Haunting the Nation State. Colonial Gothic in Contemporary Art

Prof. Dr. Susanne Leeb

Leuphana Universität Lüneburg

Wednesday, 31 May 2023, 5.30 pm (BST)

ONLINE Lecture, hosted by the Warburg Institute.

Free and open to all via Zoom; please register in advance via the Warburg Institute website.

Under the title “Colonial Gothic in Contemporary Art”, the lecture moves between museology and contemporary art, with the aim of questioning common object categories. Using works by contemporary artists including Uri Nir and Karrabing Film Collective, the lecture develops the category of the “Unding” (non-thing) – as a proposal for an object category to describe the place that many ethnological and archaeological objects occupy in mainly Western museums, and how they are articulated within contemporary art. From the perspective of these artworks museums are rather a non-place than a place. The many ghostly apparitions in contemporary art may attest to this.

The Bilderfahrzeuge Lecture series 2022/23 – Border Regimes

From the reality of geopolitical boundaries to arguments over national styles and disciplinary limitations, border regimes are a pervasive part of academic work and our everyday world. But what kinds of associations can be made between divisions of scholarship, divisions of artistic production, and divisions of nation states? It is a commonplace to note that knowledge and art transcend boundaries and bring politics with them; but are some forms of knowledge and some forms of art more nationalistically constrained than others?  Today, art historians are prone to celebrate Aby Warburg’s warning against the biases of disciplinary border guards (grenzpolizeiliche Befangenheit), yet scholarly boundaries can also help establish academic rigor and Warburg’s ideal of breaking down boundaries could well be correlated with his distinctly German milieu and its holistic ideal of Bildung. This lecture series brings together art historians working on “border regimes” in every sense of the phrase, querying the positive, negative, and ambiguous dimensions to this ubiquitous concept.  How does this issue apply to different historical and geographic periods of artistic production and how do those differences relate to art historiography both past and present?

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