RTG Annual Conference 2024.

The international conference convenes scholars and practitioners from various fields to explore the interplay between theory and practice within decolonial frameworks.
The first section examines decolonial aesthetic practices that critically engage with the Eurocentric concept of historiography, narration and epistemology and its methodological coloniality. The contributions deal with decoloniality as a method in the analytical practice of art history and art studies, address the challenges for critical practices of a philosophy in an entangled historical perspective and examine the limits of some key concepts of decoloniality.
The second section focuses on decolonial aesthetic practices in the fields of visual arts, museums and visual media. The lectures explore how colonial materials, colonial destruction and the colonial power structures internalized and perpetuated in institutions, objects, images, testimonies and spaces can be addressed responsibly. Finally, they call for institutional power and existing analytical approaches to be questioned in ways that ensure the transformation of colonial practices into decolonial practices in the long term.
The third section, engaging with an Arab-African perspective, addresses a central paradox: despite the call to decolonize stemming from a rejection of colonial structures, can this injunction be perceived as a Western construct? How can decolonial struggles avoid being hijacked? This section critically examines whether the act of decolonizing effectively dismantles colonial power structures or merely reproduces them.

PROGRAM:
https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/media/fb2/projekte/aesthetische-praxis/Jahrestagung_2024/RTG2477-Decolonial_Aesthetic_Practices_Program-digital-final.pdf

Thursday, November 07, 10:00 - 19:00
SECTION 1: Narratives, history and epistemology (Chair: Thomas Lange)
10:00 - Introduction
10:15 - Carolin Overhoff Ferreira: Decolonality - a challenge to modernity
11:30 - Olaf Zenker: (Lecturing) on Anton Willhelm Amo, or: How to decolonize the academy?
14:00 - Hannah Franziska Feiler: Sabotaging, listening, reorienting. Critical practices of philosophy in an entaglement-historical perspective
15:15 - Monica Juneja: "A film half a millenium long played backwards": The limits of decoloniality as a perspective for a critical art history

SECTION 2: Ways of seeing, displaying and exhibiting (Chair: Florentine Muhry)
16:30 - Introduction
16:45 - Sarah Hegebart: Njideka Akunyili Crosby's transcultural interiors as dialogical images
18:00 - Katrin Köppert: Digital Blackface. Decolonial aesthetics of computational fugitivity

Friday, November 08, 10:00 - 19:00
10:00 - Sophie Junge: Listening to images - Encountering colonial photo archives
11:15 - Lotte Arndt: Porous bodies, toxic relationality
14:00 - Jocelyne Stahl: Backstage becomes Frontstage. Practices of unlearning and curating museum practices at the GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig

SECTION 3: Decolonize!: A Western injunction? (Chair: Meriam Bousselmi)
15:15 - Introduction
15:30 - Meriam Bousselmi: "Decolonial-splaining"? On the hegemony of a discursive practice
16:45 - Chokri Ben Chikha: Truth Commission: The Human Zoo as a tool for critical (re)search on decolonial practices
18:00 - Sabine Choucair: The Clowntastic lecture-performance

Saturday, November 09, 10:00 - 13:00
10:00 - Kene Igweonu: The Ignorant Practitioner: A diasphoric perspective on decolonisation an anti-racism in UK higher education
11:15 - Ayoko Mensah: From decolonisation to emancipation: "desacralising Western paradigms of art"?
12:15 - Closing Discussion