Aka Pacha - Contemporary Art in las Américas

In Aymara, Aka Pacha describes a concept of time that does not conceive time as linear and continuous, but rather comprehends past and future from the present (Cusicanqui 2010: 54-55). Aka Pacha's understanding of the present offers a starting point from which art can be situated in an alternative framework of space and time. At the same time, the parameters of perception change out of this contemporaneous network, which is why aesthetic-political processes have to be reconsidered. Situating history in the present and not considering it as a narrative fixed in the past also leads to a dynamic interpretation in the sense of Homi Bhabha (Bhabha 2011). A look at current discourses and practices of decolonization also shows that political and artistic spaces of action overlap, not only in terms of time, but space. This is also visible in current protest movements in the Américas, where for example, indigenous, queer and feminist activists are calling for a fundamental reformation of persisting patriarchal and (neo)colonial social structures. They also criticize social conditions and grievances as well as profit-oriented interventions in natural habitats.
Against this background, the workshop will critically examine artistic works produced in the context of the Américas from an Aka Pacha, contemporary perspective. The aim is to achieve a multi-perspectival understanding of space and time, which will make current discourses and movements visible and methodologically fruitful for a transcultural art history. Some of the guiding questions for this workshop are: how do aesthetic/artistic tendencies situated in the Américas but practiced globally be described from a 'permanent present'? How can alternative concepts of time be epistemically made fruitful for a transcultural art historiography? What aesthetic strategies, for example, in the fields of media, technology and communication, are used to address (temporal) simultaneity in artworks? And what are the consequences for the reception of art in and outside of the Américas?

For Digital or Live Participation register here: akapachatu-dresden.de

Programme

Thursday, September 2, 2021

14:30 Welcome: Lena Geuer (TU Dresden) and Franciska Nowel Camino (Academy of fine arts Dresden)

15:00 Jens Kastner (Academy of fine arts Vienna): Reproduction and Revolution. Visual Art in the Work and Activities of the Peruvian Art and Cultural Theorist Juan Acha (1916–1995)

15:45 Karen Benezra (Leuphana University Lüneburg): Ticio Escobar: Towards a Popular Art (Zoom)

16:30 Coffee Break

17:00 Hannah Katalin Grimmer (Academy of fine arts Vienna): Art in Resistance. Remediated Memories within Social Movements in Chile and Argentina

17:45 Keynote: Elena Shtromberg (University of Utah, Salt Lake City): Video’s Posthistorical Memory and Colonial Representation
Moderation: Kerstin Schankweiler (TU Dresden)

Friday, September 3, 2021

09:30 Welcome: Lena Geuer and Franciska Nowel Camino

09:45 Vittoria Borsò (Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf): Drive for Life and Presence: Writing and Visualizing Community in and from Latin America

10:30 Franciska Nowel Camino: Layers of Time: Transtemporal Textile Art

11:15 Coffee Break

11:45 Joanna Page (University of Cambridge): The Reinvention of Bestiaries, Floras, and Herbaria: Alternative Decolonial Modernities in Contemporary Latin American Art (Zoom)

12:30 Lena Geuer: On an Aesthetics of Renunciation from the Perspective of Plants: Some Postcolonial Reflections

13:15 Lunch Break

14:15 Valeria Paz Moscoso (Catholic University of Bolivia, La Paz): The Future-Past of Roberto Valcárcel’s Puerta del Sol (Zoom)

15:00 Laura Bohnenblust (University of Bern): The Ocean in Art History as a Contradictory Paradigm between Geopolitics and Geopoetics (1950s–today)

15:45 Final Discussion and Goodbye

Cooperation between TU Dresden and HfBK Dresden

Organized by Lena Geuer and Franciska Nowel Camino