In the last decades, the vexed intersections between trauma and representation have proved to be among the most fruitful grounds for contemporary visual culture around the globe. Artists constantly develop new strategies to explore the expectations, experiences, and effects of grievous events, thereby challenging conventional configurations between truth and reality, fact and fiction, history and memory. In light of these critical concerns, this session brings together four prominent visual artists to present their own works and to discuss them with the audience. Damir Arsenijević is a literary theorist and psychoanalyst in training, working and practicing in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is a founder of the art-theory group ‘Jokes, War, and Genocide’ and his artistic and theoretical interventions are located at the intersection of art, academia, and activism.
Omer Fast is a video artist based in Berlin. He holds an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. Much of his work delves into the psychology of contemporary trauma, often relying on the blurring of memory, retelling actual events deploying cinematic conventions.
Kasia Fudakowski studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University. Since moving to Berlin in 2006, her work has developed in a multidisciplinary way that incorporates sculpture, film, writing, and performance.
Abdessamad el Montassir is artist-researcher affiliated with the advanced research institute IMéRA in Marseilles, France. Born in Boujdour, Sahara (southwestern Morocco), he uses the places of his childhood as a starting point for rethinking histories with reference to collective memories, fictions, and non-material archives.
Moderated by Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier and Afonso Dias Ramos
2019
