 Today
it is evident that there has been a shift in the
constitution of the global landscape. Through unprecedented events and forms, this shift has occurred in the areas of ideology, technology, economics, communication, mass movement, etc.; all of which have affected the patterns around which we have come to define certain historical formations and their link to the question of culture. Theoretical articulation of these forms and events has found expression through the discourses of postmodernism, postcolonialism, popular culture, multiculturalism, diasporicity, using as nodes of exploration motifs drawn from issues of identity, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual difference, territorial dynamics, the negotiation and transfigurations of real and virtual spaces, and the political economy of culture. Through these discourses, contemporary thinkers have meditated on the meaning of territory, the character of national affiliation and citizenship, and the infinitely complex ways in which the flow of labour and capital across national and international boundaries interact, impact upon, reformulate and, indeed, create culture. They have also addressed themselves to explorations of concepts and prospects of metropolises, both real and virtual, as spaces of anonymity as well as the reformulation of identity, as locales of conjunction and tension, adaptive metamorphoses as well as violent ruptures, all of these conditioned by both desire and anxiety, ultimately shaped by, and shaping, the dynamics of cultural transactions. In the late 1970s and 1980s, much attention was paid to the sociological and spatial manifestations and implications of these political and demographic phenomena. Subsequently, our attention has broadened to include the cultural dimensions, manifest not only in the transfiguration of existing cultural formations but also in the emergence of unprecedented and very complex dynamics. Overwhelming information surges across the globe dissolve physical boundaries and subvert frontiers, bringing with them almost unmediated access to empowering knowledge and extra-geographical linkages. At the same time they underline and thrive on our vulnerability, thus producing powerful new forms of cultural incursion and domination as prior systems erode and collapse. In the event latent forces of resistance spring to the fore as threatened politics and cultures battle to re-inscribe and reassert their borders of peculiarity, sometimes from within the locales of nationalist positions and expatriation in the so-called metropolis. For centuries South Africa has been, and perhaps most importantly, today, is a crucial metaphor for the implications and fascinating prospects of these interactions and tensions, and for the paradoxes of the confluence of history, geography and culture, which it has come to represent. The purpose of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale conference is to bring together, in South Africa, leading cultural thinkers, philosophers, critics, historians and artists of our time, with the challenge to review the nature and dynamics of culture at the end of this century, by looking at the epochal factors that shaped and continue to shape it: movement, race, nationalism, colonialism and postcoloniality, the collapse of the nation state and the emergence of new political formations and alliances, increasing diasporicity, the demise of ethnography and the interrogation of hegemonic epistemes, cultural consumption and new forms of cultural domination, as well as the implications of time-diminishing and new media technologies for culture and civilisation as we enter a new century. |
GENERAL
THEME
Panels
|
| At the end of the twentieth
century the world is coming to terms with the role and effect of diaspora as perhaps the dominant and most significant contributor to the state and nature of global culture. This diverse panel will examine the place - and conditions - of diaspora cultures in our time. By tracing their histories and projecting into the future, this panel will articulate the meanings, circumstances, and significance of expatriation, dispersal, and the reconstitution and redefinition of notions of community and culture. |
Cultures in Diaspora. |
| Cinema transports its
audience through time and space, and across the borders of culture and language, to explore and construct identity, collapse history, congeal ideology, invent empire, represent race, and monumentalise and deconstruct gender and sexuality. For long, the inclination of cinema with regard to Africa was to construct and unveil a ’dark’ continent, in the same manner as it framed the rest of the world as ’other’ against the implied neutrality of the ’West’. A new generation of filmmakers has replied with counter- narratives to European ’modernity’, creating audio- visual works that explore the legacies of colonialism as well as nation-building and globalisation. Cinema is both narrative and counter-narrative, a site of contestation and a purveyor of value-laden ’truths’. This panel will explore the myriad issues of film, globalisation, identity and diaspora, as well as the commodification of culture and the role of cinema as social and cultural critique. |
Cinema
and
Globalisation. |
| As with the industrial revolution
and the nuclear age, the
dominance of digital technologies in the late twentieth century has already brought about tremendous changes in the nature and running of society, as well as in the ways we communicate, relate, transact, transit and think. And as with these other epochal shifts, the negative and positive implications of digitisation and new information technologies are multiple. This panel will explore the myriad possibilities and implications of new media and communication technologies for society and culture, and speculate on the future of global culture and interaction in the digital age. |
Culture
and
Rupture in the Digital Age |
| The end of the
nineteenth century was marked by a celebratory, internationalist spirit occasioned by phenomenal advancements in transit technologies and the accumulation of wealth through global colonial structures. One feature of this spirit of internationalism was the institution of world fairs for the exhibition and celebration of human triumphs over nature. In the late twentieth century global exhibitions, in the form of biennales, invitationals and multi-national pavilion shows, have again become a significant aspect of international cultural politics. This panel of biennale directors, curators and critics will examine the nature, role, difficulties and shortcomings of mega-exhibitions, as well as their implications for late twentieth-century culture. |
The
Politics of
Mega-Exhibitions |
| Even
as we question notions of
nation and home, these concepts still resonate with deep significance and meaning for all who cannot take them for granted. In our century more writers have suffered the deprivation of home and country than ever before in history. How do the loss of place and the terrors of an unfamiliar existence affect artists and their art? And how does the experience of forced expatriation in turn reshape the individual’s understanding of home and place? This panel of writers and cultural critics, exiled and formerly exiled, will revisit the implications of displacement and relocation for culture and the artist. |
Home and Exile |
| Patronage
is the backbone of culture. In the late twentieth century there are fewer sources of patronage for the arts, with progressive communal and state withdrawal in many countries, and the collapse of traditional systems of patronage in others. One key feature of our time is the emergence of corporate funding which ties culture to capital and its complicated surge across polities and boundaries. This panel speaks of the changing face of the patron, examining the nature of funding at the turn of the century and its implications for the nature and future of cultural production and integrity. |
Funding
and
Culture in the 21st Century |
| In
’The End of Art Theory’,
Victor Burgin argues that "those independent forms of art history, aesthetics, and criticism which began in the Enlightenment and culminated in*’high modernism’ [are] now at an end", superseded by what he calls "theories of representation". Central to these theories is the discourse of Others as well as the global, post- colonial challenge to the idea of Others and the peculiarisation - and commodification - of difference. In this panel, speakers will explore the complicated nature of the discourse of Others and the processes of institutionalised difference with the aim to articulate and problematise Otherness and its implications for culture an society in our time. |
Speaking
of Others |