TQW Winter School: Learning Diaspora
A panel discussion as part of the TQW Winter School with Noit Banai (Professor of Diaspora Aesthetics, Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies).
The TQW Winter School is festival, experiment, and encounter, located between discourse and practice. This year, for its third edition, it devotes two days to diaspora and its interrelations with performative, embodied and discursive practices.
What happens when diaspora enters art education? How do we choose words and concepts to adequately translate lived experiences of migration, exile, and displacement? What are the effects of institutionalising and ‘departmentalising’ multifaceted diasporic histories and aesthetics? How do we choose methods that might grasp messy, entangled, complex diasporic realities? What enters a diasporic bibliography or curriculum, and what remains unsaid? How can the students’ personal experiences of diasporic belonging become part of – without being absorbed into – a formalised teaching-and-learning process?
This panel invites three researchers and educators - Noit Banai, Mariama Diagne, and Monika Halkort - specialising in different fields of art and culture and affiliated with different institutions to share their modes of working, thinking and sharing while navigating diaspora.
Noit Banai (Columbia University, PhD) is professor of Diaspora Aesthetics at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. A historian and critic, she specialises in modern and contemporary art with a focus on conditions of migration, exile, diaspora, border regimes and statelessness from a trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary perspective. Her current book project is titled Stateless: Artistic Practices by Refugees in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, 1933–1953.