Telling Impossible Stories
Spring Symposium with Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt organized by the IKL Doctoral Studies in Philosophy and the PhD in Practice-Program.
How do we tell impossible stories, and how do we listen to images of intentionally muted subjects? When we look at photographs of the horrors of slavery, or when we confront depictions of the violence that continues to constitute black live today, how do we tell the stories nesting at the limits of the unspeakable and the unknown? Can careful looking, attentive listening and critical fabulation contribute to the experiments in freedom that unfold in slavery’s shadow? How can we attune all our senses to the different affective frequencies and tell different stories, as we tell stories differently?
Program
Thursday, April 11 th , 6pm
mumok cinema, mumok, MuseumsQuartier, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna
Public lecture by Saidiya Hartman , Columbia University, New York:
An Experiment with the Chorus
The lecture will consider the role of artistic, creative and speculative method as a critical practice intended to challenge the constraints of the given and to imagine a new planetary scheme.
Friday, April 12 th , 10am
IKL Karl Schweighofer Gasse 3, 1070 Vienna , room 3.06
Public lecture by Tina Campt , Barnard Center for Research on Women, New York:
Prelude to a New Black Gaze
What is a “black gaze”? This talk is both an invitation and a provocation to reflect on our current moment of diasporic countervisuality by engaging some of the new critical visual vocabularies with which black artists are confronting their audiences, and the radical practices of refusal their work is creating.
Saidiya Hartman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making at Nineteenth Century America (Oxford, 1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). Hartman has published articles on slavery, the archive and the city, including The Terrible Beauty of the Slum , Venus in Two Acts and The Belly of the World . She was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Fulbright Fellow in Ghana, a Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton University, and a Rockefeller Fellow at Brown University. Her latest book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval , in which Saidiya Hartman examines the social upheavals and radical changes in everyday life that took place in the emerging black ghetto of the early decades of the twentieth century, just appeared.
Tina Campt is Claire Tow and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College-Columbia University. She is the author of three books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012), and Listening to Images (2017). She is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, and is completing a new collection of essays entitled, The New Black Gaze. Campt is currently in residence as Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and was recently appointed as a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
