Speaker Series | Tamar Garb "Making Art in the Light and Shadow of Historical Trauma"
Making Art in the Light and Shadow of Historical Trauma
Tamar Garb (Durning Lawrence Professor of History of art and Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London)
Abstract: My paper explores the role of selected artworks in addressing the historical trauma of 鈥榬ace鈥�. Focussing on three works by South African artists Santu Mofokeng, Zaneli Muholi and Berni Searle, I explore the ways in which their art complicates identitarian politics by staging 鈥榮elves鈥� that are formally and psychically inflected by posited 鈥榦thers鈥�. By placing themselves in a relationship of 鈥榮ympathy鈥� with strangers, these artists dislodge the sage boundaries and secure separations that legislated difference entails. They offer neither therapeutic redress nor reparation for past injury but instead provide a poetic space for working through and questioning ongoing separation and suffering.
Bio:聽Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art and Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London. Her research interests have focused on questions of gender and sexuality, the woman artist and the body in nineteenth and early twentieth century French art and she has published extensively in this field. Key books in this area include聽Sisters of the Brush听(1994),听Bodies of Modernity聽(1998) and聽The Painted Face (2007). Her interests have turned recently to post-apartheid culture and art in South Africa as well as the history of photographic and lens-based practices in Africa and she has curated a number of international exhibitions including聽Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography聽(Victoria & Albert Museum, London 2011),聽Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive聽(Walther Collection: New York, Ulm and Berlin. 2014-2015) and聽William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: A Conversation in Letters and Lines (Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh, 2016). She is an art critic who has written on many contemporary artists including Mona Hatoum, Nancy Spero, Marlene Dumas, Zanele Muholi, Sabelo Mlangeni and Santu Mofokeng.