AHM Conference 2022: ‘Witnessing, Memory, and Crisis’

In the wake of the COVID lockdowns implemented all around the world, and in particular since March 2020, private and public initiatives have emerged to collect diaries, testimonies, and perspectives on the pandemic from ordinary citizens. These calls for witnesses have been presented as a way to preserve traces of the pandemic for the future and to give a voice to all kinds of people confronted with the health crisis, in order to build an “ordinary memory” of the event. In this paper, we will study these social practices of witnessing in a time of crisis. Who were the people who answered these callouts? Who will be considered the witnesses of this pandemic in the future What social groups do they come from in terms of level of education, income, marital status, place of residence, birthplace, ethnicity, religion, and gender? This article will ask to what extent ordinary memories of crisis can really be preserved. It argues that institutional calls for witnesses of the health crisis cannot avoid reproducing some of the social inequalities that have been central in framing ordinary people’s experience of the pandemic and the lockdown.

Testimonies of the massacre in Dersim during 1938 present new sources to social sciences, as doing a close reading on these narratives adds to the field in terms of breaking the silence of a slaughtered community and by creating strategies to interpret the testimonies as materials for history writing. The events in Dersim describe the massacre of the people from Dersim, an eastern province and modern-day Tunceli in Turkey. The studies on these events are limited to anthropological studies. Thus, the analysis of witnesses’ testimonies enlarge the capacity to understand the events and in return, give voice to the witnesses’ traumas. By building on Holocaust studies, this article focuses on the witness narratives recorded by Emirali Yağan and Cemal Taş, independent researchers of Dersim history. To interpret these testimonies, this article theorizes the subtexts by using trauma and narrative theories while asserting that the historical consciousness of the ethnic identity of Dersim contributed to the healing from trauma. To discuss that, the article investigates the mystical storytelling elements that emerge in these narratives. 38 narratives indicate that testifying, thus telling, is a step towards resisting one’s trauma because the witnesses reclaim their identity by describing their pre-traumatic times.  In the Dersim testimonies, telling as an act takes several forms with the utterance of the communal traumas, individual traumas, longing for the pre-traumatic times, and its restorative impact on revealing the trauma.

In July 2021, six billboards appeared in Northwest London emblazoned with quotes from two novels from Palestinian authors, Heba Hayek’s Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies (2021) and Yara Hawari’s The Stone House (2021). Although novels are usually categorised as ‘fictional works’, by placing the billboards across Northwest London—an area with a long tradition of Palestinian and Arab diaspora community—the initiators wanted to emphasise that these works of fiction represent someone’s reality. The billboards were part of a walking exhibition called #TheDistantHere, which aimed to evoke a dialogue. But what kind of dialogue? In the spirit of Michael Burawoy’s expansion of the concepts of “dialogue and critical sociology” (1998) and Mieke Bal’s notion of “cultural analysis” (2002) as one which can allow cultural objects to enrich both interpretation and theory, this essay seeks to tease out whether the concept of “poetry of witness” (Forché, 1993) could be extended to novels and what are the implications of doing so in relation to the concept of ‘witnessing’?

The 1990s is regarded as a period when contemporary art gained momentum in Turkey – curatorial discourses in exhibition practices occurred in the Turkish art scene, and the local art scene became a part of the international art scene through the International Istanbul Biennial, private initiatives in art, and art professionals – in line with the globalization and neoliberalism of that time. In this period, memory as a tool for exploring the dialectics of forgetting and remembering has been used critically in artistic practices and exhibitions related to issues of identity, politics of power and multiculturalism. Concurrent with the artistic practices that focus on questions of memory, exhibitions that use archives have come to the fore in the contemporary art scene after the 2000s, including a reinterpretation of the exhibitions in the 1990s. This article addresses the ever-increasing tendencies in the contemporary art scene in Turkey towards using archives, which are primary and rich sources of knowledge production, historical records and hidden collections, in curated exhibitions, with a particular attention to collective memory and witnessing. By focusing on the uses of memory and archive within the art scene, the article argues that curated exhibitions have contributed to art history as a means of reinterpreting and reactivating the past by analyzing selected examples.

What does it mean to be a witness to someone else's pain and suffering? What does it mean to remember an event, the memory of which has not yet taken shape? What ethical positions can artists take in the acts of seeing? Speaking from the position of an artist, who has inherited the traumas of the Soviet past, I will discuss the challenges of becoming a ‘secondary witness’ (Apel, 2002). Taking as an example my art-led research on memory of the Kazakh Famine – a man-made famine caused by the Soviet policies of collectivisation and sedentarisation in the 1930s – I will reflect on the possibilities of artistic witnessing. Drawing on Bracha Ettinger's notion of "wit(h)nessing” that demands to remain with the suffering subject or with the traces of his experience, I will pay more attention to indexical and textual memory fragments; which I attempt to transform aesthetically. ’Here I will reflect on the use of hand-drawing and hand-drawn animation, as a part of the discussion of my role as a mediator between the viewer and the traumatic event.

Colombia has suffered from a complex internal armed conflict for over fifty years. The war has left millions of victims of crimes against humanity and a deeply wounded society. Most of the victims belong to marginal groups such as peasant and ethnic minority communities and have been systematically unrecognized in the public sphere. This paper will focus on two photographs of the exhibition El Testigo, first opened in 2018 but closed in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic and now reopened again to become part of the permanent collection of the museum Claustro San Agustín. The exhibition displays a comprehensive collection of photographs taken by the photojournalist Jesús Abad Colorado between 1992-2018 and show the horrors of the violence that the victims of the conflict had to endure. The main goal of this paper is to compare the images of this exhibition with previous images circulating in the mass media to reflect on the framing of representations of violence and on how different framings of war can serve different purposes. I will argue that the photographs of El Testigo contribute to imagining the unimaginable nature of violence by bringing to the present fragments of the past that need recognition, especially today when Colombia is facing a stage of transition towards the maintenance of peace since a peace treaty was signed between the FARC guerrilla and the Colombian Government in 2016. The photographs therefore elicit an ethical treatment of violence and contribute to the configuration of a collective memory that strives for the victim’s recognition and justice.

One of the ways in which lesbian sexuality found coverage in the media in the mid-1990s was through the phenomenon of ‘lesbian suicides’ in states like Kerala and Kolkata in India. ‘Lesbian Suicides’ became one of the pivotal issues through which sexuality became a political matter in the public sphere of these two states, which further encouraged the formation of ‘the lesbian’ as a political subject. Since the mid-1990s, several newspaper reports expressed their concern over reports of women who die together. A selected list of lesbian suicides reported in the print media in India between the 1980s to early 2000s, compiled by Alternative Law Forum (an organisation in Bangalore), includes thirteen cases, and all of them are from Kerala. This paper tries to observe a pattern in which investigative reports on these suicides represented the figure of ‘the lesbian’. I will analyse selected documentary and fictional narratives of lesbian suicides, as well as the representation of these cases in myriad newspapers and magazines to examine how these stories are articulated in the public sphere and contribute to the formation of the "lesbian political subject" in 1990s Kerala and Calcutta. The case studies also include cinematic representations such as Debalina’s Ebang Bewarish (the unclaimed...). Through analysis of the newspaper coverage of the lesbian suicides and rereading of the cinematic representations, I will counter the general trend in the media where a lesbian life is reported as an isolated spectacle that, as scholar Ashwini Sukthankar has noted, consumes itself in its own sensationalism and leaves no traces of the life that was its context.

This paper examines responses by Kashmiri cultural producers to the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution in August 2019. These provisions had, in principle, guaranteed the limited autonomy of the states of Jammu and Kashmir. However, the Muslim majority state has since been reorganized, by act of parliament, into two union territories administered directly by the central government without adequate representation from the state, thus delivering on election promises made by the ruling Hindu hardline Bharatiya Janata Party since 2014. The military occupation of the Kashmir valley has been riddled with reports of disappearances, extra-judicial killings, the use of human shields, torture, sexual violence, and other atrocities undertaken in the name of rooting out “insurgency” and establishing “peace.” While this long history of state violence has gripped the Indian national imagination in new ways it was only recently in 2016, when a group of university students was served with sedition charges for organizing a panel discussion and protest around the secret execution of Kashmiri separatist Afzal Guru who was convicted for his participation in the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, and questioned the human rights abuses in India-administered Kashmir, that it was labeled as inherently ‘anti-national’ risking legal action, the memorial practices of Kashmiris have acquired visibility due to the deft use of social media and the proliferation of art meant for global consumption. This paper investigates the deployment of this language of memorialization and the platforms that enable them.

Numerous memorials commemorate victims of wars and genocides, ranging from Holocaust memorials to national memory sites of historical events and monuments of war veterans, but there are only a few memorials to commemorate a significantly large victim group: female victims of wartime sexual abuse. While the memories of rape have largely been absent from discourses on trauma because neither the victims nor the perpetrators are eager to share them, an increasing number of studies address the issue, and some memorials dedicated to these painful pasts have recently been initiated, such as Fragments – Space of Art and Memory in Bogota and the Memorial to Wartime Rape Victims in Budapest. Although the two memorials are connected to distinct histories and differ in many regards, they both aim at raising awareness in sexual violence alongside commemorating forgotten victims. In this paper I will discuss how the designers of these memory sites create spaces of reflection and what tools they employ to bring the issue closer to audiences that have not witnessed war and violence directly. I argue that despite the complexity and difficulty of transmitting such memories, these memorials enable debate and reflection through the artistic articulation of space.

This paper presents a curatorial aesthetic of documentation footage in exhibition settings that accentuates the condition of ephemerality. The development of this curatorial aesthetic is based on the 2021 All About Theatre about Film exhibition at the EYE Filmmuseum. The exhibition reconstructs theatrical adaptations by Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove and scenographer Jan Versweyveld of canonical European films in the 60s and 70s. To translate the form of theatre into the museum space, the curatorial team resorted to presenting the documentation footage of the selected plays. While their unfolding in the exhibition indexes the memory of past performances, the documentation footage cannot but announce the loss of the theatrical events in the here and now. Instead of framing it as an analytical closure, I investigate how such loss allows the footage to evoke a different sense of liveness that is always in the making, and that activates the counter-archival potential of the documentation footage to witness the memory of theatre differently. Rather than viable records of past performances, the footage becomes an ephemeral document for what cannot be registered in the camera frame. To illustrate, this paper offers a close reading of the exhibition room India Song, where the blurry registration of the footage interacts with an immersive physical environment to re-stage the thematic of colonial decadence and estrangement of the original artworks. Going beyond the canonical theatrical works by van Hove and Versweyveld, I further suggest how this curatorial aesthetics of ephemerality can be employed to activate the counter-archival impulse of various other types of archival footage—such as ones with fraught representations of colonialism.