Ghosts are everywhere, sociologists Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider argue in Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era (2016). Their appearance in books, films, memorial sites, and political discourses underlines our need for imagination when facing the consequences of large-scale violence. The talk explores the ways in which ghosts (specters, phantoms, spirits) manifest themselves in contemporary art in different war-shattered societies today. On the basis of a set of selected works (by Khvay Samnang, Hiwa K, Minouk Lim and Jamal Penjweny), it discusses how visual artists use the ‘ghostly’ to address the legacy of historical violence at the individual and collective level, the complexities of political transition and the structural effects of neoliberalism and extractivism on ‘recovering’ societies. Far from being nostalgic figures, ghosts in these works operate as shape-shifting mediations between questions of memory and forms of activism. As such, they open up new lines of inquiry into the temporalities, materialities and ideologies of ‘post-conflict’. Building on the notion of ‘spectro-aesthetics’ (T.J. Demos, Return to the Postcolony, 2013), this talk brings art into dialogue with peace and conflict studies and the emerging interdisciplinary field of spectrality studies. Moreover, it suggests that the notion of ‘haunting’ may become a means to rethink the relation of artistic practices, aesthetics and catastrophe beyond the Holocaust and in response to conflicts worldwide.
Mon 01 Jul 2019
