Recent and upcoming:
Gender and the Holocaust: Postgraduate/ECR In-Person Workshop, 16 September.
I will be presenting my paper titled “Semiosis, Translation, Transposition and the Art of Hannelore Baron: Confronting Interpretation of a ‘Holocaust Survivor’” as part of the Gender and the Holocaust: Postgraduate/ECR In-Person Workshop, organised by The Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. The event will take place on Friday 16th September at the Weiner Holocaust Library. For tickets please follow this link.
Conversations with Images, Memory Studies Association: Week of Virtual Events, 11-12th July 2022, online.
The Memory & Arts Working Group organised two sessions in which artworks take centre stage. The event intended to invite conversations that explore how the works address questions of memory in their medium-specific way. A short introduction to each work was followed by brief responses that opened up further perspectives and generated a wider conversation involving the audience. By looking at six works from different cultural and geographical contexts – created by Wiame Haddad, Kang Yong Suk, Hannelore Baron, Katya Oicherman, Carrie Mae Weems and Adela Goldbard – we created a multi-directional conversation that allowed the works and the memories they addressed speak to each other and provide a context for transnational mnemonic solidarity.
“Unfolding Narrative, Rethinking Memory: Interpreting Artwork by Hannelore Baron through a Reading of Natalia Ginzburg’s Voices in the Evening.” (Proposed paper) Memory Studies Association Conference, Sogang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea, July 3-7, 2022.
This paper presents aspects of my engagement with literary works that crosses geographical and theoretical boundaries to negotiate ideas of modality, materiality, and conceptual analysis of artworks through theories of intermediality and exploration of different methods for history-writing. Taking the critical theory traditionally applied to literary texts to offer insight into art practice, my aim is to offer ways to allow other narratives to unfold and the potential for associating materiality and making to literary themes of translation, anachronisms, and narratology andrecognise methods for engaging with the multi-various experiences associated to memory studies.
Memory and Arts Working Group Workshop (online), 12th January, 2022.
The theme for the MSA Conference in Seoul is ‘solidarity’, where the implications of the past can be explored in a space of transnational experience and thinking. The hope is that this will offer the field of memory studies a unique opportunity to incorporate non-Western, non-hegemonic epistemologies of memory and to resolve aspects of Eurocentrism in the field of research. However, other areas of memory studies will also be explored through presentations and papers.
I am organising an online workshop, originally planned to take place in London, that will provide opportunity for the Working Group to meet and discuss individual and group research and projects in relation to the conference and related events. This will involve some 20 participants from Europe, North and South America.
Memory Wonderlands, Art and Design studios, Prague College, Czech Republic.
Convened by Branislava Kuburovic (Prague College) and Cathrine Bublatzky (Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies). Planned to take place in Spring, 2022.
I plan to participate in the workshops that aim to proceed with the discussions started in Madrid and London on the relation between the multiplicity of memories, the nation state and the raising nationalism within Europe and in other contexts, beginning from the work of art. Following the larger theme of “(trans) national memory wonderlands”, the workshops will take critical inspiration from publications such as by Sharon McDonald Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (2013), the keynote by Aleida Assmann “’Re-Imagening’ the Nation: Memory, Identity, and the Emotions”, initiatives such as the Czech project “Memory of Nations”, and the Bubny Memorial of Silence.
This workshop sets out with the belief that artists are central agents in the field of remembering, also ‘remembering a nation state’, and in terms of their practices to perform citizenship. My personal research and the project I am working on with Sharone and Katya elates to a number of the areas they plan to consider such as the constructions of identity beyond nation state, feminism, and the role of thinking migration. I am please that through such an engagement, I am able to work with, and alongside scholars within and beyond art.
Memory and Arts: The space aside: translations between the personal and the collective memory in art practice and beyond. (Chair: Astrid Schmetterling), MSA Annual Conference, June 2021, Warsaw (online).
This panel discussion forms the first part of a collaborative project between curator and writer Rebecca Harris and artists Sharone Lifschitz and Katya Oicherman. In this panel we will reflect on the different strategies our respective work utilizes to address interplays of personal and collective memory in relation to the role of public memorial practices in our societies. Short focused presentations will provide the basis for discussion among the audience and us. This will be recorded and developed into a publication and an exhibition in the future. This panel will approach ideas surrounding the art language that permits absences and movement, leaving space for the viewer/reader’s engagement with her/his own emotional and intellectual response, so opening the possibility of an engagement with the past and our present aside of our daily experiences of public memory.
Esther, Vashti and Artemisia: Translation in Narrative Form. Part of Chochmah (wisdom): a feminist discussion series, open to everyone, fifth instalment, 26 July 2020.
Arts and Memory Working Group Seminars, Goldsmiths College, 11-12th December 2019
My presentation sought to engage the research group in the collaborative project I am working on with Katya Oicherman and Sharone Lifschitz . My interest for some time has been focused on the activity of the artist through an engagement with literary practices aside from traditional art historical discourse and so working with contemporary female artists who are themselves, engaged in practices where language through writing, reading, and listening, provides an opportunity to open a discussion on shared and distinct interests, thinking in terms of the borders between thinking and making, theory and action. My way into this is with reference to the ‘art writers’, while also approaching the poet and translator’s work, and the writtenness of Hélène Cixous, in order to focus on our visceral and intellectual experiences of art. Without claiming that any of this specifically relates to either Katya or Sharone’s work, although one can find elements at times, I introduced a text as an object, from which I initiated discussion on the a number of themes as a way of thinking about art practice more generally.
The Domain of the Personal in the Narrative Act: collaborative project with artists Katya Oicherman and Sharone Liftschitz, writer and curator Rebecca Harris, July 2019 – present.
This project is the result of my personal research and the invitation I have extended to Katya Oicherman and Sharone Liftschitz to collaborate. The three of us first met at the MSA Conference in Madrid in July 2019, where we joined the Arts and Memory Working Group led by Astrid Schmetterling and Nela Milic. To date we have presented together at a two-day seminars workshop organised at Goldsmiths College, University of London in December 2019.
In Sharone’s work memory is traced within public ‘non-spaces’, through encounters and conversations with strangers. In Katya’s short animations she reflects on the elusive personal character of mass-produced textiles hinting at the absent body. Rebecca’s reading of poetical language in relation to a cultural and intellectual engagement with literature outside of the traditions of Art History attempts to create a framework for the reading of artworks. Crossing disciplines and geographies our presentations will engage with shifting acts of translation between personal and collective memory in the different contexts of our practices: human interaction in travel and urban space in contemporary Germany, acts of misreading and unmaking and poetical language, and linking family stories and textile patterns in the Soviet Jewish family archive.