Workshop

Australian Aboriginal art is known for its capacity to encode, visualise and circulate cultural knowledge. The workshop takes the exhibition “Remembering Forward: Australian Aboriginal Painting since 1960” at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig as a starting point for analysing the ways in which geographic, topographic and historical knowledge as well as cosmological and genealogical concepts have been articulated in artworks and artistic practices in Australian Aboriginal communities. It also looks at how individual artists draw on ritual and social practices as well as oral traditions and work them into e.g. “abstract paintings”.
The workshop thus focuses on key issues of Morphomata’s research programme: the materialisation and transformation of knowledge in objects of art and material culture.

Howard Morphy, Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra, and Fred Myers, Professor of Anthropology at New York University, both experts in the field of Australian Aboriginal art, will provide a comparative perspective on the subject.

The workshop will be held in English.
It is free and public; please register with Larissa Förster at larissa.foersteruni-koeln.de

Preparatory tour through the exhibition in the Museum Ludwig on Wednesday, 16 February 2011, at 15:00 (led by the curators, Emily Evans and Falk Wolf).

The workshop precedes the symposium “Exhibiting Aboriginal Art” organised by the Museum Ludwig in cooperation with the Institute of Art History of the University of Basel (17-19 February 2011).
More information at www.museum-ludwig.de

PROGRAMME:

10.00 Dietrich Boschung (Director, IK Morphomata): Welcome Address
Larissa Förster (IK Morphomata): Introduction

10.20 Howard Morphy / Fred Myers:
Time, Place and Space in Australian Aboriginal Art

Discussion

12.15 Lunch Break

14.00 Fred Myers / Howard Morphy:
The Production of Discourses by and on Australian Aboriginal Painting

Discussion

16.00 End

Venue:
Internationales Kolleg Morphomata / Center for Advanced Studies
University of Cologne, Weyertal 59 (3rd floor), 50937 Cologne

EVENING LECTURE / KEYNOTE ADDRESS
for the symposium “Exhibiting Aboriginal Art” in cooperation with the Museum Ludwig

19.00 Howard Morphy: Moving the Body Painting into the Art Gallery: A Critical Perspective from the Recent History of Yolngu Art

Venue:
FilmForum at Museum Ludwig
Heinrich-Böll-Platz, 50667 Cologne