Weekend international symposium with participation of artists, curators and invited speakers who have been engaged for years in both theoretical and practical fields (artistic, curatorial, academic, activist) of potential history. They all have worked at the complex and creative intersections of topographies, methodologies, heritages, languages and politics. Drawing on this experience, they will share their research and engagement and will discuss possible scenarios of collaboration and solidarity, refusal and resistance to dominant narratives, affects and aesthetics in the face of violent forms of feeling and representation.

Basma al-Sharif on necessity of displacements and reversals in historical, political and artistic narratives, on the right to look at the landscape and countering the archival surveillant gaze. (presentation of the work on Ouroboros, 2017)

Ana Teixiera Pinto on the White West project and on the necessity of facing fascism and imperial violence both in theory and in artistic, curatorial and social practice; on the need for a decolonial debate both in academia and in art institutions, as well as on the limits of repair.

-

Basma al-Sharif is a Palestinian artist/filmmaker whose work explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.

Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. She is a guest professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg (AdBK) and a theory tutor at the Dutch Art Institute. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Third Text, Afterall, e-flux journal, Manifesta Journal, and Texte zur Kunst. She is the editor of a book series On the Antipolitical published by Sternberg Press. Together with Kader Attia and Anselm Franke, she organized the conference and podcast series The White West: Whose Universal, which took place at HKW Berlin, and she was a member of the 2022 Berlin Biennial artistic team.

-

Curator of the programme: Katarzyna (Kasia) Bojarska, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies of the SWPS University in Warsaw. Founder and head of Center for Comparative Research on Memory Cultures (CCRMC). Co-founder and editor of View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture journal. Scholar of visual culture, contemporary art and memory cultures. Translated among others Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2016). Author of a book Wydarzenia po Wydarzeniu: Białoszewski – Richter – Spiegelman [Events after the event: Białoszewski – Richter – Spiegelman] (2012). Editor and translator (among others) of Ernst van Alphen’s Criticism as Intervention: Art, Memory, Affect book (Polish edition 2019). Member of the Polish section of AICA.