An open workshop exploring some basic aspects of decolonial thinking and the decolonization of the gaze with Mina Karavada and Mata Dimakopoulou.
The language of the event is in Greek. The discussion is curated and moderated by Myrto Tapeinou.
At the Crossroad of John Akomfrah’s Parallel Narratives | Mina Karavanta
Taking some images from the work of John Akomfrah, a British artist originally from Ghana, as a starting point, we will explore some key aspects of decolonial thinking and epistemologies of the South as analysed in the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos. We will discuss some of the methodological choices that emerge from the key stakes of these two historical and theoretical currents. Akomfrah’s images create crossroads between histories and events from different localities and temporalities, freeing historical reading from the confines of the dominant discourses and texts that constitute history as an exclusively national narrative and deconstructing the relationship between the historical subject and otherness as the object of history.
The Decolonization of the Gaze through the Work of Anri Sala | Mata Dimakopoulou
Decolonizing the gaze? How is our gaze colonized? And what dominant or non-dominant regimes of knowledge and perception do or do not determine our gaze? What does the gaze narrate and how does it possibly discard held representations? I will approach these questions through the work of Albanian visual artist Anri Sala whose work invites us to consider what and how it has colonized our memory, experience and emotion, and at the same time to become confused with forms of recording, performance or performance that in a sense evacuate or de-concentrate our over-saturated consciousness of the world and the self. Possibly a decolonial condition in visual practice is called upon not only to challenge and deconstruct hegemonic conceptions of the world, but also to constitute multiple languages of gaze, emotion and discourse, in a dialogical, changing condition that is a field of correlation, coexistence, “cohabitation”, and not colonization. The works we will examine are on public view online: Intervista (1998), Long Sorrow (2005), Take Over (2017). Finally, are there fruitful contexts or synergies between alternative pursuits and experimentation and institutionalized and established figures on the international contemporary art scene such as Anri Sala and John Akomfrah?
GUEST SPEAKERS
Mina Karavanta
Mina Karavanta is Associate Professor of Literary Theory, Cultural Studies and Anglophone Literature in the Faculty of English Studies of the School of Philosophy (NKUA). She holds degrees in English Language and Literature from the National and University of Athens (BA), and in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton (MA and Ph.D). She specializes in postcolonial studies, critical theory and comparative literature.
Mata Dimakopoulou
Stamatina Dimakopoulou (MA, PhD Lon) is Assistant Professor in American literature and culture in the Faculty of English Studies of the School of Philosophy (NKUA). She has been Fulbright Visiting Scholar at New York University in spring 2016. Publications include articles on Surrealism, modernist magazines, U.S. poetry and art. Currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled, Singularity, Vulnerability and the Texture of Experience.