Mardi 7 novembre 2023 18h salle 126, Site Saint-Charles 1
Conférence Inaugurale : Valérie Morisson, à travers la présentation de son ouvrage Locating the Self, Welcoming the Other in British and Irish Art, 1990-2020
This volume addresses how spatialized identities, belongingness and hospitality are interrogated in British and Irish contemporary art (painting, installation, video, photography, new public art) at a time when economic and political crises tend to encourage individual or exclusive usages of space. It sketches a cartography of encounters encompassing the home, the neighbourhood, the village or city, and the nation. Artists interrogate how intimacy is both facilitated and threatened by spatial devices, how space fashions our perception of gender, social or ethnic identity and activates power relations. They explore the need for a home or a homeland and the various forms exile or placelessness can take. They may also take part in the restoration of the Commons and the constitution of alternative communities. Whether the analyses focus on the private sphere (in urban, suburban or rural contexts), or on shared communal spaces, they ponder the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at work in human encounters and shed light on how artistic apparatuses make the tensions between openness to the other and rejection or withdrawal perceptible. The approach, borrowing from art history as well as anthropology, lays emphasis on context, situationality and field work; it proposes to repoliticize relational art and concludes on the dialogical positionality which lies at the core of art.
Valérie Morisson présentera son ouvrage Locating the Self, Welcoming the Other in British and Irish Art, 1990-2000 (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2021) lors de la prochaine séance du séminaire commun d'EMMA. L'ouvrage propose d'analyser la manière dont les artistes britanniques et irlandais donnent à voir et percevoir les tensions inhérentes à ce que Jacques Derrida et Anne Dufourmantelle nomment l'hostipitalité dans un contexte de crises propice à la réactivation des replis nationaux. Les praxis artistiques et l'immersion des artistes dans un terrain d'enquête sociale et sensible mettent en forme de manière critique la relationalité des espaces. Envisagé de manière concentrique, l'espace du soi (maison, quartier, village, pays) accueille inévitablement diverses formes d'altérité. Les arts visuels (peinture, photographie, sculpture, installation, art collaboratif) déploient des stratégies représentationnelles particulièrement aptes à travailler la dialectique articulant la spatialisation du soi à l'ouverture aux autres.