the very exiting temporal politics of arts-based research

October 17-18, 2013, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

The conference invites six EARN members – especially PhD candidates in the field of arts-based research – to give a ten minutes input each. If your project is concerned with the question of chronopolitics as laid out in the following introduction, you are invited to give a ten minutes presentation of your work within the conference. The presentation can be given in any media or format. Please send in a short abstract of your project and presentation to: Prof. Renate Lorenz, R.Lorenz(at)akbild.ac.at.

Deadline: July 30, 2013.
The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna cover travel expenses (up to 200 euro), accommodation and a fee (150 euro).

CONFERENCE

The conference comprises two sessions of lectures (by art-related theorists and theory-related artists) and two workshop sessions. For the workshop a call for inputs will be announced: Each workshop session will not only allow for a deeper discussion of the lectures, but also invites presentation of a number of chronopolitical projects in the field of arts-based research.

The conference NOT NOW! NOW! focuses on chronopolitics. While the field of temporality studies is relatively wide, the conference will lay special emphasis on the question of the temporal politics in the field of art. The conference departs from the premise that artistic practices are considered a productive means to challenge orderly and rigid temporal concepts and their effects on bodies and the organising of the social: How exactly and by which formats and methods can artistic practices intervene into normative, “straight,” linear and normalizing concepts of time? A specific selection of exemplary art works as well as recent debates in postcolonial and queer studies will be the starting points for our common discussions.

Contemporary queer and postcolonial studies have investigated the way in which biographies and their temporal courses are responsible for the appraising of some biographies over others, for the demand for able-bodiedness and the degree to which our notions of the normal and the respectable are constructed based on a logic of reproductive temporality. They seek to produce alternatives to a developmental concept of time, alternatives which counter the temporal cycles of nation states and capitalist markets. This coalesces with the desire to displace colonial concepts of non-coevalness by which some groups are characterized as progressive, others as regressive.

How can these temporal frameworks of normalcy on the one hand and cultural and bodily otherness on the other hand be profoundly reworked?

Is it through installating a synchronous time (Homi Bhabha), through the unruly figure of anachronism (Mathias Danbolt), or the digging for and re-enactment of past potential futures, futures that, Kodwo Eshun says, are unrealized? Is it through “temporal drag”, which bridges times by means of desire, values past feminist / denormalizing accomplishments and allows for “rage and longing, scorn and affection, for seemingly obsolete objects and subject-positions“? (Elizabeth Freeman) Or is it “re-speaking” in its double meaning of reenactment and resisting, a concept that Sharon Hayes claims for her own artistic practice?

The conference aims at participating in the debate around arts-based research by enriching the field through the investigation of chronopolitical interventions and the analysis of particular artistic practices and methods, which already have been developed.

Keynote Speakers include: Sharon Hayes (New York), Mathias Danbolt (Kopenhagen), Nana Adusei-Poku (Berlin), Jamika Ajalon (London), Suzana Milevska (Skopje, Vienna).