Workshop "Engaging Anthropology and Art: From Postcolonial Critique to Decolonial Doing"

Workshop

"Engaging Anthropology and Art: From Postcolonial Critique to Decolonial Doing"

Date: Friday, 26 July 2019, 09:00 – 17:00

Location: IBZ, Amalienstr. 38, 80799 Munich

Conveners: Philipp Schorch and Christopher Balme
Institut für Theaterwissenschaft und Institut für Ethnologie der LMU München

Participants: Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Alex Flynn, Helen Gilbert, Lisa Skwirblies

Admission: free
Registration required via mail theaterwissenschaft@lrz.uni-muenchen.de

Workshop Programme

The two main intellectual domains through which indigenous material and visual cultures have been studied and exhibited are anthropology and art. Both fields exist separately within the academic and museum worlds, but interactions and overlaps have begun to emerge. What happens, then, when both disciplinary and curatorial mechanism are blended, or when anthropological investigations are artistically performed and art is seen, not as a purely aesthetic exercise, but as a complex human expression exposed to, and constitutive of history with political efficacy? Moreover, what happens when such an expression exceeds the explanatory frameworks of anthropology and art altogether?
This workshop addresses these broader issues by paying particular attention to the methodological potentialities of art, including performance and theatricality. Rather than formal papers, we ask each participant to prepare a 20-30 min presentation of work-in-progress research material, which considers the following questions: 1) How can performative artistic interventions be methodologically geared towards the interrogation of human affairs to address academic concerns? How can they, for example, enable us to turn archival and museum collections from static records of the past into dynamic resources used in the present and mobilized towards the future? What happens then, if we approach archives and museums, not only as mechanisms and structures of collecting, ordering and governing, but also as dynamic-contingent processes, heterotopian spaces, and living resources for creative interventions and utopian (re)imaginations? In other words, what happens when we move from postcolonial critique to decolonial doing? And how can performative artistic interventions facilitate the required thinking-by-doing, e.g. by experimentally researching and arguing in exhibitionary environments? 30 minutes of open and critical conversation will follow each presentation. A limit of seven participants will allow one hour per presentation/conversation.