Andreas Huyssen (Columbia University):
Memories of Europe in the Art from Elsewhere
Keynote Lecture of the Mnemonics Summer School 2017
Frankfurt, Goethe University Campus Westend, IG 411
07 September 2017,10:00 am
Abstract: Memories of Europe in the Art from Elsewhere
The contemporary arts contain and nurture the social lives of European memory, both in Europe and abroad. But European memory cannot be fortressed. It must include memories of Europe as they circulate elsewhere in the world. The lecture will focus on three contemporary artists (Doris Salcedo, William Kentridge, and Vivan Sundaram) whose work engages with memories of political violence in aesthetic forms imaginatively appropriated and transformed from the legacies of European and Transatlantic modernism.
Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. Before joining Columbia, he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 1971 until 1986. He served as founding director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society (1998-2003). He is one of the founding editors of New German Critique and is on the editorial board of various journals. Among his publications in the field of memory studies are William Kentridge, Nalini Malani: The Shadow Play as Medium of Memory (Charta, 2013), Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford University Press, 2003) and Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (Routledge, 1995).
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