World of Art
Year 2008/09
Lectures

Angela Harutyunyan
Interstices of History: Collective Writing and/as Curating
(with the contribution of Tevž Logar)

Monday, November 10, 2008 at 8 pm
Project Room SCCA, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana

In my lecture I will address some of the issues related to the writing of history, and particularly, history of contemporary art.

In the age of the destruction or deconstruction of the grand meta-narratives of modernity, how is it possible to narrate without presenting the writing as a groundless fiction?

I will address the role of the writer's subjectivity in the process of writing, the subject - as always already inserted into the very history s/he attempts to narrate. I will discuss the writing of history as a possible-impossible endeavor, as a selective/evaluative process that resembles the task of the curator.

Finally, I present the project Timeline of Socialist and Post-Socialist Art as an example in which the task of the historian is almost identical to that of the curator. The political-artistic Timeline of body art practices in former Socialist countries, realized in collaboration with several art curators, is a curatorial practice in writing which not only tells a story of representational practices in a specific context but also a temporary space in which history comes forward as representation.

Angela Harutyunyan

Angela Harutyunyan is a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She is currently writing a dissertation on contemporary Armenian art and the post-Socialist public sphere under Dr. Amelia Jone's supervision. She is a member of AICA and the co-organizer of the annual international summer seminars' program for contemporary art curators. She curated several solo and group exhibitions of contemporary Armenian art, including the International media art festival Public Media Space at the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (ACCEA) in Yerevan, 2004 and Coming to You Not To Be With You, WOW, 2008. She has published several scholarly articles on various topics related to the contemporary art scene in Armenia within the broader context of post-socialist art and culture. She is the co-editor of Public Spheres After Socialism (Intellect Books, 2008). Her research interests include issues of art historiography, performance and body art, artistic practices related to the problems of memory and forgetting, queer studies as well as aesthetic and politics.

Contact

SCCA-Ljubljana (office hours: 11.00-15.00)
Contact person: Petja Grafenauer Krnc
Metelkova 6, 1000 Ljubljana, tel.: 041 367 425, fax: (01) 430 06 29
E-mail: svetumetnosti@scca-ljubljana.si

The lecture of Angela Haratyunyan is supported by Gulliver Connect Programme 2008.
The World of Art is supported by Municipality of Ljubljana - Department for Culture, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, and European Cultural Foundation.