local
corporate media has unfortunately
maintained or kept in motion subtle reminders of colonial
practices in a post-colonial
period. The result: narrowing of creative possibilities for nations of
the global community, leaving
diverse cultural productions once again vulnerable to
appropriation, co-option,
and worse. This new round of restrictions is accompanied by the
exasperating implication
that efforts made to ensure a balance over a very short period of
time failed to yield instant
healing of past evils because of imagined shortcomings of those
targeted and victimised
by earlier colonial structures.
Peter
Wollen
’Globalisation
and the Poetics of Place’
In this talk I shall be taking
my cue from George Lipsitz’s recently published book, Dangerous
Crossroads, in which he
discusses the globalisation of popular music. I want to investigate
the push-and-pull relationship
between the 60s idea of a homogenised and centralised ’global
village’ and the contrary
forces of connection to local places and local cultures, stretching
down even into highly specialised
local microcultures. I shall be looking at film and visual art,
rather than music as Lipsitz
does, and I shall try to talk about money and power as well as
aesthetics. In particular,
I want to make some comments on the concepts of ’national culture’
and ’national cinema’ in
today’s world and suggest how they can be both helpful and
unhelpful, both authentic
and inauthentic. In this context, one focus of my thought will be the
role played by film festivals
and the construction of what the Brazilian video-artist, Arturo
Oman, has called the new
genre of the ’film festival’ and its relationship to a long succession
of national ’New Waves’.
Another focus will be the blockbuster international art exhibition. I
shall be paying particular
attention to the impact of the show, Magiciens de la Terre, held at
the Pompidou Centre in Paris
in 1989. Finally, I shall try to develop a way of relating
contemporary aesthetic trends
to new socio-political theories of the ’World City’ and the
complex ways in which globalisation
constitutes new types of core-periphery relationships
across different regions
of the world.
Catherine
David
’Mega
and/or Meaning Policy’
What can be the meaning and
purpose of a documenta today, at the close of this century, when similar
large-scale exhibitions have been called into question, and often for very
good reasons? It may seem paradoxical - or deliberately outrageous - to
envision a critical confrontation with the present in the framework of
an institution that over the past twenty years has become a mecca
for tourism and cultural consumption. Yet the pressing issues of today
make it equally presumptuous to abandon all ethical and political demands.
In the age of globalisation
and the sometimes violent social, economic, and cultural transformations
in entails, contemporary artistic practices, condemned for their supposed
meaninglessness or ’nullity’ by the likes of Jean Baudrillard, are in fact
a vital source of imaginary and symbolic representations whose diversity
is irreducible to the (near) total economic domination of the real. The
stakes here are no less political than aesthetic - at least if one can
avoid reinforcing the mounting spectacularisation and instrumentalisation
of ’contemporary art’ by the culture industry, where art is used for social
regulation or indeed control, through the aestheticisation of information
and forms of debate that paralyse any act of judgement in the immediacy
of raw seduction or emotion, in what might be called the ’Benetton effect’.
Overcoming the obstacle
means seeking out the current manifestations and underlying conditions
of a critical art which does not fall into a precut academic mould or let
itself be summed up in a facile label. Such a project cannot ignore the
upheavals that have occurred both in documenta’s institutional and geopolitical
situations since the inaugural exhibition in 1955 and in the recent developments
of aesthetic forms and practices. Nor can it shirk the necessary ruptures
and changes in the structures of the event itself.
Andreas
Huyssen
’The
Voids of Berlin’
This lecture will explore
the architectural, urban, and historical issues facing the reconstruction
of Berlin as the German capital since the fall of the Wall and the collapse
of the East German state. Focus will be on the major building projects
in Berlin’s multiply voided centre and on Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum
Project.
John
K. Noyes
’Theorising
Mobility: Itineraries, Nomadism, and the Writing of History
Debates concerning nation,
race and gender require a careful theorisation of mobility. Once
the question of mobility
is introduced, the categories of identity that these debates are based
on become increasingly problematic.
Representations of individual subjectivity always
involve a relation to space
that is fundamentally different from the shared spaces that
characterise group identities
and allow the writing of history as a mapping of group identity
onto territory. Subjectivity
has always been measured in relation to mobility, and yet the
nature of this relation
changed drastically with the advent of modernity. The focus of
modernity gave rise to narratives
of subjectivity as personal itineraries, departures from and
returns to sovereign territory.
The writing of history has depended ever since on these
itineraries. But the same
forces of modernity also led to the emergence of counter-narratives
based on radically different
representations of mobility. These nomadic representations
conceive of subjectivity
as a series of narratives that do not depend on sovereign territory for
their authority. Instead,
subjectivity emerges through mobility outside of territory. Thinking
about subjectivity and identity
according to an alternative model of mobility allows us to
query in positive and productive
ways our understanding of group identity in South Africa
today.
Lorna
Ferguson
’Cultural
Converters: Biennales and Cultural Commodification’
After more than four decades
of legislated cultural separation under Apartheid and nearly two
of international boycott,
the first Johannesburg Biennale was planned to reintroduce South
African contemporary art
and artists to the international cultural arena and invite the
international community
to engage with issues prevalent in the new South Africa.
Within the context
of national political consultation leading up to South Africa’s first
democratic elections, the
Biennale structured itself on a political model. The broadest
possible democratic
inclusion of South African artists was accepted as necessary as well as
a wide, representative presentation
of contemporary art from around the globe. Like the
Havana and Dakar Biennales,
the Johannesburg Biennale brought a focus to art produced in
historically marginalised
countries and racially marginalised communities in many first world
countries, attempting to
challenge or investigate beliefs within the hegemony of so-called
established art centres
in North America and Europe.
This paper will assess
the successes and failures of the first Johannesburg Biennale
within these parameters
and comment on the broader importance of providing a forum for
debate on important political
and socio-economic issues which affect the contemporary art
world.
Vasif
Kortun
’Instant
History’
The political and economic
forces that sustain the mega-exhibition model are obscured by
the civilising gesture of
the exhibition. The mega-exhibition takes place where there is
neither an extensive constituency
nor substantive cultural exchange. It is a provincial
enterprise for a restless
town with an institutional desire. While the mega-exhibition
dismantles the provincial
grip on local culture, and provides the grounds for the global
’transfer’ (as in sports)
of the artists and curators, it also suppresses the authentic
possibilities. The works
are massified and installed over huge spaces with little aesthetic or
intellectual care. By attempting
to stimulate interest in contemporary culture, the mega-
exhibition circumvents healthy
exhibition potentials by usurping space and funds. Without
proper pedagogical support
as well as other provisions that would make the cultural
translation possible, the
mega-exhibition becomes the most irrelevant exhibition type and
claims to be irreplaceable
by the very fact of its functioning as a singular model of its city.
The most appropriate mega-exhibition
model for today is one that moves towards its
dispersal for processual,
smaller, and meaningful exchange.
Taslima
Nasrin
’Women’s
Cultural Identity’
There is a clear conspiracy
to keep women deaf and dumb in Bangladesh. If women do not
have their personal identity
as individuals, how can the have their cultural identity? In
Bangladesh, it is still
difficult for women to achieve any kind of a social, political or cultural
identity. Women by the hundreds
are not trained to take up the pen, and the women authors
of Bangladesh today are
quite meek. The moment a women in our society starts writing, the
first reaction of men is
that there must be something wrong with her. This paper will explore
the position of the
Bangladeshi women writers and the possibilities for the future of women’s
writing in Bangladesh, including
the formation of a women’s publishing house and changes to
religious laws against women.
Lewis
Nkosi
’Postcoloniality
as a Condition for Homelessness’
There are different conceptual
approaches to what the term ’postcolonial’ covers or refers to,
but if one puts the emphasis
on its temporal reference and to the ’post’ in postcoloniality to
mean ’after’ colonialism,
then it is possible to argue that during the period of political
resistance it was always
assumed by the colonised, mostly Third World peoples, that
postcoloniality would inaugurate
a moment of ’homecoming’ for the dispossessed and the
’homeless’.
Instead, in a majority
of Third World countries, from Cambodia, Afghanistan and
Bangladesh, to Kenya, Ruanda
and Algeria, postcoloniality has created conditions of
’homelessness’ in which
the ruling elites are able to exile creative thought as well as the
physical bodies in which
unwelcome ideas breed. There is then a developing conflict
between the idea of the
postcolonial as a celebtration of the ’local’ and what has since
emerged as an era of ’nomadism’.
The migration of dissident writers and intellectuals is only
of the symptoms.
Ivan May
’One’s
Rightful Slice of the Sponsorship Pie’
As we aproach the 21st century,
the demands on both the South African taxpayer and South
African business are increasing.
Given the financial imperatives facing Government, it is an
unfortunate fact of life
that arts and culture funding ranks below items such as education,
housing, electrification,
defence, etc. Worldwide sports bodies have recognised the
difference between donations
and sponsorship, and have substantially embraced the concept
of sponsorship. By establishing
such workable business-related and business-directed
relationships, sports bodies
are garnering a larger and larger slice of the corporate cake. The
argument developed in this
presentation looks at ways and means of assisting art and culture
in South Africa get its
rightful slice of the sponsorship pie. But this must be done in the full
realisation that in the
21st century nobody owes anybody anything, and that sustainable,
catalytic, innovative and
exemplary partherships are critical to future success. The future is
rosy!
Carol
Becker
’Surpassing
the Spectacle: America at the End of History’
With the end of the marxist
dream of total social and societal transformation, and no other
vision for all-encompassing
societal change on the horizon, the voices of America’s culture
critics have lost the goalposts
necessary to imagine a progressive future for American
society. Caught in a series
of contradictions which challenge the basic premises and myths
upon which the society had
previously been constructed, America is now fighting the battle of
who and what can be called
American - what values, what priorities, what groups of people.
How does America’s past
sense of itself incorporate the new demographics and social values
at the centre and at the
margins of a society? How can America change its image of itself to
itself? The extreme right
wing, discontented with the complexity of the society in which it
finds itself, has chosen
funding for the arts as one of its primary battlegrounds. Here, in its
attempts to destroy the
National Endowment for the Arts, are buried their deepest fears
around issues of race, class
and gender. This paper focuses on particular recent events
which show the degree to
which culture, racism, and the struggles between past and present
comprise embattled ground
for America’s transformed role in world politics and its changing
demographics. It also raises
the question of what role artists and cultural critics might take in
a society that cannot grapple
with its own complexity and has increasingly, dangerously,
become Other to itself.
"That idea of ruin and dereliction,
of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself,
attached to myself: a man
from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in
middle life in the cottage
of a half neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its
Edwardian past, with few
connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big
houses of the valley, and
I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange.
Everything I saw in those
early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my
daily walk*made that feeling
more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part
of something like an upheavel,
a change in the course of the history of the country". These
words, from V.S. Naipaul’s
The Enigma of Arrival, sets the tone for my presentation.
Displacement, freakishness,
the ’upheaval’ within the self and the narratives of history, each
of these states - psychic,
semantic, philosophical, material - find yet another enthralling
expression in Salman Rushdie’s
Imaginary Homelands. We read: "The effect of mass
migrations has been the
creation of radically new types of human beings: people who root
themselves in ideas rather
than places, in memories as much as in material things, people
who have been obliged to
define themselves - because they are so defined by others - by
their otherness; people
in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented
unions between where they
were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects
reality: having experienced
several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To
see things plainly, you
have to cross a frontier". From these two departure points I intend to
examine broader and more
abstract questions: What does it mean to narrate oneself as a
book? What happens to the
’Real’ given the heightened ficticity of being? If the very dialectic
of self and other no longer
quite pertains then what is the value of a notion such as
’Otherness’? Are the perceptions
of Naipaul and Rushdie merely the nascent beginnings of a
greater upheaval? Are we
not already posthumous beings? Simulcra? Once the mirror
breaks, once the fetish
of the fragment is set aside, what then is left? In answer I turn -
perhaps - to Paul deMan
on translation, Baudrillard on the vertiginous nature of simulation,
Deleuze on Plato and the
eternal war against sophistry.
Colin
Richards
’Missing
You: Indecent Self-Possession’
In the title of this panel
discussion the preposition between ’speaking’ and ’others’ is ’of’.
Through discursive slippage,
this conjunction ’of’ is often recast as a familiar proposition -
a
truism. Here speaking ’of’
’others’ becomes an ’other’-denouncing act of self-annunciation.
So we speak ’for’, not ’of’,
others.
This seems odd, given
prolix discourses on identity mobility and multiplicity, of migrant
’multiculturalisms’ which
cross and double-cross national, ethnic, metropolitan, sexual, racial
and other boundaries in
locations of culture pressure-cooked by globalisation. The instability
and internal incoherencies
of ideas of ’selves’ and ’others’, the ambiguities of the preposition
’of’, the complexity of
acts of ’speaking’ in themselves, should all militate against or at least
mediate any simplistic speaking
’for’ (’representing’) others.
Using a textual fragment
of lived-experience (neither confession nor autobiography) from
an historical past when
self/other identifications seemed especially entrenched as well as
selections from ’Graft’,
speaking ’of’ or ’for’ self and other is rendered irredeemably complex
and conflicted. Constitutive
of culture, such conflict involves violence. Disavowing such
violence should be contested.
So should the idea that this violence is a structurally entailed
ossification of power relations,
pressed always and everywhere into service for past relations
(the status quo) - whether
through forms of repressive/regressive nostalgias or, more
sinisterly, through forces
of reaction. If violence is always culturally entailed, it is also always
situated, obstinately particular
and often multivalent. Accounts of ’speaking of others’ need
not only to recognise this,
but act critically on just this recognition.