Framer Framed

Symposium: Between Fetish and Art

Is sculpture transcultural, gobal, universal?
Universität Duisburg, Essen, January 13-15, 2011

“Things” have attracted a great deal of interest in recent times. As objects, tangible items they seem to guarantee authenticity. As “travellers” in and through diverse cultural contexts they have a direct influence on political practice and theory. The extent to which they are also capable of bridging cultural differences, as universal vehicles of signs which “wander between cultures”, or rather draw in and reinforce differences, is a central question of our conference.

By focusing on the various modes of the sculptural, the conference Between Fetish and Art: is sculpture transcultural, global, universal? shifts the current discussion on thingness into an aesthetic and art historical perspective. At the dawn of Modernity and in the heyday of colonial expansion, increased attention is given to three-dimensional objects, in both artistic and cultural practice. Handcrafted everyday objects and items of utility evoke an aesthetic interest, are described, interpreted, presented in lavish exhibitions, and collected in museums. They become material vehicles and agents of cultural identity formation and differentiation, which ultimately take shape and find expression in the indistinct thresholds of aesthetics, psychology and ethnography. A culture of the artefact approached and adopted aesthetically eludes the traditional genre hierarchies employed by museums and the differentiation into single media (painting, sculpture). At the same time, when understood as materializations of local and foreign culture, artefacts furnish significant indicators for how alterity is approached, negotiated and dealt with, both historically and currently.

PROGRAM

Thursday 13/1/2011
ZECHE ZOLLVEREIN SANAA-Gebäude ESSEN

14:00 INTRODUCTION
Gabriele Genge, Beate Söntgen

14:30 I PHENOMENOLOGIES
Moderation Gabriele Genge

14:45 SYLVESTER OKWUNODU OGBECHIE
Transcultural Interpretation and the Production of Alterity: Photography, Materiality and Mediation in the Making of African Art

15:30 CHRISTIAN KRAVAGNA
Encounter with a Mask: African Art Dead and Alive

16:15 PAUSE

16:30 KITTY ZIJLMANS
The Unwanted Land Revisted. Towards a Transcultural Art History: The Input from Contemporary Art

17:15 THOMAS REINHARDT
Fixing Shadows: Photography Beyond the Indexical

18:00 BARBARA VINKEN
The Rosary. Splendors and Miseries of Catholicism

19:00 APERITIF

20:00 FILM SCREENING / ARTIST‘S TALK
ULRIKE OTTINGER
The Corean Wedding Chest

Friday 14/1/2011
MUSEUM FOLKWANG ESSEN

10:00 VISIT MUSEUM FOLKWANG
11:15 II PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE
Moderation Gerald Schröder, Beate Söntgen
11:30 IKEM S. OKOYE
Quadrantanopsia. Fetishism from T.E. Bowdich‘s Space to E.O. Owusu‘s Time
12:15 CHARLOTTE KLONK
Non-European Artefacts in Art Exhibitions of the Late 1920s and 1930s
13:00 PAUSE
14:30 CLéMENTINE DELISS
Stored Code
15:15 ANGELA STERCKEN
[Arte]Fact, Object, Image. Jean-Michel Basquiat‘s Archives
16:00 PAUSE
16:15 KERSTIN MEINCKE
La madame patron ici. Tu comprends? – Germaine Krull in Africa. Propaganda
and Photographic Articulation
17:00 VIKTORIA SCHMIDT-LINSENHOFF
Displaced Sculptures at the Laboratoire Agit`Art/ Dakar Sequences from the film “Der Hof”
19:00 EVENING LECTURE
JOSEPH ADANDé
Carving as a Liminal Shape: The Bocio in „Gbe“ Speaking Area

Saturday 15/1/2011
SITUATION KUNST BOCHUM

9:30 III UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THINGS
Moderation Beate Söntgen
9:45 JOHN PICTON
Modernity and Modernism in African Art: When was the Modern World?
10:30 EVA MARIA TROELENBERG
In the Contact Zone: The Rise of Modernity and Western Strategies of Defining „Islamic Art“
11:15 HANS KöRNER
Speared Heads. Portraits as Things in 20th Century Sculpture
12 PAUSE
13:30 IV POLITICS OF IDENTITY
Moderation Alma-Elisa Kittner
13:45 ALEXANDRA KARENTZOS
Incorporations of the Other – Exotic Objects, Tropicalism, and Anthropophagy
14:30 BOUBACAR TRAORé
Some Reflection about African Sculpture in Buenos Aires
15:15 PAUSE
15:30 LILIAN TSENG
Monumentality and Transnationality: The Cult of the Ding Bronze Vessels in Modern China
16:15 MELANIE ULZ
Why have there been no Great Forgeries? Collectors, Artefacts, and the Question of Originality

Links

• WEBSITE BETWEEN FETISH AND ART