History(es) of art
Spring Seminar 2024

May 8-10, 2024
Escola das Artes, Universidade Católica Portuguesa

Call for Papers: until February 26, 2024.
Publication of results: March 4, 2024.
Format: preferably in person, with a limited number of online communications
Languages: English and Portuguese

Keynote Speakers and Artist Talks
Joana Cunha Leal
Cyril Schäublin
Erika Balsom  
Rosângela Rennó  

(more tbc)

At the end of the 20th century, Jean-Luc Godard created his Histoire(s) du cinéma. The French filmmaker's work explained, through this plural in parentheses, that it would no longer be possible to think of cinema in a single history. There were several histories. It thus defined the tone of a thought for art, especially in the 21st century, which this Spring Seminar will investigate: plurality in the relationship with history.

The seminar's objective is to think about the historicity of works of art after the end of traditions that intended, in a totalising way, to fix their meaning chronologically. It is now a question of examining strategies for visually articulating a subterranean memory in a permanent reconstruction process. As opposed to rejecting history, the question arises about the possibilities of its critical updating. What can be found in the ruins of the past? Just melancholy? Or does the energy of the present release from them (as Benjamin thought)? And what does the present do to these ruins that can still be heard?

Authors such as Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, Didi-Huberman or Claire Bishop, among others, have sought to think about ways of relating certain artistic practices with the making of history but also thought about how the assembly and relationship between works of art affect their history without of any temporal order. Benjamin, for example, stated that each work of art founds its own pre- and post-history, that is, it not only inserts itself into a previous history, but also invents a history for itself, which demands its criticism.

In the arts, the idea of an atlas of images appears, for example, in the work of Akram Zaatari, who catalogues documents, thinking about the relationship between fiction and event. Or in artists such as Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Arthur Jaffa, Atlas Group, Dayanita Singh, Isaac Julien, and Kader Attia, among others, whose artistic practices have challenged not only how stories are told but also contributed to a reformulation of the way history(ies) is constructed.

In contemporary cinema, the genre of the historical film has been recalibrated, with proposals appearing that - more than being faithful museum portraits - are reinventions that confusingly free time from historical traditions (for example, Transit, by Christian Petzold; Unrest, by Cyril Schäublin). What are the possible operations of art to make history less oppressive and more liberating?

The poet René Char once said that “our inheritance was left to us without a will”. This verse remains significant for our contemporary experience. We no longer have a will that determines history: on the one hand, this can result in disorientation, but on the other hand, it offers more dialectical openness to relate to the past in surprising approximations. Instead of excluding and restricting the story, it's about expanding it.

 In this context, proposals from different areas of research (practical or theoretical) will be accepted to think about how specific artistic research — arts, cinema, cultural studies, performance studies, philosophy, art history, literature, music, sociology of art, among others — have contributed to changing the construction models not only of art history but of all historical narratives.