CFP: The Rhetorics and Aesthetic of Memory

CFP: Graduate Conference: The Rhetorics and Aesthetic of Memory

Department of Art History, Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University

March 6-7, 2015

Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios (Defiant) 1992-2004; installation; shoes, animal fiber, and surgical

thread.

Memory functions in several multifaceted dimensions: individual, familial, local, regional,

national, and international. Whether memory can be read as an individual construction or as

national one, whether it is a negotiation of trauma or a tool for the construction of individual or

national identity, artists have explored the concept through various strategies, media, and across

history. We invite papers that discuss how the question of memory impacts art and visual culture

throughout history.

Themes may include, but are not limited to:

-‐ art as reconfiguration of individual memory

-‐ construction of photo albums and familial memory

-‐ negotiations of trauma

-‐ representations of national or collective memory

-‐ challenging existing representations of memory

-‐ historical memory

-‐ use of technology to disseminate individual or collective memory

-‐ testimony as exercise of memory

-‐ spectral spaces and geographies; phenomena of ‘haunting’

-‐ memorialization

-‐ material culture, sacred objects, culturally or politically charged objects

-‐ theories on affect; performativity of affect

-‐ museums, archives, and records as sites or spaces of memory

-‐ socio-political critique through memory

-‐ parsing biography and autobiography

-‐ ‘active’ forgetting

Please send 300 word abstracts and questions to rascagrad@gmail.com by December 1st, 2014.

Abstract deadline: December 1, 2014

Decisions made: December 15, 2014

Symposium: March 6-7, 2015