CATALOGUE: Stories of Traumatic Pasts: Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism

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7. October 2020

Edited by Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, Sophie Uitz, and Christina Jauernik

Hatje Cantz, Berlin, Germany; Weltmuseum Wien, Austria; Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria; Peek Project No. AR 439-G24/IBK, 2020, ISBN 978-3-7757-4884-1, 204pp.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Stories of Traumatic Pasts: Counter-Archives for Future Memories, at Weltmuseum Wienfrom 8 October 2020 to 3 April 2021.

About the catalogue

Belgian colonialism in the Congo. Antisemitism in Austria. Turbo-nationalism in former Yugoslavia. Over the last two centuries, these three historic lines of violence and annihilation (re)enforced a process of oblivion that to this day prevents a processing of the genocides they caused. Today involuntary or performed amnesia again threatens to destroy what has already come to a point of possible coexistence.

We go back to these traumatic events in history and the recent past, which had such a violent impact on communities and people, states and territories, and confront them with a system of interventions. The scars that remain after atrocities, although hidden and obliterated, are recovered through artistic, scientific, and political reflections.

Online Artist Talk Series 2021 “Stories of Traumatic Pasts”

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10. February 2021

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All events will be held in English. The events will take place online!
Registration: info@weltmuseumwien.at

Adela Jušić in conversation with Marina Grzinić
Friday, February 19, 2021, 04:30 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien

Adela Jušić was born on 1982 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Jušić has exhibited in more than 100 international exhibitions (Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain; Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Image Counter Image, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, Balkan Insight, Pompidou Center, Paris). In 2010 she won Young Visual Artist Award for the best young Bosnian artist in 2010, Henkel Young Artist Price Central and Eastern Europe in 2011, and Special award of Belgrade October Salon in 2013.

Martin Krenn in conversation with Marina Grzinić
Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 07:00 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien

Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe in conversation with Marina Grzinić
Tuesday, March 30, 2021, 07:00 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien

Adela Jušić and Marina Grzinić , zoom 19.2.2021

Honorary Mention of the 2022 Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity

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22. June 2022

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Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, Sophie Uitz have received the Honorary Mention of the 2022 Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity for their work Digital Research Travelogues through European Archives!

Digital Research Travelogues through European Archives creates an interdisciplinary platform for art and science to explore the current politics of forgetting in relation to three traumatic events of the 20th century: Belgium (colonialism in the Congo), Austria (antisemitism in World War II and the post-war period), and the former Yugoslavia (turbo-nationalism, Srebrenica genocide). The platform departs from the research conducted as part of the FWF-PEEK project Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality (AR 439). It was presented as a digital format to promote emancipatory politics in the humanities through the 2020-2021 exhibition at the Weltmuseum Wien, Austria. It consisted of 42 interviews presented as 42 posters with QR codes. This part of the exhibition was a unique artistic-scientific and collaborative research work, presented as an interactive digital installation. The 42 QR codes were divided into three sections, each with a description and content, and accessible to the viewer via mobile phone. Each user could listen to the interviews in English. As a second level of interaction, an interactive table was presented in the exhibition space, allowing the viewer to spend hours exploring the connections between the three sections presented in parallel through images and texts, as a kind of double index, footnotes and hypertexts through European trauma histories.

Credits: Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, Sophie Uitz, and contributors © FWF-PEEK AR 439, Weltmuseum Wien, 2021/22. In collaboration with: Šefik Tatlić, Valerija Zabret, researchers, artists, activists. With support from: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, various NGOs across Europe

Book chapter: “Racialized violence in Europe: The Genealogy of Amnesia Project and the immobilization of refugees?” (by Marina Gržinić)

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3. February 2022

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Marina GRŽINIĆ: Racialized violence in Europe: The Genealogy of Amnesia Project and the immobilization of refugees? In: PERERA, Suvendrini (ed.), PUGLIESE, Joseph (ed.). Mapping deathscapes : digital geographies of racial and border violence. London; New York: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 148-162, ilustr. Routledge research in digital humanities. ISBN 978-1-032-05657-9. DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-15.

Book Description

This volume offers a critical and creative analysis of the innovations of Deathscapes, a transnational digital humanities project that maps the sites and distributions of custodial deaths in locations such as police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres.

An international team of authors take a multidisciplinary approach to questions of race, geographies of state violence and countermaps of resistance across North America, Australia and Europe. The book establishes rich lines of dialogic connection between digital and other media by incorporating both traditional scholarly resources and digital archives, databases and social media. Chapters offer a comprehensive mapping of the key attributes through which racial violence is addressed and contested through digital media and articulate, in the process, the distinctive dimensions of the Deathscapes site.

This interdisciplinary volume will be an important resource for scholars, students and activists working in the areas of Cultural Studies, Media and Visual Studies, Indigenous Studies, Refugee Studies and Law.

https://www.routledge.com/Mapping-Deathscapes-Digital-Geographies-of-Racial-and-Border-Violence/Perera-Pugliese/p/book/9781032056579

EXHIBITION Stories of Traumatic Pasts. Counter-Archives for Future Memories

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1. September 2020

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at Weltmuseum Wien
October 8th, 2020 to April 3rd, 2021

Curated by Marina Gržinić, Christina Jauernik and Sophie Uitz

Trailer-teaser of the exhibition in Weltmuseum Wien

The exhibition Stories of Traumatic Pasts: Counter-Archives for Future Memories focuses on three European regions, their stories, and their current experiences of collective amnesia in relation to traumatic events from the past: Belgian colonial rule in the Congo, Austria after the “Anschluss” in 1938, and the denial of war crimes since 1990 after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Participating artists
Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe
Lana Čmajčanin
Bojan Djordjev
Dani Gal
Siniša Ilić
Adela Jušić
Martin Krenn
Monique Mbeka Phoba
Nicolas Pommier
Anja Salomonowitz
Joëlle Sambi Nzeba
Arye Wachsmuth
Valerie Wolf Gang

Posters and works developed by students of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (workshop with Arye Wachsmuth):
Negra Bernhard
Henrie Dennis
Iklim Doğan
Robert Jolly
Lars* Kollros
Shaya Safaisini
Hiba Shammout
Sophie Anna Stadler
Pia S. Weissinger
Ondrej Zoricak

The digital archive: COUNTERING THE GENEALOGY OF AMNESIA

7.10.2020 Opening speeches and performance
(closed for public due to Covid-19)

Speeches: C. Schicklgruber (director Weltmuseum Wien), J. Hartle (rector Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), S. Uitz and M. Gržinić (curators). Opening performance by Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe and Mani Obeya.

8.10.2020 Symposium
(closed for public due to Covid-19)

Taking part in situ or via zoom:

Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe
Lana Čmajčanin
Bojan Djordjev
Dani Gal
Siniša Ilić
Adela Jušić
Martin Krenn
Nicolas Pommier
Anja Salomonowitz
Joëlle Sambi Nzeba
Arye Wachsmuth
Valerie Wolf Gang
Lars* Kollros
Mika Maruyama
Shaya Safaisini
Pia Weissinger

Moderation by Marina Gržinić
Organisation by Sophie Uitz

Weltmuseum Wien
Heldenplatz, 1010 Vienna
Tel. +43 1 534 30-5052
info@weltmuseumwien.at
www.weltmuseumwien.at

Opening hours
Open daily, except Wednesdays, 10 am to 6 pm
Late Fridays until 9 pm: 30 October, 27 November

Online BOOK LAUNCHES

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9. December 2020

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Presentation and discussion with the editors of the three recent publications of the “Genealogy of Amnesia” project research.

All 2020 presentations are held online due to restricted mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Booklaunch Sarajevo

22.12.2020, 18.00h
Association for Culture and Art, Crvena, Sarajevo / ZOOM

Presentations by:
Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.

Booklaunch Vienna

19.11.2020, 19.00 h
Depot Wien / ZOOM

Presentations by:
Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, Sophie Uitz, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Booklaunch Zagreb

15.10.2020, 19.00 h
Multimedia Institute/MaMa, Zagreb, Croatia / ZOOM
Organized by Lina Gonan and MaMa

Presentations by:
Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.

Booklaunch Belgrade

29.09.2020, 19.00 h
Centre for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, Belgrade, Serbia / ZOOM
Organized by Aleksandra Sekulić and CZKD (director: Ana Miljanić)

Presentations by:
Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.

Online Lecture “Stories of Traumatic Pasts”

Allgemein

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19. November 2020

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Marina Grzinić, Stories of Traumatic Pasts

Held on fairteaching.net
November 19, 2020
16-17 PM

Lecture Summary

The exhibition Stories of Traumatic Pasts, curated by Marina Gržinić, Christina Jauernik and Sophie Uitz is on view at the Weltmuseum Wien until April 3, 2021.

The exhibition focuses on three European regions, their stories, and their current experiences of collective amnesia in relation to traumatic events from the past: Belgian colonial rule in the Congo, Austria after the “Anschluss” in 1938, and the denial of war crimes since 1990 after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Marina Gržinić, will have a lecture on the exhibition, take the audience for a travelogue on the concept and contexts of the show, participating artists, and future perspectives.

The online lecture will be held in English. Follow this link https://fairteaching.net/b/khm-7×9-cfm!

Prof. Dr. Marina Gržinić is a philosopher, theoretician, and artist from Ljubljana, Slovenia. She serves as a professor and research adviser. Since 2003, she is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is project leader of the research whose full title is “Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality” carried out as a transdisciplinary project No. AR 439-G24/IBK funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and developed at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, from 2018 to 2020. The exhibition is part of the research project.

In cooperation with Vienna Art Week and Weltmuseum Wien.

LECTURE at East-Central European Art Forum Conference in Poznań

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27. October 2018

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Marina Gržinić, The Postsocialist and Postcolonial Conditions as Features of a Conceptualization of a “New” Geography

October 27, 2018

at East-Central European Art Forum, 26-27.10.2018,
Conference: Theorizing the Geography of East-Central European Art

organized by Piotr Piotrowski Center for Research on East-Central European Art

Lecture Summary

The postsocialist and postcolonial conditions as features of a conceptualization of a “new” geography

The proposal is to rethink geography as a process that comes out from the post-1989. Why? At that moment we have the appearance of two conditions, of two posts that coincide largely speaking geographically in Europe and that can subsumed, according to David Harvey writings in the 1980s, as “urbanization of capital and urbanization of consciousness.” This double process is vital to capitalism’s survival as a dominant mode of production and consumption. Let’s state that this urbanization is a perverse cosmopitanism that Piotr Piotrowski (Piotrowski, “From the international to the Cosmopolitan” (2012)), sees as the possible approach to East and Central Europe today. Therefore my proposal claims that geography can better be captured as the joint process of these two conditions postsocialist and postcolonial than divisions we used for the last decades in the former Eastern European context: East-West, center-periphery, etc. As well the question that we will enter is how the postcolonial enters the post-socialist of the East-Central Europe geography of today. My question is how these traumatic nodal points produced, executed and governed by and within Europe transform the perception of art, geography, topography, memory and history in the present moment. The elaboration is based on the new insights provided by the research project I am in charge at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with the title “Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality” (funded through the Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK), inside the FWF, Austrian Science Fund, in the period from 2018 to 2020).

SYMPOSIUM: Performative Digital LAB/Zoom-presentations

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26. October 2020

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BUILDING NEW VOCABULARIES OF RESISTANCE. Screening, lectures, performative interventions

November 11-12, 2020
12.00 to 16.00 (CET/Vienna time)

Download Symposium Program

The art-research project “Genealogy of Amnesia” (FWF-PEEK Project, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) in cooperation with Österreichisches Filmmuseum andkulturen in bewegung, an initiative by VIDC, Vienna, announces a collaborative two days of screenings, lectures, performative lab situations onto the topic of evaluating film and video languages to oppose discrimination, epistemic violence, invisibilized realities, lost memories, and closed archives. The two days lab situations will be going on with filmmakers, curators, students, and the younger generation of film and video artists and Viennese activist communities. New film languages will be discussed through processes of changing established narratives and imperial knowledge.

The first part is a two afternoons Digital LAB/Zoom-presentations by Tjaša Kancler (Barcelona), Saša Kesić (Belgrade), Christoph Kolar (AT), İklim Doğan (Turkey/AT), Mika Maruyama (Japan/AT) and Mai Lin (AT), Marissa Lobo (Brazil/AT) and Nevline Nnaji (USA/Germany).

The second part is a two-night screening program at Österreichisches Filmmuseum with films by Selma Doborac (AT), Nevline Nnaji (USA/Germany), and Morgan Quaintance (UK).

Trailer of the Performative Digital LAB (2020).

Talk with Nevline Nnaji at performative film lab on November 12, 2020 on her feature-length documentary Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights (US, 2013, 81 min.). Nevline Nnaji is a film director, pole dancer and multi-media artist from Northampton, MA., US.

The collaborative film program presents a coming together of several partners: the Österreichisches Filmmuseum,the project “Smashing Wor(l)ds: Cultural Practices for re/Imagining & un/Learning Vocabularies,” supported by Creative Europe and led by kulturen in bewegung, an initiative by VIDC, and the art-research project “Genealogy of Amnesia” (FWF-PEEK Project AR 439, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna). It will be two days of intensive encounters of inspiring program of experimental, profoundly defiant film practices that oppose injustice, xenophobia, and systematic racist exclusions. (M. Gržinić)

GoA SYMPOSIUM in Vienna: Genealogy of Amnesia – Crushing Silences, Constructing Histories

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11. November 2018

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poster_chj — (image: Christina Jauernik)

November 8-10, 2018

A symposium on the silencing of colonialism, anti-Semitism, and contemporary turbo-fascist nationalism in Belgium, Austria, and former Yugoslavia.

The international and interdisciplinary symposium, open to public audiences, is built as a podium for research and exchange, dissemination of knowledge, and discussion.

The two-day-long symposium hosted invited speakers that cover the central topics of our research in the three respective territories: memory and history, archives, and the axis of power and knowledge. The general objective of the symposium was to denote gaps between processes of institutionalized silencing, hegemonic processes of oblivion and amnesia, and processes of instituting power through building counter-memory and counter-history projects, interventions, and resistance. The aim was to demonstrate how processes for the establishment of counter-memory and counter-history can open up spaces for new ways of forming radicalized constituent politics. Collective struggles and oppositionality were investigated as the basis of a possible dismantling of neoliberal and necrocapitalist societies by means of re-empowering history that crushes silences.

For full symposium program and details click here